Fall of liberalism: we are doomed to Byzantium?

submitted by Rakean93Identitarian socialist from self.debatealtright

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[–]NeoRail 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I think Democrat centrists like Biden may actually hold their ground. They already compromise with the left on everything that is not related to money, and they have enormous wealth and connections, both of which are powerful tools in a plutocratic system like America.

Political party membership counts in general are actually decreasing across the vast majority of European nations.

It would be interesting to see if that also translates into lower turnout at elections. Unfortunately, there are still too many people who are stuck in the hyperreality spectacle etc. etc., but at the very least if there are a lot of people dropping out of politics, that would create a large pool of disaffected potential voters.

[–]LGBTQIAIDSAnally Injected Death Sentence 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Memberships in organizations of all sorts with few exceptions (including the activist and lobbying groups I mentioned, which seem to be bucking the trend) are declining. There is some sort of wider atomistic, hyper-individualizing sociological phenomenon occurring, one which is leading to people disengaging from being card-carrying members of all sorts of groups, including labour unions, whose decline has long been observed. Indeed, the decline of labour unions (and thus of the 'Old Left') accompanied Leftist parties essentially discarding their old, less trustworthy voting blocs and resorting to becoming the parties of 'post-materialist' voters.

I think that we can see these parties changing their voting blocs again, by trading out 'post-materialist' Whites, who cannot always be counted on because of their declining numbers and so forth, for various nonwhite groups. So the Tucker Carlson types who say that mass immigration is solely to change election results are not wrong, they're just missing other things.

'Post-materialist' is essentially social-scientific jargon denoting people who, due to rising wealth, are economically comfortable enough and have primarily non-economic concerns, such as self-actualization. This of course ties in with all the extreme 'wokeness' that some, who conceptualize Left and Right only economistically, deny is even Left-wing. Of course, I do not mean to suggest that 'wokeness' is reducible to a mere side effect of economic success.

That being said, people ceasing being card-carrying members of political parties does not necessarily indicate that people are becoming disaffected with party politics more generally. They may be among the very same people taking up memberships in the growing activist, lobbying groups instead.

I haven't looked at whether voter turnout is also being reduced at the same time as party membership count decline. The closest thing that I can offer is that American voter turnout was far higher back in the 19th century (the record is an astonishing 81.8% in 1876), and it is unlikely that many 'postmaterialists' existed at that time. My feeling is thus that voter turnout is also declining alongside party membership count. Of course, it is not clear whether that means that they are more likely to engage with other political parties like those of the DR, like Patriotic Alternative and AJP, because they're just disengaging from almost every type of institution, irrespective of whether they are pro- or anti-System.