New Cold War — Democracies in Macpherson's Mirror

Back in the 1970s, Macpherson anticipated much of this. For him, Western capitalist liberal democracies and those in socialist and developing countries all had “genuine historical claims to the title democracy.”

Whether they were liberal or not, the “ultimate goal” of all democracies was “the same – to provide the conditions for the full and free development of the essential human capacities of all members of the society.”

Indeed, he considered capitalist liberal democracy (especially handicapped) in fulfilling this goad. Their formative institutions were liberal and representative, designed to protect the rights of private proprietors....

Moreover, Macpherson argued that liberal systems became more democratic, but not without making democracy more liberal. Constitutions and laws, and varying combinations of concessions to working people, electoral force and fraud, ensured democracy would not erode private property.

Today’s deepening corruption of U.S. democracy is rooted in the attempt to preserve wealth and privilege even when its ability to serve interests broader than its own has declined steeply.

Macpherson even warned that liberal democracy might prove inferior, when socialist and developing countries demonstrated that protecting the rights and privileges of the propertied minority was no longer necessary to expand productive power and efficiency. Decades after his passing, China’s productive achievements – the CPC’s ability to organize the greatest industrial revolution in history and take technological and ecological leadership without losing its legitimacy – underline Macpherson’s foresight.…

Why to expect continuing hybrid warfare with China and Russia that could go kinetic at any moment, given current conditions. 

The US has framed this in terms of an existential conflict between liberalism—in which democracy and capitalism are equated — and "authoritarian" socialism as a socio-economic system. This is just an extension of the "existential" struggle between liberalism and communism of the Cold War punctuated by detente.

This moment in the historical dialectic is coming to head.

New Cold War

Democracies in Macpherson's Mirror

Radhika Desai | professor of political studies at the University of Manitoba in Canada.

Originally at CGTN

https://newcoldwar.org/democracies-in-macphersons-mirror/