The Age of Mass Democracy

Is liberalism already dead?

Much has been written to try and make sense of the political system we find ourselves under in the West today. Political philosophers love to debate to what degree today’s politics is the end result of classical liberalism, Christian presumptions about the dignity of the individual, or some earlier strain of democratic thought. On the right, some, such as the paleoconservative intellectual Paul Gottfried, have pushed back against what they view as an excess of this kind of genealogical thinking. Can we really understand the mindset of a woke, Generation-Z activist by looking to some long-dead English political philosopher? There is an unlikely source for making sense of this debate: Panagiotis Kondylis, a barely translated Germanophone Greek sociologist.

Though Kondylis claimed his main intellectual influence as Karl Marx, his thought is often represented as an amalgamation of Marx and Carl Schmitt. Paul Gottfried draws on the work of Kondylis in his book After Liberalism, to argue we have moved to a post-liberal age of mass democracy.

Gottfried sees Kondylis as part of a tradition of counter-enlightenment thinkers who “used the critical approach of the Enlightenment to question and even devalue their final vision.”¹ The Marxist influence of Kondylis is most evident in his detailed analysis of the class relations and state form dictating ideology and culture, though. as Gottfried observed, he resembles European New Right thinkers in his defence of traditional communities and ways of life, and his natural disdain for the process of their dissolution to mass democratic ways of life. A process which, like other New Right thinkers, he sees as led by the American Empire through its spread of human rights ideology and its expansionary economic system.

Kondylis identifies two distinct ways of life which have been adopted by modern Europeans (and eventually the world): bourgeois liberalism and mass democracy. Mass democracy grew out of bourgeois liberalism. It adopted, and still maintains many principles which were developed under liberalism, (equality, tolerance, pluralism) – though each is now less formal, instead serving as general ethical guides to a managerial system which cares less for the bourgeois individualism enshrined by its predecessor. Mass democracy is the social formation that has arisen as a result of the uniquely modern mass-participation in the political system. It is a totalising way of life created by a set of conditions unique to modernity, primarily universal suffrage, social mobility and material abundance.

Liberalism provides many of the ethical preconditions for the development of mass democracy, perhaps more importantly, it provided fertile soil for the development of other radical and modernising ideas which would help develop mass democracy into an all-encompassing world system. Concentration in the cities in the early 20th Century led to the development of modernism and a number of avant-garde artistic movements which challenged the moral order and faith in reason which had undergirded bourgeois liberalism. Western thought became increasingly unmoored and subjectivist, focused only on self-expression and hedonism. This only came to full realisation with the postmodernist movement, which was also more explicit about using relativism and deconstruction as a way to tear down older, bourgeois modes of thought and prevailing anti-democratic hierarchies.

Since mass democratic ideologies leave no basis for establishing hierarchies of anything but material wealth and competence, its basis for legitimacy becomes the promise of delivering the greatest material abundance for the greatest many. It adopts many of the goals of socialist ideologies of the 19th Century, and makes their central criticisms of capitalism redundant by delivering material wealth for the masses and the dissolution of a rigid class system. Though great inequality and wealth disparities continue to exist, the oligarchies of bourgeois liberalism are dissolved, and the state’s role as a guarantor of delivering material abundance stewards the economic process, while the principle of unlimited social mobility and equality for all becomes sacred.

This was not the result of subversion by “Cultural Marxists” or a victory of revolutionary socialism. As Kondylis points out, authoritarian right-wing governments like fascist Spain also “created the institutional framework for modernization and industrialization in a capitalist direction, to the exclusion of socialist experiments.”² Once these authoritarian governments lost control, their countries quickly embraced all the social aspects of mass democracy – consumerism, human rights, feminism, and pluralism were quickly adopted by any country which had an already established modern economy and welfare state. It mattered little how late they were in embracing the social aspect of the package.

The problem then, is surely deeper than a few bad ideas or electoral defeats. The satisfaction of human want on a mass scale, the transformation of society toward mass-production, mass-consumption and mass-democracy tends to also empower certain values, some of which are necessary for its own legitimacy, some of which allow the expansion of this model and the greater generation of abundance, and some of which are just preferred by the masses who really do have a greater degree of freedom in determining the direction of things through the apparatus of mass democracy.

Kondylis also makes clear that mass democracy could not have developed without the demographic and economic revolutions that transformed Western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Industrialization, agricultural modernization, an urban working class, the disappearance of a family-based craft economy, and the operation of assembly-line production were the factors, Kondylis observes, contributing to mass democracy³

Earlier societies had massive urban populations, but they did not have the industrial output and affluence of the modern West, which has made it possible to build a society on hedonism and individual self-gratification, freeing the individual from obligations once made necessary by economic hardship. Mass democracy and the ascendancy of its associated intellectual justifications follows from an economy of mass consumption and mass production. Liberalism, as an ethic of the bourgeoise, was an obstacle to affluence for all, and gradually gave way to a worldview more suited to maximising economic output and the raising up of the masses into productive and mobile economic agents.

There are two other tendencies Kondylis identifies as central to mass democracy: atomisation (and with it, individualism) and globalism, and each belong together. Mass democracy tears down older social orders, and in their place creates a whole framework of economic and social supports for an atomised state of affairs – universal rights, social mobility, mass education, empowerment of women etc. This necessarily has an expansive and globalising tendency – no distinctions between people of equal human rights are meaningful, and no obstacles to their atomisation into raw biomass is desirable from an economic standpoint. Liberation from the bounds of traditional social orders and the delivery of economic abundance are bound together, and a taste of either has been shown to be quite irresistible for communities exposed to it. Atomisation allows for differentiation and complexity through specialisation and the division of labour.

Bourgeois liberalism was not replaced by losing a battle of ideas, but by the gradual dismantling of its class hierarchies due to revolutionary technological development, division of labour, social mobility and increasing affluence for the masses. Each of these changes brought greater atomisation and social levelling, as older class identities gave way to interchangeable participants in mass-consumption, mass-production, mass-democracy.

Kondylis sees the transition to mass democracy happening from the beginning of the 20th Century, but the end of the Second World War is the real turning point:

Bourgeois mass society found itself on the path to modern mass democracy already from the time the mechanisation of everyday life started and the worker was discovered as consumer. This decisive turn occurred only after the Second World War, and not least under the influence of the Cold War.⁴

The Cold War further accelerated this transition, with elites in the West fearful of a communist takeover opting to greatly improve living standards for the average worker and democratising new sectors of the economy. The utopian dreams offered by the vision of the communist East became much less appealing to the world when Western mass democracy actually succeeded in providing mass affluence and lifting up the average worker to a previously unthinkable prosperity.

So the West defeated the East only when bourgeois class society gave way to mass democracy, whereby the communistic criticism of capitalism became obsolete and unattractive.⁵

The 20th Century was host to a great synthesis of liberal individualist capitalism and socialist ideas of central planning and managerialism. A strong state working in tandem with capitalists and embracing cultural leftism and individualism actually created prosperity and a freeing of the individual that socialist utopians could only promise. Many of the divisions which were useful under bourgeois liberalism melted away – politicians on the right could just as easily make use of Keynesian central planning to stimulate private enterprise, the capitalist class found it was actually a benefit to them to embrace “Cultural Marxist” ideas like racial egalitarianism, and socialists increasingly embraced the free market as a means of lifting up workers into a prosperous middle class.

Consequently, modern mass democracy at one blow made the concepts "conservatism", "liberalism" and "socialism" objectless.⁶

Under the unstoppable process of atomisation which characterises mass democracy, most of the useful categories of bourgeois liberalism became empty of content. Not realising how total the transformation was from bourgeois liberalism to mass democracy, we are now in a strange situation where most of the terms we use to argue over politics are decontextualised out of the social order in which they had any meaning:

The terms “democracy,” “capitalism,” and “rights” have been made to mean whatever partisan politicians and intellectuals wish them to mean. All of these terms now have been given what Kondylis calls a “polemical” function: they are used to carry on a struggle against political and cultural enemies or obstacles.

…

What provides these terms with steady points of reference are their connection to postmodern societies and their sacral use by a particular elite. Public administrators, journalists, and other segments of the political class determine or alter the meaning of political doctrine.⁷

All that is solid melts into air. Even Marxism’s defeat is not ultimately the victory of its competitor liberalism – Marxism had grown out of liberalism, and shared its desire for a great synthesis of economism and humanism. It was defeated when the rationalist, totalising aspects of its world outlook were made obsolete by postmodernism, a distinctly mass democratic mode of thought:

From this viewpoint, the defeat of Marxism meant the putting aside of the last systematically organised remnants of humanistic liberalism and the final victory of a thinking which one may for the time being call postmodern, if one, in course of this, (continuously) keeps in mind this postmodern thought's concrete mass-democratic roots and functions.⁸

The “managerial revolution” discussed by thinkers like James Burnham has an effect not just on how the economy is organised – the new elites created by this revolution have a fundamentally different outlook to those who ruled the older liberal order:

Managers, technocrats and yuppies are as sociological types and bearers of functions something essentially different than the bourgeois; bourgeoisness (i.e. bourgeois morals, manners and ethos) as lifestyle today fulfils, if one keeps in mind the overall picture, the same picturesque-chic functions (or tasks) (within "high society") which once were carried out by the survivors of noble lineage (old noble families)⁹

All traces of non-democratic elitism and prejudices must be expunged, and replaced by an ethic of relativism more suited to a global, democratic political system.

Part of this relativising process is a change in the notion of equality, from a formal and legalistic basis for natural rights, to an actually material right which makes a demand on the collective for a share of affluence. This leads to an “economisation of the political”, as the state must continually justify its legitimacy through delivering affluence for the masses.

However, the materialisation of formal rights can only be bought off through the continuously higher output (i.e. performance) of the economy and through redistributions of the profits generated (within the national income), which increases the purchasing power of the large masses. The priority of concern over the economy is inseparably interrelated with the political process of democratisation, that is why the economisation of the political in the sense we explained above constitutes a specific feature of mass democracy, which only with difficulty goes together with other social formations, i.e. with other power relations and relations of domination.¹⁰

Mass democracy could not exist without the continued provision of cheap food and energy to the masses, and this economic basis of legitimacy leads to a deep intertwining between economics and politics. The more this system delivers affluence for the masses, the more the principle of equality through human rights is worked out and makes further demands of the political-economic system. Could a theorist of classical liberalism have imagined future liberals proclaiming a universal right to a “decent home”?

In what sense, then, are we still living under liberalism? Bourgeois liberalism was founded on property rights and values like free expression, now we live in a period where a strong state can enact strict speech laws and promise to fulfil the “right to a home” through taxation in the name of liberal values. Some on the right who were cynical of the postliberal critique of our problems as rooted in liberal enlightenment values have turned to Kondylis as a refreshing alternative. Kondylis understood this problem quite well – the current order was birthed by liberalism and inherited its values, but they have lost any real content in their transformation:

Modern mass democracy of course arose from the inside (womb) of bourgeois society, but it constitutes a structurally new social formation. For that very reason the political vocabulary, which was formed in the bourgeois age, has lost in this new social formation of mass democracy its real content and meaning, although the competing elites still have to use it in the absence of another political vocabulary, in order to ideologise their practical matters of concern (desires), to be symbolically distinguished from one another, and to consequently make themselves more interesting.

I agree with Dr. Ricardo Duchesne that the thought of John Rawls is the best way to understand the worldview of liberal pluralism which dominates political thinking in the West today. Rawls’ work could be seen as a description of how the ethic of liberalism has been transformed by mass democracy. Rawls advocates abandoning the earlier, “comprehensive liberalism” which was too systematic and prescriptive, in favour of a way of doing politics grounded in nothing but pluralism. Rawls takes this pluralism so far that he will not allow any political theory, even his own, to be asserted as true. Questions of metaphysics and morals can be left to individuals to determine for themselves, but what must be recognised is the fact of pluralism – none of these doctrines can be established as true and no beliefs should be imposed on others. Rawls is speaking to a liberal audience which values pluralism, individualism and equality as inherited democratic beliefs, though he cannot justify any of them within his own political theory. However, he believes reasonable persons can agree that it is unreasonable to impose anything but an absolute commitment to pluralism on the public square.

Unlike earlier liberal theorists, Rawls devotes a great deal of attention to economic justice. He draws from the principles of liberalism a theory of economic justice which guarantees equality of opportunity and argues that economic inequalities are justified only insofar as they provide affluence for the worst off in society. Rawls’ theory is much more focused on finding ways to guide managerial decisions of mass democracy in the direction of social justice and equal rights, though he derives these values from the liberal tradition he has inherited. He represents quite well the phenomenon Kondylis discussed in the transformation of liberalism under mass democracy – it is birthed from it, uses many of the concepts and values, but they stray so far from their original form as to end up almost unrecognisable (there is room for debate here, as Duchesne for example believes Rawls was just working out logically the principles inherited from the earliest liberals).

Ideologists of the mass democratic era profess the end of history and ideology, they tend to profess relativism and claim to be done with metaphysics, but, as Kondylis points out, they still borrow many of the ideological assumptions of earlier liberalism such as the social contract and invisible hand. The most important guiding assumption they inherit from liberalism though, is the faith in progress. Kondylis would not agree this is just liberalism working out its own precepts. Instead, he sees 20th Century intellectual movements as a continuous attack on bourgeois liberalism from ideologues of mass democracy. These movements attacked the understanding of man that formed the background to bourgeois liberal modes of thought. Atheism, materialism, and pluralism are three examples, postmodern deconstructionism is a more recent example, and one which is more overtly aimed at the very foundations of bourgeois liberal morality.

With the development of mass democracy into a global system, the non-White world is welcomed into the system, and ideologies of equality and anti-racism become dominant. The separation of the civilised and savage world was a liberal bourgeois distinction – under mass democracy, there is only the “developed” and “underdeveloped” world.

The end goal of mass democracy is a global marketplace of interchangeable individuals, with world peace and maximum economic efficiency achieved through the scientific management of the masses. The spread of the mass democratic model to the periphery became a superior means of drawing out its economic potential than the bourgeois model of colonialism:

While putting those principles into force, which in the interior of advanced mass democracies had already found practical application, at the international level it is expected that the lower strata of world society, through affluence and democratisation, will become integrated with the higher strata, and that finally the planet, seen as a whole, will resemble a giant market and at the same time a giant social state, in which the resources and riches could be redistributed in favour of those have hitherto been disadvantaged.¹¹

This is motivated not just an altruistic sharing of wealth by the Western elites, but a belief that the development of the rest of the world will make the strongest nations stronger too, just as the lifting up of the proletariat in Western societies led to greater affluence for all.

Just as the fear of a communist takeover pushed Western elites to embrace aspects of mass democracy, so too on the global scale did the competition between communism and the capitalist West accelerate the spread of mass democratic ideology.

In their endeavour to mobilise the coloured and colonial peoples against the capitalistic metropolises, the communists have substantially contributed to the spreading of today's prevalent principles of equality, and at the same time they forced through their competition the camp of the (former) colonial Powers to gradually adopt the same vocabulary and the same positions.¹²

The contest between East and West turned the entire planet into contested space for these two worldviews, which had to justify themselves as the superior system on the merits of their mass democratic aspects. While Communism promised to empower workers against the imperialist, bourgeois West, it was Western capitalism’s coupling of individual freedom with mass affluence won out as the more appealing vision, helped in no small part by the objective failures of centrally planned economies.

Communism contributed to the intensification of the two processes at the core of the spread of mass democracy – the globalisation of politics and the levelling of all prior hierarchies. Both communist theoreticians and free market fundamentalists conceived of an end of history where national borders are eroded, and Marxists viewed the revolutionary force of capital as a necessary but intermediary stage of history in sweeping away the hierarchies and divisions of the past. Communism arose within these processes and intensified them – in the end, it only accelerated the transformation of the Western capitalist model into its mass democratic form, which is now more hegemonic and antifragile than ever.

1. Paul Gottfried, Panajotis Kondylis: A Skeptical Philosopher Of The Enlightenment

2. Panagiotis Kondylis, Konservativismus, 504.

3. Paul Gottfried, After Liberalism, 34

4. Panagiotis Kondylis, Planetary Politics after the Cold War, 114

5. PP, 115

6. PP, 115

7. Paul Gottfried, The Obsoleteness of Conservatism

8. PP, 116 &117

9. PP, 114

10. PP, 28-29.

11. PP, 14.

12. PP, 16