What is Politics For, Anyway?
Francis Fukuyama's The Origins of Political Order paints a clear picture of why the politics we practice today is a huge improvement over the alternatives.
In modern political arguments, it’s easy to lose track of what politics is for in the first place. Yes, there are important problems that demand respondes, but why is “politics” an issue to begin with?
Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order is a reminder of what the alternative to modern politics is. We came from small tribal bands subject to the violence of larger groups surrounding us.
China, the world’s first organized state, came together in part out of military necessity. Small groups along the river had two choices when they encountered a hostile group: fight or leave. When they finally ran out of room to fight, larger organizations of force became ways to free ordinary people from arbitrary violence.
Freedom from the warrior bigger than you was the benefit in theory. It would take about 5,000 years of political development to form liberal democracies, where people with diverse points of view could co-exist as long as they were all committed to the same project of not killing one another for arbitrary differences.
Three Ingredients for Modern Liberal Democracies
Fukuyama argues that as we moved from monarchies to democracies, the main political goal changed from coming up with new ways to practice politics to “implement[ing] them [existing political principles] through larger and larger parts of the world.
One country combined a strong state, a rule of law that all citizens were equally subjected to, and accountability of those in power: England.
”England was the first large country in which all these elements came together at once…Without a strong early state, there would not have been a rule of law and a broad perception of legitimate property rights. Without a strong rule of law and legitimate property rights, the Commons would never have been motivated to come together to impose accountability on the English monarchy. And wihtout hte principle of accountability, the British state would never have emerged as the great power it became by the time of the French Revolution.”
That does not mean that the British Empire’s crimes of colonialism were spreading democracy around the world. It does mean that England became one of the world’s most prosperous countries because it could coordinate its country’s resources without exerting totalitarian control over its citizens. It was a powerful player on the world stage and a good place to live.
Society Plays a Role in Great States
A country isn’t just it’s government. It’s also its people and how they choose to organize themselves. The elite class always plays an outsized role in government, but common spaces that give different people chances to mingle can bridge divides that would have been oppressive 400 years ago.
“…successful liberal democracy requires both a state that is strong, unified, and able to enforce laws on its own territory, and a society that is strong and cohesive and able to impose accountability on the state,” Fukuyama wrote. “It is the balance between a strong state and a strong society that makes democracy work, not just in seventeenth-century England but in contemporary developed democracies as well.”
Ensuring the ruling class remains responsive to the people it governs is a difficult challenge that strong states like China have been unable to overcome. Xi Jinping has purged political opponents under the guise of accountability, but he faces no serious threat to his rule from the rule of law as the Chinese Communist Party’s Chairman.
The political fights we have remain crucial to have. But there’s a reason we’re free to have them instead of being made to arrive at the right answer by force.