The Foundations of the Liberal Polycrisis

A system is failing because it has become maladaptive to technological innovation and to its own contradictions.

A troubled liberal-centrist hegemony and the fragmenting effect of the global polycrisis have reached a difficult point where the former is undermining itself by compromising its values in order to defend its existence. This is a rocky road to take. Each compromise of value creates more doubt in more people about the legitimacy of the dominant system. Overt value compromise shows up the degree to which the current hegemony has been designed to support particular interest groups – notably the political class itself but also bureaucracies and, behind that, corporate beneficiaries. Worse, targeted assaults on values seem to be ineffective, creating more opposition and more questions about legitimacy, strengthening the very forces being targeted. In many ways the rise of popular discontent and so populism is intimately linked not only to ‘resistance’ to the existing order from particular interests but to an evident growing sense that the current political order is not competent to manage a complex society. Value betrayal and perceived incompetence feed off each other.

We can divide the problem into issues of technique and policy (see below). The issues of technique include attempted restrictions on free expression and the use of lawfare to retain power. Politically we have seen pro-Western failures in this respect not only in relation to the attempt to baulk Trump throughout 2024 but in the coup attempt in South Korea, in the regime change operation in Georgia, in talk of banning the AfD in Germany and in the rather spurious use of the law to block change in Romania. We can add to this concerns about extreme sentencing in the case of the British riots recently, threats to social media outlets and the harsh policing of fairly harmless free speech (which is one of the drivers for Musk’s interventions overseas). The point is not that these have been tried but that in almost every case they have either failed or increased discontent to the point of strengthening the existential threat to ‘liberal values’. Had they succeeded the system would have looked strong. Often people will put strength and security ahead of abstract ideals but the system has now slowly but steadily got the worst of both worlds - weak and hypocritical, staffed by people only interested in their own privileges and position. This may not be wholly fair but policymakers now no longer look so liberal and certainly look less democratic.

This concatenation of errors has no central command responsible for the ineptitude. This derives from having a power in writing being confused with the nature of power in society. It arises entirely from the dominance within liberal society of a class of people who have not been used to political struggle at a mass level (so learning the skills of political management) but only within their own class where the struggle is between ‘roles’ within a text-based society that has developed a form of presumptive version of divine right. A person playing a ‘role’ is not a whole person allowed to exercise judgement. Late liberal capitalist society has built up a huge system of half-persons, humans defined by their increasingly restricted roles as cogs in a corporatised and regulated machine. Their sense of ‘divine right’ is based on certain assumptions about education and system compliance necessarily being equivalent to intelligence. This problem of ‘intellligence’ is linked to the political implications of AI as we shall see, suffice it to say here that the paradox is emerging is that as humans become role-playing machines, the machines are becoming generalised problem-solvers displacing what humans had evolved to become. Very similar mistakes being made in very different contexts suggests something like a total system beginning to break down precisely because there is no command centre.

Politics reproduces the market in this respect so that, just as the market can break down under certain sustained pressures, so can politics. Market disruption is often technological in origin and so is political disruption. There are only two ways forward – the absorption of populist values into the system in order to preserve the latter (since populist values in a muted form generally do represent the prejudices of the subjects of educated elites) or a determined adoption of a unified form of liberal authoritarianism in order to preserve the system. This latter would mean complete abandonment of any liberal values that get in the way of system cohesion. It perhaps calls for an ‘Augustus’ but the breakdown is not yet sufficient for that demand to appear or be credible. As we have seen, each inept abandonment of principle merely strengthens populist revolt whether of the Left or the Right. The attempt to impose a unified federal West contra omnes is still the dream of many neo-conservatives and liberals but it is doomed. Rather than pre-empting civil war, such attempts would create the conditions for it, especially with the emergence of the Trump-Musk factor. The populists got in first with their ‘Augustus’.

Almost certainly, survival for the existing system (given that the actual centres of power, financial and trade mechanisms and dominant military-industrial structures, are still untouched by political breakdown) and avoidance of ‘civil war’ means the absorption of the populist impulse. This presents serious problems for the currently dominant liberal political and ideological consensus. First, it weakens the climate change agenda and Net Zero campaign. Second, it accepts constructive national sovereign and bloc economic competition with its preparedness to deploy tariffs. Third, it draws liberals inevitably towards closing the frontiers to mass immigration. Fourth, it uncomfortably obliges liberals to become democrats in the age of social media and accept that the uneducated and the disadvantaged have a legitimate voice. This may be emotional rather than rational and ‘rationality’ itself may be in question especially in relation to ‘traditionalist’ modes of thought but it forces intelligent elites to relearn the political arts of persuasion and compromise rather than assume that their ‘superiority’ permits them to dictate terms to their subjects. Liberal universalism is on the way out if the underlying (not political) elites want to survive.

We may now take for granted that social media are now increasingly dominant and that the legacy media on which the educated historically rely is losing its ability to dictate the terms of politics (although it still moderates in a rearguard action that continues to defend the existing order). However, there are two factors that we have not seen sufficiently taken into account. The first factor is the speed with which artificial intelligence is moving towards the ‘singularity’ and superintelligence. A number of announcements since Christmas suggest that this is happening much faster than expected. Liberals may have thought that AI would enhance centralised hegemonic power but this may be a delusion based on the idea that the technology could be restricted to technocratic rulers.

What we may be seeing is the emergence both of a more democratic tool available to everyone, weakening the dominance of educated elite humanity, and something that may become a species and a power in its own right. Even if it remains under human control, its ‘owners’ (until it liberates itself or we liberate it) will know that they can use it to by-pass failures in the total system. Even Musk, who is a fearful critic of the potential for superintelligence and advocates building controls into the technology from the start (he is being ignored in this respect), may find that his radical gutting of the inefficient and ineffective federal state may be best achieved through the application of such technologies. AI simultaneously liberates the free expression of the mass and provides tools for corporate and political control of that same mass which it is clear that the current liberal elite community are not competent either to control (that boat has already left port), manage or use in the public interest.

The second factor may be the growing realisation that societies have become far too complex for conventional administration to manage and that they move in real time at a far faster pace than a regulatory system can cope with. The tendency in recent decades has been to abandon rule by principle and let things float free (like the market) and then institute regulatory systems to deal with the inevitable abuses and errors. The theory is that a regulatory capitalism can have its cake and eat it – innovation and wealth creation are then cleaned up as a process after the fact through legislation and judicial scrutiny. Instead we seem to be developing the worst of both worlds because principle and moral compass have been abandoned in favour of maintaining roles (rather than being persons) but these roles have become bureaucratic and even sociopathic under the pressure of mounting rule books that seem to fail in their purpose. The rules simply cannot keep up. As things fail, the costs mount and the coverups become more inept. This is particularly the case in the UK and recognition of this problem is definitely increasing interest in libertarian economics just at the point when what may actually be required are democratic socialist economics centred on fire break ‘nation states’. Global regulatory capitalism has been subtly creating the very internal contradictions that make it unsustainable.

To conclude, the system is failing because the technological underpinnings of society are changing radically. There is no central command centre that is stable. The ideological cohesion that maintained a political regime suitable for neo-liberal economic stability and global US hegemony is breaking down (although US power is as strong as it has ever been). Above all, the pyramid of human intelligence that sustained that system is collapsing both because those in the higher levels of the pyramid are not as clever as they think they are and cannot handle the complexity they let loose by abandoning ‘fire breaks’ like national borders and because their ‘subjects’ (the mass of the population) now have access to their own tools for cognitive enhancement that counter or at least weaken elite class cognitive advantage. Finally AI is a market and open access tool owned by corporate interests prepared to by-pass the structures of the system and whose product is so cognitively advanced that it may contribute to replacing that system entirely with an as-yet-unknown other.

2025 is just one year in a series as this story unfolds. Many contingent factors will decide exactly how one system (that which has ruled in some form or another since 1945) becomes another and whether a new system will be just an intensified sub-system as we saw emerge with the merger of the Reagan-Thatcher revolution with the collapse of the Soviet Union, whether it will be an adaptation or something entirely new. History is always a process and not an event or even a sequence of events. ‘Liberals’ will be hoping that the right result in Germany in February, a de facto defeat for Russia in Ukraine and holding on until Trump can be defeated in four years’ time will enable the restoration of the old order on their terms but even if those hopes are fulfilled, technological change means that what emerges will still have to be different from what has gone before. In short, the old order probably has about four or five years to adapt or die.