On the Modern Left and the Decay of Democracy

Julian Xue
Aug 25, 2017 · 10 min read

Watching the events down south and reading Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, I am stirred into a possibility so troubling that it needed written expression. It is that the more democratic, the more inclusive a pluralistic society become, the weaker the moral legitimacy (indeed, the numinosity) of democracy as an institution, the more democracy becomes a Machiavellian exercise of power.

My thoughts are still inchoate and scarcely original. Yet this stirring means I am beginning to digest this possibility, making it into my own scaffolding for current events.

To see this, we first need to re-sense the strangeness of modern democracy. Why, I might ask myself, should some vote in Vancouver determine whether I may live or die? Of course it is not so direct, but if a majority of a nation is warmongering, then — if I were a member of this nation — my life is at stake. More acutely, why should a Neo-Nazi Trump voter speak for a trans Californian liberal, and the reverse? It is important to see how amazingly counterintuitive this is, that a stranger, whom I may disagree with, whom I may hate, whose life is the opposite of all I stand for, who may be an eighth of the world away, should affect my life so.

Why do we allow strangers this power over us? The origins of modern democracy, Anderson has thoroughly convinced me, comes from the nation. It is not coincidence that only with the rise of nationalism did democracy became a popular form of government. Without following Anderson’s brilliant exposition on how the Nation became the substitute for God and the divine, I will argue here that without the Nation, there is no people, and hence no will of the people.

It seems to be a truism that whatever theory best answers humanity’s existential questions becomes the key to power for an Age (hence the imbalanced power between the pen and the sword). Humans will not tolerate naked power without legitimacy; this is probably truer for the powerful than for the weak. Once Nation became the substitute for God, it also became the only legitimate source of power. Article III of The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen spelled this out: “The principle of any sovereignty resides essentially in the Nation. No body, no individual can exert authority which does not emanate expressly from it.”

Let’s take Germany[i]. To a true German under the sway of nationalism, only a spokesperson for the Spirit of the German Nation can evoke that profound existential energy in him that lets him suffer, kill, die. But who is this German who spoke for Germany?

Every dynastic empire in that period aimed to co-opt nationalism (they cannot tolerate power without legitimacy!) by saying that they are the voice of the nation — they being the hereditary rulers from a previously divine right. In every single case, they failed. The simplest and most natural speaker for Germany, it turned out, was not the Habsburgs or the Kaiser, but a German. Some people certainly seemed more German than others, Goethe, Fichte, perhaps, but it turned out that an essential Germanness could not be denied to any member of that community that imagined itself to be German. Thus, every member of this community is a conduit for the German Nation, making this no ordinary community, but a sacerdotal one, each of whom is ordained. So in those heady years, when a German sat with a fellow German, they could speak for each other — not because both together might improve some solution to a social problem, not because this was a method to prevent tyranny, not even because they needed each other to survive — but because they were each an emissary from the German spirit.

Democracy did not everywhere succeed, but nationalism did. Wherever nationalism took root, it created the concept of the people, and political legitimacy from then on rested on its awesome will. The CCP claimed to speak for China, the very spirit of China, more than popular democracy. Communism is the only competition modernity ever offered to nationalism, but nationalism quietly won in both China and Russia. The CCP and Putin will only be legitimate if, through wealth and might, they expanded the spirits of China and Russia. These two examples make it clear that nationalism has the deepest moral power, and every modern government, authoritarian and democratic, rests on nationalism for legitimacy.

So modern nationalism does not always create democracy, but where democracy is strong, its legitimacy is always rooted in nationalism. A Neo-Nazi Trump voter can speak for a trans Californian liberal only if these two strangers (they’re most likely to not know each other) are members of that imagined community, the people, whose spirit forms the moral basis of their world. The moment the Neo-Nazi and the trans Californian stops believing each other to be American (we may have passed that moment), or does not feel being American is important (a final point of no return), is the moment democracy stops being legitimate — as a moral force — in America, because people no longer believe that other citizens can speak for them. Such people will participate in democracy only as a Machievellian exercise, or through long force of habit enforced through sleepy imaginations.

If nationalism ceases to be the great source of legitimate power, what takes its place? That answer is clear: in the last decades, a new world-spirit is creeping up on everyone and has, in places such as Canada, possibly replaced nationalism a new source of spiritual legitimacy. I speak, of course, of the universalist (compared with nationalism, which is inherently local and limited) and utilitarian impulse on the modern “left”. Among this new community I count myself.

To the modern left, having woken up from the nightmare of nationalism, a government is fit to rule if it gives access to drinking water and good healthcare, if it cleans up the environment and prolongs longevity, if it gives citizens a modicum of freedom and dignity. The government gains legitimacy to the extent it creates measurable improvements and implements evidence based policies towards these goals. These goals are based on what the modern left sees as self-evidently the lowest common denominators (LCD) for human individuals, making the modern left both the most universal and the most individualistic of all ideologies.

The whole history of this impulse remains to be written, but we should first disabuse ourselves of the notion that it is more “natural” than all that came before. Everyone of every Age believed their legitimizing narrative is the only permissible, natural, and moral source of power. The millions, if not billions, through the ages who willingly died for a higher (therefore neither “lowest” nor “common”) ideal should firmly show us that humans are quite willing to throw away all our denominators — wealth, health — in the pursuit of a sense of meaning. For this reason, it is not impossible that our new world spirit might find itself to be the weakest of all spirits to have come so far (I do not believe this, but it needs to be thought).

To this modern left, nation is a relic and democracy is a compromise with human nature, to be taken reluctantly and with a wince, like necessary medicine. Oh, it tries to legitimate democracy in its own way, for democracy has been hallowed by age and by victory. It says democracy holds power responsible, allows people to feel ownership, and eases transitions of power. But these defenses of democracy are always weak and of a completely different quality than nationalism’s defense of democracy. The modern left can only defend democracy based on democracy’s results, not democracy itself. Once something is found that could clearly and decisively generate better results than democracy[ii], I do not doubt the modern left would abandon democracy en masse. No such danger lies with nationalism, who defends democracy with a curt question, addressed to an idiot: — who should speak for Germany, if not Germans? The effeminate French? The depressed English?

Alas, in the modern impulse, it is, in fact, the French and the English who can speak for Germany, and Germans and French people who can speak for the English, until the English turned to nationalism again and tapped out in a horrified shudder. In the EU the modern logic shows its true, anti-nationalist, and therefore anti-democratic skin, a technocracy of power based on expertise. This is the natural government of the modern left. Expertise is not essentialist, and therefore not common. If being German was the key to power, then democracy is a natural outcome, if having expertise was the key to power, then technocracy is a natural outcome.

Where the modern left is prevailing, in America, Canada and Europe, the nation will be deprived of its emotional energy, and democracy — this strange, nonsensical creature in the absence of nationalism (who is the people, and why should it speak for me?) — will also be deprived of moral legitimacy. What is left of democracy — and this is very important — is that democracy might remain, for a long time, the key to power. This key is important to retain, even if we must imbue democracy with a pretend-legitimacy, like the Papacy in the Late Middle Ages.

When an institution is valued primarily for its keys to power, actors will become Machiavellian. So the modern left values democracy because it gives the rules and platform to achieve power for the weak and dispossessed: the immigrant, the refugee, the indigenous peoples, the sexual minorities. This power is a portion of a human’s LCD. But to the grave question of democratic legitimacy, by what moral right should these poor and dispossessed speak for a wealthy, white population, the modern left stays absolute silent. The classic, nationalistic answer (which still worked during the Civil Rights and the first few waves of Feminist movements) is that the poor and dispossessed are still American (or Canadian or German or English, etc), and therefore are emissaries of the American spirit. Yet this classic answer is becoming more and more untenable. To the modern left, the moral right for the poor and dispossessed to have a modicum of power and dignity is a matter of self-evident justice, not of nation.

So I come to the heart of what I wish to say: the more the modern left aims for an inclusive society, the more it raises the voices of the poor and dispossessed, the more it erodes nationalism, and the more democracy becomes Machievellian. For while nationalism is certainly capable of including new people to the Nation[iii], the process of addition requires a slow digestive process that cannot be hurried. The modern left aims for inclusivity without regard to the digestive process, and in fact disdains it (I disdain it, too, I fear it did not digest me — Canada is not so good at this). This is hardly surprising, since the modern left competes with nationalism as a source of legitimacy. But then the modern left has no moral justification for democracy other than a technical platform to give power to those it feels are deserving. Without nation as a profoundly felt moral foundation, the trans Californian liberal tearing down Confederate statues and the Neo-Nazi Trump voter cannot feel the other as a legitimate source of power over each other, except because there is a set of institutions forcing them to have this power.

In the place of nations, the modern world — and this is not only the modern left — is erecting new imagined communities. With globalization, the growth of immigration, the spread of English, the partitioning of the news based on political alignments, the growth of international mega-conglomerates, those we imagine having the same consciousness of the world as ourselves are no longer our Nation. They may be people who have the same political views as ourselves, or those who belong to the same company, or those who have the same profession, or those who have a similar level of education. Coastal elites in the United States might feel they have more in common with similar left-leaning Canadian or European elites than a farmer in the American heartlands[iv]. What is the outcome of these new communities, it is hard to say. For the modern left in the West, the imagined community is those who reads Al-Jazeera, Vox, NYT, Washington Post. One cannot pick up one of these channels without imagining a large group of sympathetic people reading the same thing, sharing one’s own consciousness of the world. But because participation in this community is not based on an essential property such as Germanness, but based on (so the modern left fancies), critical thinking and a firm commitment to social justice, the natural government for the modern left is not democracy but expertise (critical thinking) to achieve the LCD for everyone (the commitment to social justice).

Make no mistake, nationalism is far from dead: between the switch of any two world-spirits is a time of tremendous turbulence, even of revolution — sometimes from the new, sometimes from the old. What we see in America today is such turbulence. Of the great Western nations, America still lives strongest by the code of nationalism. The reason the modern left cannot recruit the poor American is because the poor American still feels more American than poor. But the divide is real, between nationalism and the modern left’s ideals of political legitimacy, Red vs. Blue, old and new children of the Enlightenment, and perhaps, democracy and technocracy.

[i] I choose Germany because “Englishman” or “Frenchman” are so unwieldy and male, and America is not illustrative here: it did not have to become a democracy. The original modern democracy had its democratic roots laid in the Mayflower Compact, which probably was rooted in the reality of their social situation as well as the Christian view of all equal before God. But while many of the Founding Fathers were famously suspicious of democracy, the democratic impulse soon took charge and was on full display by the time Tocqueville visited in the 1830’s. This impulse was almost certainly spurred by nationalism as the legitimating source of power. Tocqueville, who already lived in the zenith of European nationalism and took the imagined communities of France and America as assumptions, still noted that the “sovereignty of the people in America” was rooted in “the will of the nation”. This is a different sovereignty that the Pilgrim Fathers envisioned, they who had no knowledge yet of nation.

[ii] Hence the absolutely mad theory of Dataism, where a super AI will generate all the best solutions to our problems. https://www.ft.com/content/50bb4830-6a4c-11e6-ae5b-a7cc5dd5a28c

[iii] As Anderson notes, here lies the fundamental difference between nationalism and racism, which cannot add new membership. We can see this in how the natural government of racism is aristocracy based on purity of blood, not democracy.

[iv] If this seems self-evident to the reader, that means the reader is already totally modern. Even after growing up in Canada, I feel a kinship to a Chinese farmer that is hard to describe, somethings I share with this Chinese farmer no coastal elite could understand. But China has not left nationalism for the modern left.

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