Whats next?

[RedRalph]

Even Francis Fukayama has now accepted we are not at the end of history, (I always thought it was a ridiculous contention myself), Marxism predicts a sort of end of history when there are no more contradictions in our economic and political system, but that certaintly isnt the case now, and wont be in the foreseeable future.

What do you think comes next in our methods of governing ourselves? It may well seem unimaginable now that liberal, capitalistic democracies wont be around for ever but they wont, nothing has survived yet and the spur of new technology will bring new ideas, new social patterns and eventually new types of government.

Any ideas as to what they might be? Will political entities still be constrained by physical borders? Remember fixed national borders are a reasonably new phenomenon, communication technology and economic intergration have made them more obsolete. If this trend continues, in the distant long term, could political entities come to represent something other than all the people inside a fixed geographical area?

 

[BCLG100]

A Havelock Vetinari type figure!

 

[Cutlass]

Some of the LDCs that are only in the early stages of capitalist/democracy aren't going to make it. They'll go back to a series of left and right dictatorships. Some of the developed nations that are democracies will fall to corruption, incompetence, or internal divisions. Some will go the way of Nazi Germany, where the elected government will seize more and more power until it can declare the democracy null and void. That's the goal of the Christian Fascists in the US and the reason "small government conservatives" constantly increase the power of the government.

 

[Verbose]

Possibly something like "The Society of Spectacle (Guy Débord, 1967)?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_the_Spectacle

A "New Middle Age" possibly, for a while, in the sense that we may be entering a period where radical social and political alternative thinking (society could be set up different, possibly better) will experience a slump.

That would be "Middle Age-like" in the sense that while lots of politics and stuff is going on, very few seriously question the basic mode of social organisation, subsistance and production (liberal capitalism in some form).

Oh, and "the end of histoty" in Fukuyama's sense only makes sense in light of Nietzsche; history has already "ended" once already, when man chucked God and providence out of the equation in favour of a secular political history centered on a set of competing political ideologies. If that period of political history as a Great Story, indicating what our societies are about, ends, then history has effectively ended.

Of course this is not history in the slightly trivial sense of "all that stuff what happened in the past", but rather certain master-narratives telling us who we are and where we are headed as societies.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

I'm personally rooting for a sort of Steampunk scenario.

 

[WICKLC1]

USA becomes a far left/socialist nightmare and everything will fall apart. Might as well forget it.

 

[RedRalph]

I'm personally rooting for a sort of Steampunk scenario.

 

[Traitorfish]

USA becomes a far left/socialist nightmare and everything will fall apart. Might as well forget it.

You have no idea how hilariously ridiculous the concept of an extremist left-wing US sounds to a European.

 

[Plotinus]

Not to mention the implication that such a US would be worse...

On-topic, I don't really see why one must assume that any new form of government is likely to arise in the foreseeable future. That is not to say, of course, that those countries that are capitalist democracies or variations thereon will remain as such; rather, it is to say that when they give up that kind of government, they will probably change to a kind that already exists, rather than invent a completely new one. So we can see that when democracy crumbles it usually gives way to some kind of fairly simplistic dictatorship or tyranny, or perhaps a tempered version of one. I'm sure we can all think of democracies that have incorporated elements of tyrannies without actually becoming fully-fledged ones, so perhaps any new form of post-democratic government would be some kind of hybrid - perhaps retaining the form and outward appearance of democracy but abandoning its basic principles.

Finally, surely this should be in OT, not History.

 

[Arwon]

In a word, green authoritarianism, but not really coming from greens but just from whoever's in government. Environmental and price and scarcity pressures might lead to a new type of green-morivated heavy interventionism, central planning or even mercantilism, with lots of rationing and general control of resource consumption, all motivated by simple stability and power-retention concerns.

My guess is this, because that's likely where the next great restructuring of society and economics is coming from, whether we like it or not, and there will come a point when it's inevitable.

 

[Edward The Big]

In the short term, I expect the old isolationst America to come back...and I expect widespread social unrest throughout Europe this century...and I expect we will run out of oil in the next 50 years...and I expect China and India's economies to collapse in the next 10 years...

Start building the bunkers in your backyards now.

 

[WICKLC1]

You have no idea how hilariously ridiculous the concept of an extremist left-wing US sounds to a European.

I'm from Massachusetts, one of the most liberal places in the US, I see it happening all the time. If Obama becomes president, we'll be just like France in 20 years, just on a much larger scale.

 

[RedRalph]

I'm from Massachusetts, one of the most liberal places in the US, I see it happening all the time. If Obama becomes president, we'll be just like France in 20 years, just on a much larger scale.

If France is extremist left wing, what was the USSR? so left wing that there is no human measurment system to express how left wing they were?

 

[Cutlass]

I'm from Massachusetts, one of the most liberal places in the US, I see it happening all the time. If Obama becomes president, we'll be just like France in 20 years, just on a much larger scale.

That's ridiculous. There's no one in the US who wants anything like that.

 

[Gigaz]

When McDonalds starts selling frog burgers I will know what happened in the US
There is no way that the US could afford a european-style socialism without 20-30% decrease of economic strength.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

If France is extremist left wing, what was the USSR? so left wing that there is no human measurment system to express how left wing they were?

They looped around to the other side and popped out as fascists.

 

[Traitorfish]

I'm from Massachusetts, one of the most liberal places in the US, I see it happening all the time. If Obama becomes president, we'll be just like France in 20 years, just on a much larger scale.

The National Assembly, Senate and Presidency of France currently belong to the Union for a Popular Movement, France's centre-right conservative party, with not only a plurality but a majority in both houses. If it takes the US 20 years to get there under the Democrats, that's merely a comment on how reactionary the US is, not on how progressive Europe is!

 

[WICKLC1]

If France is extremist left wing, what was the USSR? so left wing that there is no human measurment system to express how left wing they were?

Maybe France isn't extreme, but is pretty far left compared to the US.

 

[WICKLC1]

That's ridiculous. There's no one in the US who wants anything like that.

Barrack Obama has proposed plans for income redistribution, socialized healthcare, and other socialist programs. Also, his wife has said some pretty wacky things about the American dream and the American people. I am assuming that most of his supporters agree with him, so as many as 40% of Americans might want this kind of thing.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Barrack Obama has proposed plans for income redistribution, socialized healthcare, and other socialist programs. Also, his wife has said some pretty wacky things about the American dream and the American people. I am assuming that most of his supporters agree with him, so as many as 40% of Americans might want this kind of thing.

He means no American wants to be like the French.