The world’s largest democracy is collapsing before our eyes

Conservatism Capitalism has always been an ideology that's opposed to progress, democracy and freedom.

There you go, I fixed that for you.

All political entities serve the needs of capital first and foremost in a capitalist system, people are only a secondary...if that.

There are a lot of conservatives here thanks to Reddit. Tankie hysteria allows them to speak in parallel to the radlibs and anarcho-bidenists without too much dispute, so they have blended in. Funny how that works.

When you start talking about "always", you're going to need to apply way more rigor. Conservatism is a political philosophy that emerged in reaction to the emergence of liberalism in the age of European enlightenment. Conservatism champions the idea that order tends towards chaos, that order is required for society to function and that chaos destroys everything, that some individuals are more worthy than others by virtue of their birth and hierarchical position, etc. In the 1700s, Tories we're conservative.

But what we call conservatives in the USA are liberals, and they always have been. Liberal philosophy posits that individual liberty is more important than strict hierarchical order, that society should be organized to limit the power of the state over individual freedoms, etc. Capitalism and market systems are liberal constructions.

Liberalism, however, is still historically situated and emerges during the age of discovery. As such, it is not a moral movement but rather an political one. Specifically, it emerged as the merchant class needed a way to undermine the authority of the nobility. Liberalism birthed all of the bourgeois revolutions across Europe and European holdings. Every tri-color flag came out of this movement. But liberalism couldn't undermine the entirety of merchant dominance, which means it had to be compatible with slavery, misogyny, racism, genocide, and settler colonialism.

This, liberal philosophers struggled with systems of science and systems of morality that allowed for these things to occur. Race science is a liberal cobstruct. Eugenics is a liberal construct. The belief that black people aren't fully human is a liberal construct. The idea that white people must civilize the savages is a liberal construct. The Berlin Conference, the professional police force, the state police force, all liberal constructs.

When Haiti was liberated through the successful slave revolt, it was the French monarchy that determined every single person on Haiti that was a newly freed slaves represented a loss of wealth for French slave holders, and they levied a debt on Haiti to recoup the cost of freedom. The liberal capitalist world acknowledged the debt and required Haiti acknowledge it in order to be recognized. This is a liberal financial construction the remains in the hands of liberal democracies to this day, draining Haiti of it's wealth.

The Nazis, are not Conservatives. They are Liberals. Fascism arises from liberal democracies. It uses specific liberal systems to grow and develop. It is essentially the violence of liberal capitalism turned against liberal capitalists. Prior to the rise of European fascism, the things we attribute to the Nazis are just things that the Europeans had been doing to brown and black people all over the world. There's a reason the Third Reich studied US settler colonialism systems and industrialized them. There's a reason why US capitalists, liberals of the highest order who believed in the individual right to private property and access to free markets, supported the Third Reich.

You can't just go around saying everything bad is conservative and everything good is liberal/progressive. It's a dogmatic approach to political and historical analysis. Nothing could be further from the truth. Liberalism was a progressive step from mysticism. Conservatism was a reaction to liberalism. And most the ills of the modern era are traceable to liberal philosophy, not conservative. In the USA, we redefined conservative to mean liberal and we redefined liberal to mean liberal progressive. Maintenance of market systems is a liberal project. Maintenance of representative democracy is a liberal project. Eugenics was a liberal project and the US engaged in it through the 1970s and we still have after effects of race science in our discourse. All liberal.

Haha true that. This was inevitable btw, the further capitalism develops the more its will absorb everything. Religion is done for, community is done for, bourgie democracy is dying, next come nationality I guess, the environment is already compromised. It truly is a vampiric black hole.

Cuba would like to have a word with you

I was going to say this. The older democratic systems (easily identified by 1st-past-the-post) are falling apart at the seams, but the rest of us is (relatively) fine. Places like the US and UK need to change their system, but politicians have an incentive not to change anything.

Thanks for the sources! Here's another one that I read the other day and found pretty insightful https://www.sinification.com/p/why-chinese-democracy-is-better-than

Thanks for these sources.

I'm surprised to see a narrative like this in some of the links, especially the Harvard ones. But I suppose the children of the ruling class need to be taught what the world is actually like if they are to have any hope of continuing to rule it.

It won't serve a Harvard graduate very well to be lied to about what China is like – once their uncle gets them a cushy job, they'll be expected to negotiate with Chinese businesses and diplomats, and that won't go well if all they can repeat is the propaganda line.

Sorry, you can't have democracy without basic political agency. You can't have basic political agency without the ability to speak freely.

Picking between three party approved technocrats is not sufficient for political self determination.

Democracy is working just fine in China according to people who live there.

Lmao, what? You can't be serious.

Wait, are you serious?!

and just look at what happened to Fox News: finally knocked off of their pedestal after decades of being #1-- by MSNBC

I remember the day we started bombing Iraq. Their vice-president (actual it was their president, but he was second in command to Saddam as the PM) was a Christian calling on the pope to help stop the war. After the war, things go so bad that we had to intervene a second time to stop the killing of Christians. Freedom of religion definitely took a hit, since the public at large didn't support it. Was it worth it in that particular case to get rid of a dictator? Maybe, maybe not. He most likely would have fallen during the Arab spring - if it still occurred without our Iraq intervention.

My main point is the American public loves 'freedom', but you shouldn't t expect it to follow democracy. Specially when popular leaders get elected claiming everything wrong with "country name" is because of "insert basic human right".

The board of the bank is unelected and the electorate have zero control over its decisions. The (unelected) Prime Minister appears to disagree with the decision but also has zero control over the board’s decisions.

This is more feature than bug in a central bank. Let's say the US president had direct control over fiscal policy. The president says print money and drop the interest rate, the central bank says how much. It gets really tempting when reelection comes around to juice the economy. The negative consequences - inflation - take enough time to do their damage that people will already be going to the polls before they get hit.

The way the Bank of England gets its board does seem less than ideal, but not terrible as these things go. It's kind of a run of the mill technocratic structure.

Yogthos cited nine sources and summarised the main theme running through them. Those sources included esteemed Western outputs. How is that shilling for China?

Just stating basic facts bro.

Compared to China, Cuba, and Vietnam.