Political Theory for the Institutional Left Part 2

The Last Man and the Democracy of Institutions

The Left political theory is that mediating systems improve society.

Conservatives display a similar ignorance to the content (not the morality) of this argument as Liberals displayed for decades when it came to the work of Yarvin, Schmitt, Heideggar, etc.

The right is at home criticizing bureaucracy and interference. They view the government directing social media platforms to suppress or remove content as a smoking gun. In doing so, they misunderstand the Left political theory. They misunderstand what Fukuyama means when he says ‘neutral’ or ‘democratic’.

In the Left political theory, adding epicycles increases good — more procedure, regulation, and intermediation strengthens social systems. Put bluntly, you want to make the system more bureaucratic. You want more layers between the people and information, between the elected politicians and the law.

That's what they did in practice and what they argue for in theory. Once again, we return to the same question: Let's say we sat down Fukuyama and Curtis at a table and asked them in pure, descriptive, objective terms of how power works. Do they actually disagree on anything? Here’s Fukuyama:

Musk wasn’t purchasing the platform for economic reasons, nor was he interested in defending free speech as he suggested. Rather, he wanted to buy political influence, which he did in spades. X turned from being a slightly left-of-center platform to becoming a MAGA megaphone, which Musk uses many times a day to broadcast his own political opinions.

Conservatives accuse Fukuyama and the institutional Left of hypocrisy. They’ll point to the censorship of Covid dissent, the Hunter Biden laptop, or other political content. They will accuse Fukuyama of ignoring the political bias of old twitter. That is a misunderstanding of Fukuyama’s position.

Fukuyama isn’t arguing that government-run content moderation didn’t exist; he’s arguing that it is a positive good.