Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan is notorious for brawls among lawmakers. These fights happen between competing parties, and they start from debates over bills heating up too much. However, outside observers miss one detail: these fights are mostly for show.
A local journalist explains this process to the BBC: “The legislators are partly acting - trying to show their constituents they're working hard to fight for their cause.” These brawls cover up real important issues fenced behind meters of red-tape: important bills too long-winded for the general public to understand. One infrastructure bill under review in 2004 even covered 10,000 pages. Indeed, before legislators can even debate on a bill, they need to understand it. How can one expect legislators to understand them if a major infrastructure bill alone can cover up to 10,000 pages?
These creatures in the legislature are more a creature of their staffs than anyone else. Civics and political science classes give their students a quaint model of how politics works: everyone votes candidates who will enact policies and enforce laws, the State holds a monopoly on violence to secure life, liberty, and property, etc. This on-paper model serves as a useful smokescreen that works wonders in selling to people that Liberal Democracy is the best system in the world. What lies behind said smokescreen serves a useful purpose that rubber stamp legislatures in autocracies don't have: it provides the bureaucracy some honest non-garbage input about public wants, so that they can tailor their plans around it and sell it to the public as legislation by their salesmen (elected officials).
However, the public buying into the democratic system gives professional-managerial “strivers” another method of exerting control around the margins. The veneer of debate allows people to air out their grievances and have free(er) discussions in public, but strivers in the private sector thoroughly regulate the public square. Free speech is either a time lag between the public square’s technological abilities and strivers’ ability to worm its way into the system and co-opt it, or a cultural lag between when the public and strivers are at each others’ throats, and the former hasn't been brought to general compliance with the latter yet.
The system is resilient in such a way that it doesn't require that too repressive a system that would retard economic development, or demolishing of autonomous, functional communities. The rot sets in, however, when people find that they can vote in power for themselves, such that these people can direct specific targets to be extorted and/or vilified. Conflicts within strivers also play in to this, as losers will converge and rally around public discontent to outmaneuver the well-off winners, who are much less motivated to fight back.
Since conflicts among strivers in democratic societies are usually less bloody, a slow but deep fracturing of society sets in between those who do well and those who do not. Note that this is not purely a class conflict, and ethnic and cultural tensions also factor in. Socialism thrives in this environment by promising cold hard cash, and by promising to expropriate the expropriators. The professional-managerial caste can gloss this over by gaslighting people under the guise of ‘justice’ (whatever that means), since your average Juan simply isn’t bloodthirsty enough in an environment with relatively ‘free’ elections and ‘civilized’ society.
Hence we see what happens as Liberal Democracy’s Managerial system of governance fails. Managerialism’s failure is encouraging public erosion of trust in Liberal Democracy’s institutions. Societal trust vanishes, and we see our society increasingly becoming low-trust. While older times had blood ties ranking first, institutional and ideological alignments have become more important in judging whom to trust. Patronage networks have already emerged, and the free for all conflict within the professional-managerial caste has already seen winners: a mixture of state institutions, state-funded institutions, and private trusts and charities. They voted in power to themselves by funding the right candidates and lobbying the right bills, and now they reap their patronage’s fruits. Taiwan’s legislative adventures are but the most bitter fruit of Managerialism’s failure; the Philippines gives a good example too.
Read also:
While conflicts among strivers are indeed not too bloody, Managerialism’s failure has led to what Samuel Francis calls Anarcho-tyranny. Managerialism needed a monolithic culture which ironically came in the name and form of multiculturalism. The regime’s distributed tyranny holds a broad mix of different cultures and backgrounds in suspension, and thoroughly politicizes it. This politicization happens through top-bottom ways (providing specific recognition and funding, selectively enforcing laws to ensure that the restrained culture would develop into the desired state), or through bottom-top ones (campaigns by regime supporting actors to make the culture more ‘inclusive’, ‘intersectional’, or whatever pseudo-neutral ideological qualifier that can be used to nudge the captive culture into compliance and convergence).
By setting up its own ideal for the captive cultures within the ‘multicultural’ plurality, the regime extends its power, while also portraying to gullible observers or subjects that it actively cedes power. Rejecting the monolith becomes an empty slogan used to hide the process of capture, being able to identify itself as a superior alternative to the backward, oppressive ways of the past. In a superficial sense, multiculturalism achieves its goal of providing diversity to social life the same way one offers varieties of junk food against the alternative of one or two kinds of stale bread. In a deeper sense, the monolith also claims superiority by exerting far more pernicious and total control than the brute force monolithic ways that it is denouncing.
By spreading this ‘multiculturalism’, conflict among different ethnic and interest groups happens. Self-regulation among these groups fails, so restraint now comes from the outside. Hence people become passive in securing their own protection, and they rely only on the State to protect them. This outcome is only one part of Managerialism’s failure, for that system made people too passive in their societal roles and duties. Everyone now relies on mass corporations for jobs, mass media for information, and mass political parties for illusory mass political action. Telling people that they are too stupid and reckless to feed themselves, let alone defend themselves, has made them give up these societal roles fall to the State.
One may see the outcome in the Philippines: the Philippine National Police relies on Manila’s command and control, with no input from LGUs unless political connections allow them. Local politicians cannot promise to restore law and order. Only the national executive can do something about problems like drug use, for only they can direct law enforcement. LGUs have to make do with anarcho-tyranny, for the most they can do is perform social welfare actions as the 1987 Constitution and the Local Government Code state.
Most people, however, are sick of anarcho-tyranny. While strivers detest vigilantes, working caste ‘chuds’ romanticize them as countless action movies attest. Duterte’s drug war somewhat legitimized vigilante action, although striver pushback ended this stride after a year. Managerialism’s failure will only encourage violence and conflict as people know not whom to trust. Divisions among ethnic lines, soft secessions through private communities, and the rise of private states seem inevitable. Nomadic Prolet once spoke about what Filipinos really want in face of Managerialism’s failure:
quasi-libertarian and anarchistic distrust of government institutions;
anti-globalist;
want to be left alone for the most part; and
crave for decisive leadership, irrespective of anything.
The people want in every election someone to stop the country’s anarcho-tyranny through unity; we may yet see further division and anarcho-tyranny’s acceleration as Managerialism resists its own death throes.