Robert Duigan: Nobody really believes in parliaments any more
Objectives are set by unelected international forums, and legislatures merely rubber-stamp their agendas.
Recently, a rather vulgar image of author Mariana Mazzucato’s foot, decorated with blue toenail polish, appeared on X to promote the book on which it was treading — The Common Good Economy, which argues that the state needs to intervene to align every aspect of society with a single universal perspective of the common good — namely, bigger bureaucracy and more regulation, while preserving private ownership of capital.
In this, she echoes the work of Giovanni Gentile, who saw the state as the highest form of human expression, and believed that aligning one’s will with the state granted one the greatest true spiritual freedom one could possess. Fabian socialism in many ways found common ground with fascists in interwar Europe, much to the chagrin of its luminaries, who found nationalism déclassé. They just had different ideas of the higher good.
Today, executive authority is regarded with fear and scepticism, and we are unlikely to see a rainbow-spangled despot hailed as the herald of this new dogma. But of the classical trias politica, the other electoral element, Parliament, has also been neutered. At one stage, ministers would have had total control of their own departments. Even after twentieth-century professionalisation, they still had power to direct senior administrators.
But over the past 30–40 years, political influence on actual governance has diminished so much that it may as well not be there. Agendas and policies are set at an international level, and legislatures rubber-stamp them and vote on budgets they don’t read. Cabinets cede power to civil servants whose policies are set by NGOs, treaties, and private contractors, with the entire system of government drifting into a strange realm of unreality, becoming increasingly unaccountable to any tangible party or authority.
Politicians who attempt reforms are lambasted if they appeal to any popular sentiment, and hounded until their dying days if they stumble trying to ride the mob. Instead, in the eyes of almost all those involved in professional politics these days, reform must take a decidedly predetermined direction, raising the question of why we bother with democracy in the first place.
In South Africa, we have this liberal opposition party called the Democratic Alliance. They aren’t the opposition any more; they are part of a ruling coalition with the black-nationalist, Marxist African National Congress (ANC). However, they remain a sort of left-liberal outpost of the global Western establishment, something that clashes with the long-term vision of the more radical black nationalists who occupy two-thirds of the legislature. Their party manifesto is literally just the UN Sustainable Development Goals — why conservative minorities vote for such a progressive party is a whole essay in itself.
The DA can’t get enough votes to take over Parliament, but they can hold on to one key province and take a couple of key metros. This should imply that ruthlessness matters when it comes to establishing and deepening power over what one can. And yet, despite staring over the civilisational brink every day, they display some of the most bizarre priorities.
One such priority is the ‘separation of party and state’. To a South African, this makes sense as a response to the ANC’s 30-year policy of ‘cadre deployment’, whereby they subverted the supposedly meritocratic selection process for civil servants by selecting them on the basis of party loyalty rather than technical capacity.
So, to ‘separate party and state’ means getting rid of cronies and incompetents and diversity hires, right? Apparently not. In 2016, the DA managed to eke out coalition victories in four major metros, pushing out the ANC for the first time since the introduction of universal franchise. They were expected to clean house, and one of the first things journalists asked of Helen Zille, the de facto dominatrix of the liberal opposition, was whether the DA would clear out all the ‘cadres’.
She said no. The party’s public line was that they would not replace officials on party-political grounds. Instead, they would use normal performance-management processes. But the same ANC cadres remained, and they sabotaged, looted and dragged their feet, sometimes even dragging DA people down with them. Similar things are being seen now that they are in charge of some of the ministries.
Why do they do business this way?
Part of the reason is that the DA is trying to avoid escalating competition with the ANC, with whom Zille had entertained plans to merge since at least 2012. But the biggest answer lies in ideology. Zille’s favourite thinker is Francis Fukuyama, and between her and the rest of the party leadership, the dominant role models are Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, Brazil’s Lula da Silva and Britain’s Tony Blair.
Fukuyama is known for his big-picture End of History thesis, but he also writes on more empirical topics. In a 2013 CGD working paper called ‘What Is Governance?’, he tries to identify objective metrics of government performance, and pushes for ‘bureaucratic autonomy’ as one of two gold standards, alongside ‘capacity’. Even Samuel Huntington, Fukuyama’s late opponent, considered this autonomy essential in his book The Clash of Civilizations.
But the professional discussions of years ago had a balanced character, speaking of a ‘Goldilocks’ zone with just enough oversight and just enough autonomy. Since Trump and Brexit, the talk has become more one-sided. Fukuyama has explicitly defended the use of the ‘deep state’, even to manipulate political outcomes, much as the European Union does whenever a population votes the wrong way.
Europe, like the Anglosphere, has its own theoretical model. It’s called ‘non-majoritarian institutions’, the purpose of which is to prevent elected officials from deviating from European centralisation. Giandomenico Majone, who remains one of the most prominent theorists of European federalism, explains the entire point as ensuring that no electorate will be capable of changing the policy direction of its state.
In 2005, Majone wrote a book on this topic called The Dilemmas of European Integration: The Ambiguities and Pitfalls of Integration by Stealth. He quotes Lord Acton on Austro-Hungary: ‘In those countries where different races dwell together [...] the power of the imperial parliament must be limited as jealously as the power of the crown, and many of its functions must be discharged by provincial diets, and a descending series of local authorities’.
This could have been written by Hendrik Verwoerd, one of the primary ‘architects of apartheid’. Majone and Fukuyama also, oddly, end up referring extensively to Arend Lijphart, whose theory of consociationalism was popular in right-establishment circles in 1970s South Africa when reform was debated. The idea was that multicultural democracy could be managed by giving each ethnic bloc a veto, and letting an independent civil service simply work. Like Belgium.
The underappreciated Fabian intellectual Antony Giddens, whose ‘Third Way’ defined not just the Clinton administration but also Tony Blair, Thabo Mbeki and Gerhard Schröder, effectively established the prevailing blueprint for all Western government: a synthesis of American free-market liberalism with socialist ethics. Unions replaced by welfare expansion, ‘ethics’ guarded by unaccountable bureaus, open borders and anti-racism, market incentives for civil servants, ideological constraints on the market, and general financialisation of everything.
But even according to Giddens, this thinking had emerged among both communists and market fundamentalists by the mid-1980s. By marketising the civil service, Thatcher and Reagan allowed it to grow faster. By regulating private enterprise but deregulating trade and finance, Clinton and Blair gave greater lobbying and agenda-setting power to major corporations.
The ideas of Fukuyama, Giddens, Majone and Mazzucato offer the dream of ‘politics without politics’ and ‘ethics without moralism’. The position is that ‘evidence-based’ policy and expert governance can find the best way to govern in the most ‘ethical’ fashion. But as Blair makes clear in his book On Leadership, this is really just a rhetorical strategy to cloak various agendas that one cannot afford to let become part of a political discussion. But as people like Dominic Cummings have exhaustively demonstrated, and as many have observed on the ground, competence is declining everywhere. All of these checks, balances and credentialled checkpoints are becoming worn out, and the system is leaking.
On the right, democracy is regarded with just as much scepticism as in the liberal centre, just a bit more openly. But this has made for unusual bedfellows. Curtis Yarvin and the Peter Thiel network both think democracy is stupid, and populism doubly so, yet have found populism to be a useful vehicle to mount a sort of technocratic dirigisme within the bloated federal bureaucracy.
There is now no meaningful political oversight, and international policy agendas are almost impossible to counter from the national stage. This is something critics of central banking have long observed in their own field — that institutional autonomy ultimately ends up creating a sphere outside government that creates its own policy mandates beyond political accountability or national interest. But there is nobody on top any more; nowhere the buck stops.
What we are doing is cutting the cords attached to all tangible levers, and those who do wield power are receding into some Olympian mountaintop obscured by clouds, perhaps unsure themselves whether they actually control the outcomes any more.
Nobody believes in kings, parliaments, experts or corporations any more, and even exotic ideas become banal in practice. We have fascism without thymos, liberalism without freedom, nationalism without ethnos, communists who cheer corporate management, populists electing anti-democrats, and anti-populists ‘defending democracy’.
No political philosophy means anything any more — the left and right are costumed morons beating each other up for clicks, demographic pluralism appears to have become a foregone conclusion, and the centre stays the centre. Even the most extreme anti-materialist force of the twenty-first century, ISIS, turns out to have been covertly supported in part by the United States for geopolitical reasons before being discarded.
Whatever we come up with to change the status quo, it will have to recognise how deep the dissolution of meaning has become, and let go of our favourite ideas, which are all sinking into the great amorphous foundations. Perhaps, eventually, we can just ignore it.
Robert Duigan is a political analyst and journalist from South Africa. He does freelance research for various political organisations, and runs half of the local news website, The Cape Independent, where he publishes the specialist monthly publication, PRISM.
