But truth is, we've only stumbled at home. It's still a free market, if not a free world, and we're still exporting democracy aplenty. (Refugees don't come from nowhere.) So, the bigger question is why, if it's still bombing its way into hearts and minds abroad, is freedom milquetoast at home?
Because, according to their forensicates:
A new phase of globalization has unlocked enormous wealth around the world. However, the benefits have been highly uneven" The center of the political spectrum, which dominated politics in the established democracies as the changes unfolded, failed to adequately address the disruption... This created political opportunities for new competitors on the left and right, who were able to cast existing elites as complicit in or benefiting from the erosion of citizens' living standards and national traditions.
Just to review: There were no WMDs in Iraq. They knew. Then our mortgages went sh*t. They knew that, too. They got bailed out. We got kicked out. They got our homes. Then sold them a second and third time. Then when a Democrat spoke up, they threw the election to some monkey's typing accident. In sum, the chance to 'cast' elites as complicit wasn't due to opportunism, but to their repeated, caught-on-camera guilt.
But let's say the 'center of the political-spectrum' 'failed'. Failed how? Failed to act? Didn't see it coming? If you can't see Trump oozing up from your drain, your free speech isn't worth much. Or it isn't free. Then it works swimmingly. In other words, the problem isn't them 'failing'. It's them.
More likely, it's that the 'center of the political spectrum' is a deft, but baseless, tautology. Think. If the political is a straight line, then, invariably, the Left discards the Right and vice-versa. Therefore, the only space for democracy is mid-dial. But by that same logic, if we pay even lip-service to popular-sovereignty, the only choice for any government is to trick the scale to where it becomes center.
For example, 40 years ago Union dollars carried the Democratic Party. Today it's the 4,000-odd members of the .001%. Between time, we've watched the 'center' drift far to the Right of what it was in the middle-class' heyday. Now, rhetoric aside, Hillary's fiscal policies fall to the Right of Ronald Reagan's. Yet it's her 'left-centrism' that deputizes her to protect us from the uncertainty of a more-seductive, Left regimen, including the once-centrist program Bernie offered.
Denying the 'center' a fixed-point, makes it no more than a safeguard of the 'status-quo'. In which case, the 'center' has an existential reason to distrust free speech, rather than defend it. Yet, ironically, the report warns us, 'democracy should not limit itself to a wary defense of the status quo.' Why then, even when its legitimacy is not in crisis, would the center (the status quo) safeguard democracy?
Figure, when you have .001% of the population calling the shots, whether the downward-mobile part to the Left or Right is the wrong question, anyway. But if it's the one you're asking, then you're not holding the center, you're upholding the .001%.
To pan out a bit, the Western Democracies allegedly denote the political 'center' of the world, and a sizable middle-class reflected it. -Above, as below. But now their middle-class is thinning (a point we'll return). And now the 'center' competes with China for map-orientation.
Now recall, (FH doesn't) 'freedom' was a Western export to China in the 19th century. China's slow development then was due in part to a 'new phase of global expansion', namely cheap fossil fuels and cheap labor in the capitalist states of the West. Recall, also, 'freedom' when exported, refers to the market, and has little -if anything- to do with democracy.
Of recent, China has made bounds, in many ways eclipsing us, by the very same means (fossil fuels and cheap labor), and our response has been nothing short of amnesiac horror. (Though I doubt we're feeling as trodden as they did around the time of the Opium Wars.)
Ironically, the fear now is that China's 21st century censorship prowess -developed with Google- itself the product of a 'new phase of global expansion', will export here. In their words:
As the internet takes on the role of a virtual public sphere, and as the cost of sophisticated surveillance declines, Beijing's desire and capacity to spread totalitarian models of digitally enabled social control pose a major risk to democracy worldwide.
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