This is very good on a certain level. And you said your essays are always written at that level.
The inference I took from it was in order for the public to have more influence in democracies we need proportional representation so that parties in power are always looking over their shoulders as they are far more easily removed from power.
However. Lets take Ukraine and the British obsession with keeping the war going and developing asymmetric tactics. This seems to have no basis of logic from a government ( indeed all recent governments) looking after the best interests of the UK population. It now seems , from Lavrov's comments, to well and truly painted a big target over the UK. I dismiss out of hand the Russian threat to western Europe, or the support of 'democracy'. They are risible arguments.
So why do it? As you say Starmer and crew are completely out of the depth. The only rational explanation is because they are being told/paid to do it. The media is of course equally told/paid to produce 24/7 psyop. Who is doing the telling/paying? I would guess the same forces that drew up the end of WW2 plan to attack Russia. the ones who are still fighting the original Crimea war and believe in the need for the maritime nations to surround and control the Eurasian nations. Call them 'elite' ( perhaps now global) and the banking fraternity dreaming of the Russian national resources to support the failing financialised economy.
I have used this merely as an example you could draw the same inferences from a lot of today's problem areas.
I think the saying that the public only get the government it deserves has a lot of merit. The dumbed down education over decades, the addiction to technology , the lack of belief in anything other materialism has created a fertile ground for control and manipulation.
The savant idiot governments are there to front this , it was probably to some extent always true, but as you describe they are now merely 'team colour' wearers, waiting to be told/paid what to do.
"However. Lets take Ukraine and the British obsession with keeping the war going and developing asymmetric tactics. This seems to have no basis of logic from a government ( indeed all recent governments) looking after the best interests of the UK population. It now seems , from Lavrov's comments, to well and truly painted a big target over the UK. I dismiss out of hand the Russian threat to western Europe, or the support of 'democracy'. They are risible arguments.
So why do it? "
Why do it? Because nobody in the british government or the opposition cares in the slightest about the british population. They care about The Special Relationship, keeping the Americans embroiled in a million conflicts so that they can show how indispensible they are to their American Master, standing shoulder to shoulder all stirring and brave.
Sort of like how the dog barks hysterically at the mailman.
Take away the United States and the uk goes from being the Empire's Special Little Buddy to a flavor-challenged has been full of pompous asses.
The british government is succeeding quite well at its real goal, BTW.
I reread 1984 a few months ago and the revelation to Winston during interrogation that the party was all about power for its own sake made me think of contemporary politics. Trump’s administration then manifests the additional feature of constant episodes of hate so as to rally his support. But nothing tangible gets delivered. Of course, his approach is not unique. It is far more in your face but one can discern the same tendencies across the spectrum. Solving real world problems is not the focus in any shape or form. It’s a systemic issue. My view is that the west in general is beyond being able to reform. Only a major system collapse of some form will recreate a reboot. Let’s hope that the collapse is not too ugly, but I fear it will be.
RE:" Trump’s administration then manifests the additional feature of constant episodes of hate so as to rally his support. But nothing tangible gets delivered." ANON Stephen
"That is to say, if you accept that the policies of government should, no matter how imperfectly, be moving the country in the direction that the mass of the people want, then there has to be a transmission mechanism to make it possible, analogous to the steering wheel and the engine of a car, which makes a car go where you want. "
No. Rather, in The Real World, the policies of government is to give the elites what they demand, and keep the masses distracted and pacified, sort of like those steering wheels attached to a child's car seat. The kid can pretend he's driving to the toy store, but Mommy is driving and don't tell Daddy, but you can wait in the car while Mommy is going to see her Special Friend the aerobics instructor.
"Governments in recent times have become much worse at this, because in many cases they have no developed ideas, and are not interested in what the public wants anyway."
This is the period in which we clearly see that The Principal is being totally controlled by the Agent. Thus, the Iron Law of Oligarchy and its sub-theorem, The Iron Law of Bureaucracy come out in full force.
Forget about the wars in Iraq, in Ukraine. In the past decades taxes have been reduced and services have been reduced as well and / or privatized and enshittified, with the public at large being shafted.
I wish Aurelien would consider more the impact the various strata: economic elites, political elites, the PMC, hoi polloi have in western liberal democracies. It seems that the economic (cough financial cough) elites are the ones that get all their wishes and the lever to do that consists of the political elites as well as the PMC. Russia, China, Iran and to some extent India, it is the political elites that are on top. And this is why the Principals' lives in these countries are getting better.
Somehow, in all this discussion about the complexities and directions, and incompetences, Aurelien seems to fail to keep the eyes on the ball. And what Warren Buffet reminded us. Yes, it is a class war, and the rich are winning:
- the get richer;
- the states are becoming surveillance and militarized entities;
- labour rights are gutted and the ability of people to associate is shot;
- public services are diminished in scope and quality.
This is not incompetence here but a well defined purpose. This takes us, at limit, to Margaret Attwood's MaddAddam's universe before it collapsed.
So who's the actual Principal, who's the Agent and who are we, the People, in this supercharged Liberal world?
As far as I can tell, Aurelian is not interested in showing the mechanisms behind the clockface - merely in describing the various numerals on the face, of whether the are in Roman or Arabic form and what meaningful combinations of numerological alchemy can be derived from them. All very interesting and intellectually satisfying, but of no use if you want to know if the clock is telling the right time or is going backwards instead of forwards.
Your ability to concisely articulate the root causes of the current political impasse is truly outstanding – the mastery of linguistic precision combined with the clarity of ideas, all written in your usual ironic tone. Thank you!
"Some will immediately say that in the West we don’t live in “democracies” anyway, and some countries (usually the US) are in practice little better than Nazi Germany"
Well I live in an authocracy (Russia), been to Western European countries a lot of times, have a lot of friends down there and watch the events in this part of the world more or less closely and it seems like we have virtually the same level of freedoms comparing to most EU countries - probably less political freedom but generally more personal freedom. And on top of this, most Russian repressive laws lately are copied and pasted from the European ones.
Probably there are more both political and personal freedoms in USA comparing to both Western Europe and Russia.
Your astute analysis of popular opinion on politics needs only a tweak for the scene in the US. Rather than entirely dismissing all voter viewpoints and doing just as they want politicians still defer to their core base of lobbyists and ideologues who, for the most part, set the views of those elected them.
"politicians still defer to their core base of lobbyists and ideologues who, for the most part, set the views of those elected them." Naturally. If they didn't 'defer' they would not be 'elected'.
"Thus, for Liberalism, as for George Orwell’s Party, the purpose of power is power itself". Fascism has been well described as power for power's sake (Ayn Rand). How would you respond to a proposition that fascism is the apotheosis of Liberalism?
There's a lot in this that chimes with my own experience. The only argument that will work is the pragmatic one. 'Putin is a bastard but we can't afford it anymore'. The accountants will always highlight the cost of one project versus alternatives. As you say 'Very soon, the West will no longer be able to afford even such gestures'. The Labour Party Cart Horse works like this. They loath real politics based on ideological analysis and debate. Indeed ALL the political parties hate 'clever Dicks' whether its Two Brains Willets on the Conservative side or Tony Benn on the Labour side. No one who reads New Left Review will ever get on in British Politics. It's equivalent to reading Country Life when you go to the toilet.
Additionally, very few politicians will or could get up and present an argument as to why the Ukraine debacle is unwise. Most of them haven't time to think through it and read the range of arguments necessary to construct a critique even if they have the ability to do it, but they CAN add up. I know from contacts and experience that the way 'dissidents' will try and veer support away from Project Ukraine is to use the economic arguments. Ian Proud has drawn attention to this. Once the debate starts and the omerta is broken then all kinds of special interest lobbies will feed on it like piranhas.
But there is a deeper problem that Yves Smith in Naked Capitalism identified and you reflect on - and that is 'the west' (in its magniminity) negotiates with ITSELF to reach a position that all its pieces can agree on and then believes that the other side should accept it. If they have a completely different approach are simply unreconstructed rotters and wreckers. They then react 'emotionally'.
And there is one final point. The current apporach to the conflict is deeply embodied within the state. There is very little oversight of Foreign Policy issues. Governments simply inherit them because they are constructed on long term strategy. David Davies (of all people) has objected to this. These strategies are at the heart of Government and have been constructed by the intelligence services. They see people like Foreign Secretary Lammy and PM Starmer as easy-meat and 'brief' incoming Ministers on 'where we are' and not about what an alternative strategy could look like. They assume - correctly - that there is little disagreement on Foreign Policy and that Britain should be a 'global player' and must have aircraft carriers. It's not the deep-state - it is 'the state'. It is primary school Lenin.
All my 1960's friends who embraced politics as a 'career' accepted state advice with hardly any question. In the none Foreign Policy area this isn't a major problem - BUT FP is sacrosanct. Which is one reason why I would sack everybody in MI6 and embrace GCHQ. MI6 is public school. GCHQ are the grammar school boys (and girls), more concerned with really understanding the world and reality than emulating the kind of James Bond nonsense that we've recently seen in Russia, Iran and Syria. I'm afraid its a 'cultural thing'.
When there is "social darwinism", there should be "national darwinism" too perhaps.
it was already claimed, that once the ruling elites do not have to fear extinction (be it removal in war, regime chaning or any other flavour of unfriendly acquisition) they gradually mutate to prasitise on people
indeed, why won't them? Fighting for power, climbing the ladder is the skill of its own. The more some person spends time and stamina on some "purpose" - the less he hones his ladder climbing skills, which pulls him in the natural disadvantage against those "munchkins" who knows "which stats to maximise"
in particular, this means the commoners, en masse, are loonies and droids. They just have too many things to do, like going to work for salary, raising kids, recreating... "circuses and breads". So it seems inevitable that people are controlled by politicians, not vice versa.
what a force could offset this natural ratio?
1. poverty, extreme desperate poverty, when "masses" have to start disproportionally investing into politics as the last, desperate attempt to sharpen the pitchforks and survive
2. external threat (real one), when politicians are forced to manage their domain into the best possible efficiency, as the resource they use against competing external elites
in particuar, mass education is often said coming not from some noble principles (do kids love being STEM-educated? do 12x6 parents have any stamina to homeschool?) but from "industrial warfare" needing (no more) literate workers for elites to survive those wars
yes, yes, "give war a chance". Disgusting as it sounds, what else?..
Funny you mention the anti-nuclear energy movement because you just reminded me of something I'd long forgotten.
When I was a wee lad in school, maybe around 5/6, myself and all my schoolmates were tasked with writing protest letters to the British government to close down Sellafield nuclear power plant because it apparently posed a risk to Dublin if shit hit the fan. Obviously, as children we had no idea what we were doing. But I remember being told about the horrors of the Chernobyl disaster a couple years prior and being pretty scared that was gonna happen to us.
Now I can't help but think of some NGO coming to my school and getting the teachers to get the school children to write these letters. Just an absurd perversion of trying to exert political pressure in hindsight. These types seem to regularly use children to further their cause. Think of Greta giving a speech at the UN 'How dare you!'
Democracies require the ritual of voting and seeing the result flashed on the "scoreboard" on TV on election night. The result of this ritual is that the "people" accept their lot regardless of how well or poorly their "legitimate rulers" rule. Thus, as Aurelian points out -- and as we have observed -- theatre and ritual are more important than delivering on substance. This trend has only gotten more pronounced with the 24 x 7 news cycle. It seems we are all in a reality TV show.
At least in the U.S. there is one shred of accountability, namely "jobs, stupid!" It's not a high bar, as it doesn't matter what kind of jobs or how low the wages are. In the end, though, all this means is that one Party loses the election, and another Party wins it, giving the facade of change with very little substance. Obama's 2008 slogan "Change We Can Believe In" turned out to be anything but. Even with a filibuster proof majority in 2010, Democrats still couldn't codify federal abortion rights, as they had promised for decades. So, Aurelian's points remain valid.
But the rituals will evolve. I suspect that in the near future "we the people" will be mainly voting for AI chatbots, with human "leaders" serving as the charismatic veneer for AI-produced campaign talking points, speeches and videos. Voters (and the AI/Media oligarchs who increasingly profit from this circus) will gradually come to understand that the socio-economic problems of nations are way too complex for mere humans to deal with. Everyone will get used to "autonomous democracies" the way we have gotten used to autonomous cars and autonomous jet travel.
With AI increasingly orchestrating the rituals, and with increasingly uniform AI-generated policies based on the largest possible data sets, nations may well start cooperating. Nations may start beating spears into plowshares. Nations may put aside artificial goals in favor of real goals to solve real problems, like climate change. The human "leaders" will just dot the i's and cross the t's properly and give AI-produced speeches. And "we the people" may start enjoying those speeches again.
Or not. That sounds like too much peace and harmony and hardly the way to good ratings. We'll see.
This is very good on a certain level. And you said your essays are always written at that level.
The inference I took from it was in order for the public to have more influence in democracies we need proportional representation so that parties in power are always looking over their shoulders as they are far more easily removed from power.
However. Lets take Ukraine and the British obsession with keeping the war going and developing asymmetric tactics. This seems to have no basis of logic from a government ( indeed all recent governments) looking after the best interests of the UK population. It now seems , from Lavrov's comments, to well and truly painted a big target over the UK. I dismiss out of hand the Russian threat to western Europe, or the support of 'democracy'. They are risible arguments.
So why do it? As you say Starmer and crew are completely out of the depth. The only rational explanation is because they are being told/paid to do it. The media is of course equally told/paid to produce 24/7 psyop. Who is doing the telling/paying? I would guess the same forces that drew up the end of WW2 plan to attack Russia. the ones who are still fighting the original Crimea war and believe in the need for the maritime nations to surround and control the Eurasian nations. Call them 'elite' ( perhaps now global) and the banking fraternity dreaming of the Russian national resources to support the failing financialised economy.
I have used this merely as an example you could draw the same inferences from a lot of today's problem areas.
I think the saying that the public only get the government it deserves has a lot of merit. The dumbed down education over decades, the addiction to technology , the lack of belief in anything other materialism has created a fertile ground for control and manipulation.
The savant idiot governments are there to front this , it was probably to some extent always true, but as you describe they are now merely 'team colour' wearers, waiting to be told/paid what to do.
"However. Lets take Ukraine and the British obsession with keeping the war going and developing asymmetric tactics. This seems to have no basis of logic from a government ( indeed all recent governments) looking after the best interests of the UK population. It now seems , from Lavrov's comments, to well and truly painted a big target over the UK. I dismiss out of hand the Russian threat to western Europe, or the support of 'democracy'. They are risible arguments.
So why do it? "
Why do it? Because nobody in the british government or the opposition cares in the slightest about the british population. They care about The Special Relationship, keeping the Americans embroiled in a million conflicts so that they can show how indispensible they are to their American Master, standing shoulder to shoulder all stirring and brave.
Sort of like how the dog barks hysterically at the mailman.
Take away the United States and the uk goes from being the Empire's Special Little Buddy to a flavor-challenged has been full of pompous asses.
The british government is succeeding quite well at its real goal, BTW.
Have you seen the cartoon where the small brainy dog rides the big aggressive dog , holding the reins.
This is what the british leadership tell themselves they are.
You may recall from "Looney Tunes" the yappy little dog that follows Spike The Bulldog around.
Old money, dear chap. old money.
I reread 1984 a few months ago and the revelation to Winston during interrogation that the party was all about power for its own sake made me think of contemporary politics. Trump’s administration then manifests the additional feature of constant episodes of hate so as to rally his support. But nothing tangible gets delivered. Of course, his approach is not unique. It is far more in your face but one can discern the same tendencies across the spectrum. Solving real world problems is not the focus in any shape or form. It’s a systemic issue. My view is that the west in general is beyond being able to reform. Only a major system collapse of some form will recreate a reboot. Let’s hope that the collapse is not too ugly, but I fear it will be.
RE:" Trump’s administration then manifests the additional feature of constant episodes of hate so as to rally his support. But nothing tangible gets delivered." ANON Stephen
You are not from the USA are you.
"That is to say, if you accept that the policies of government should, no matter how imperfectly, be moving the country in the direction that the mass of the people want, then there has to be a transmission mechanism to make it possible, analogous to the steering wheel and the engine of a car, which makes a car go where you want. "
No. Rather, in The Real World, the policies of government is to give the elites what they demand, and keep the masses distracted and pacified, sort of like those steering wheels attached to a child's car seat. The kid can pretend he's driving to the toy store, but Mommy is driving and don't tell Daddy, but you can wait in the car while Mommy is going to see her Special Friend the aerobics instructor.
"Governments in recent times have become much worse at this, because in many cases they have no developed ideas, and are not interested in what the public wants anyway."
This is the period in which we clearly see that The Principal is being totally controlled by the Agent. Thus, the Iron Law of Oligarchy and its sub-theorem, The Iron Law of Bureaucracy come out in full force.
Forget about the wars in Iraq, in Ukraine. In the past decades taxes have been reduced and services have been reduced as well and / or privatized and enshittified, with the public at large being shafted.
I wish Aurelien would consider more the impact the various strata: economic elites, political elites, the PMC, hoi polloi have in western liberal democracies. It seems that the economic (cough financial cough) elites are the ones that get all their wishes and the lever to do that consists of the political elites as well as the PMC. Russia, China, Iran and to some extent India, it is the political elites that are on top. And this is why the Principals' lives in these countries are getting better.
Somehow, in all this discussion about the complexities and directions, and incompetences, Aurelien seems to fail to keep the eyes on the ball. And what Warren Buffet reminded us. Yes, it is a class war, and the rich are winning:
- the get richer;
- the states are becoming surveillance and militarized entities;
- labour rights are gutted and the ability of people to associate is shot;
- public services are diminished in scope and quality.
This is not incompetence here but a well defined purpose. This takes us, at limit, to Margaret Attwood's MaddAddam's universe before it collapsed.
So who's the actual Principal, who's the Agent and who are we, the People, in this supercharged Liberal world?
As far as I can tell, Aurelian is not interested in showing the mechanisms behind the clockface - merely in describing the various numerals on the face, of whether the are in Roman or Arabic form and what meaningful combinations of numerological alchemy can be derived from them. All very interesting and intellectually satisfying, but of no use if you want to know if the clock is telling the right time or is going backwards instead of forwards.
Your ability to concisely articulate the root causes of the current political impasse is truly outstanding – the mastery of linguistic precision combined with the clarity of ideas, all written in your usual ironic tone. Thank you!
I would say that a government is simply a maker of compromises between the forces that are mobilized and express themselves forcefully.
Sadly, the only mobilized force in the present North-Atlantic sphere seems to be the rentiers who control the money.
"Some will immediately say that in the West we don’t live in “democracies” anyway, and some countries (usually the US) are in practice little better than Nazi Germany"
Well I live in an authocracy (Russia), been to Western European countries a lot of times, have a lot of friends down there and watch the events in this part of the world more or less closely and it seems like we have virtually the same level of freedoms comparing to most EU countries - probably less political freedom but generally more personal freedom. And on top of this, most Russian repressive laws lately are copied and pasted from the European ones.
Probably there are more both political and personal freedoms in USA comparing to both Western Europe and Russia.
If as you say liberal governance has failed, then we are in danger of drifting into one world governance.
I sense zero prospect of this. If anything the recent trajectory is more fissiparous than not.
Your astute analysis of popular opinion on politics needs only a tweak for the scene in the US. Rather than entirely dismissing all voter viewpoints and doing just as they want politicians still defer to their core base of lobbyists and ideologues who, for the most part, set the views of those elected them.
"politicians still defer to their core base of lobbyists and ideologues who, for the most part, set the views of those elected them." Naturally. If they didn't 'defer' they would not be 'elected'.
"Thus, for Liberalism, as for George Orwell’s Party, the purpose of power is power itself". Fascism has been well described as power for power's sake (Ayn Rand). How would you respond to a proposition that fascism is the apotheosis of Liberalism?
Because the heartwarming slogans provide a convenient beard.
There's a lot in this that chimes with my own experience. The only argument that will work is the pragmatic one. 'Putin is a bastard but we can't afford it anymore'. The accountants will always highlight the cost of one project versus alternatives. As you say 'Very soon, the West will no longer be able to afford even such gestures'. The Labour Party Cart Horse works like this. They loath real politics based on ideological analysis and debate. Indeed ALL the political parties hate 'clever Dicks' whether its Two Brains Willets on the Conservative side or Tony Benn on the Labour side. No one who reads New Left Review will ever get on in British Politics. It's equivalent to reading Country Life when you go to the toilet.
Additionally, very few politicians will or could get up and present an argument as to why the Ukraine debacle is unwise. Most of them haven't time to think through it and read the range of arguments necessary to construct a critique even if they have the ability to do it, but they CAN add up. I know from contacts and experience that the way 'dissidents' will try and veer support away from Project Ukraine is to use the economic arguments. Ian Proud has drawn attention to this. Once the debate starts and the omerta is broken then all kinds of special interest lobbies will feed on it like piranhas.
But there is a deeper problem that Yves Smith in Naked Capitalism identified and you reflect on - and that is 'the west' (in its magniminity) negotiates with ITSELF to reach a position that all its pieces can agree on and then believes that the other side should accept it. If they have a completely different approach are simply unreconstructed rotters and wreckers. They then react 'emotionally'.
And there is one final point. The current apporach to the conflict is deeply embodied within the state. There is very little oversight of Foreign Policy issues. Governments simply inherit them because they are constructed on long term strategy. David Davies (of all people) has objected to this. These strategies are at the heart of Government and have been constructed by the intelligence services. They see people like Foreign Secretary Lammy and PM Starmer as easy-meat and 'brief' incoming Ministers on 'where we are' and not about what an alternative strategy could look like. They assume - correctly - that there is little disagreement on Foreign Policy and that Britain should be a 'global player' and must have aircraft carriers. It's not the deep-state - it is 'the state'. It is primary school Lenin.
All my 1960's friends who embraced politics as a 'career' accepted state advice with hardly any question. In the none Foreign Policy area this isn't a major problem - BUT FP is sacrosanct. Which is one reason why I would sack everybody in MI6 and embrace GCHQ. MI6 is public school. GCHQ are the grammar school boys (and girls), more concerned with really understanding the world and reality than emulating the kind of James Bond nonsense that we've recently seen in Russia, Iran and Syria. I'm afraid its a 'cultural thing'.
pubic opinion?
When there is "social darwinism", there should be "national darwinism" too perhaps.
it was already claimed, that once the ruling elites do not have to fear extinction (be it removal in war, regime chaning or any other flavour of unfriendly acquisition) they gradually mutate to prasitise on people
indeed, why won't them? Fighting for power, climbing the ladder is the skill of its own. The more some person spends time and stamina on some "purpose" - the less he hones his ladder climbing skills, which pulls him in the natural disadvantage against those "munchkins" who knows "which stats to maximise"
in particular, this means the commoners, en masse, are loonies and droids. They just have too many things to do, like going to work for salary, raising kids, recreating... "circuses and breads". So it seems inevitable that people are controlled by politicians, not vice versa.
what a force could offset this natural ratio?
1. poverty, extreme desperate poverty, when "masses" have to start disproportionally investing into politics as the last, desperate attempt to sharpen the pitchforks and survive
2. external threat (real one), when politicians are forced to manage their domain into the best possible efficiency, as the resource they use against competing external elites
in particuar, mass education is often said coming not from some noble principles (do kids love being STEM-educated? do 12x6 parents have any stamina to homeschool?) but from "industrial warfare" needing (no more) literate workers for elites to survive those wars
yes, yes, "give war a chance". Disgusting as it sounds, what else?..
My usual italian translation, here:
Politica senza scopo.
E le sue conseguenze.
https://trying2understandw.blogspot.com/2025/06/politica-senza-scopo-e-le-sue.html
Funny you mention the anti-nuclear energy movement because you just reminded me of something I'd long forgotten.
When I was a wee lad in school, maybe around 5/6, myself and all my schoolmates were tasked with writing protest letters to the British government to close down Sellafield nuclear power plant because it apparently posed a risk to Dublin if shit hit the fan. Obviously, as children we had no idea what we were doing. But I remember being told about the horrors of the Chernobyl disaster a couple years prior and being pretty scared that was gonna happen to us.
Now I can't help but think of some NGO coming to my school and getting the teachers to get the school children to write these letters. Just an absurd perversion of trying to exert political pressure in hindsight. These types seem to regularly use children to further their cause. Think of Greta giving a speech at the UN 'How dare you!'
Democracies require the ritual of voting and seeing the result flashed on the "scoreboard" on TV on election night. The result of this ritual is that the "people" accept their lot regardless of how well or poorly their "legitimate rulers" rule. Thus, as Aurelian points out -- and as we have observed -- theatre and ritual are more important than delivering on substance. This trend has only gotten more pronounced with the 24 x 7 news cycle. It seems we are all in a reality TV show.
At least in the U.S. there is one shred of accountability, namely "jobs, stupid!" It's not a high bar, as it doesn't matter what kind of jobs or how low the wages are. In the end, though, all this means is that one Party loses the election, and another Party wins it, giving the facade of change with very little substance. Obama's 2008 slogan "Change We Can Believe In" turned out to be anything but. Even with a filibuster proof majority in 2010, Democrats still couldn't codify federal abortion rights, as they had promised for decades. So, Aurelian's points remain valid.
But the rituals will evolve. I suspect that in the near future "we the people" will be mainly voting for AI chatbots, with human "leaders" serving as the charismatic veneer for AI-produced campaign talking points, speeches and videos. Voters (and the AI/Media oligarchs who increasingly profit from this circus) will gradually come to understand that the socio-economic problems of nations are way too complex for mere humans to deal with. Everyone will get used to "autonomous democracies" the way we have gotten used to autonomous cars and autonomous jet travel.
With AI increasingly orchestrating the rituals, and with increasingly uniform AI-generated policies based on the largest possible data sets, nations may well start cooperating. Nations may start beating spears into plowshares. Nations may put aside artificial goals in favor of real goals to solve real problems, like climate change. The human "leaders" will just dot the i's and cross the t's properly and give AI-produced speeches. And "we the people" may start enjoying those speeches again.
Or not. That sounds like too much peace and harmony and hardly the way to good ratings. We'll see.
Your initial description of our current model is why I have called it in the past “cosmetic democracy.”