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In another thread, I offhandedly mentioned the reasons various radical leftists might believe the current state of the world is not stable or getting better. Since I was trying to summarize “why leftists might feel this way” they weren’t really a coherent argument or reasons I found convincing. 

I don’t actually find Zizek’s “Four Horseriders of the Apocalypse” very convincing. Genetic manipulation of offspring is overrated. Global warming is likely to lead to massive disaster (especially for the global poor) but unlikely human extinction.

Inequality is a threatening problem not because of some conservative sense of egalitarianism, but because it’s creating division in society. The superrich increasingly don’t live in the same world as the masses, but have even more power to determine government and culture than ever before. Financialization and globalization have concentrated the rewards more than any time in human history, and yet the beneficiaries convince themselves it’s all because of their individual brilliance and effort, instead of systemic changes and luck. In response, some of the masses push themselves ever harder and more ambitiously to pass the cut off for being “successful”, making them assholes who can not even conceive of class solidarity or life outside the status grind. The rest of the masses become increasingly resentful and can be led around like a dog into voting for whoever channels their anger at these “elites” more grotesquely.

This makes the elites insecure and overprotective in their power (“the worst form of government is insecure autocrat”), the economic egalitarians despondent and distrusting of the system, the conservative voters purely destructive, and the liberal professional climbers into self-loathing assholes.

(The few times some elites have had this much more wealth and power than those around them… have also generally led to collapse and revolution.)

I’m not sure it will like, end the world, but so far it’s presented a serious challenge that technocratic liberalism has failed to deal with.

[Points I meant to add but forgot when writing:

1. As an accelerator of inequality, I worry about mass unemployment through automation. Now the technical and economic aspects of that are actually complicated, as much of rattumb has discussed to death, but no one ever seems to argue “given the chance to unemploy 80% of the US population, just to increase profits for the positional goods race, the elite will hold back.” No, we pretty much believe that Moloch or sheer dumb stupidity would do something so horrific to their neighbors and countrymen. Under that lack of solidarity, rebellion by the left behind seems like it will be sparked some day over some dumb and heartless decision. People don’t treat capitalism as a means to a goal of full employment and material sufficiency for most of the country, but either an end in itself, or a means to them getting personally rich.]

That’s just the abstract though… more immediately it just really doesn’t feel like liberalism is working to maintain harmony anymore.

Like most groups that used to be fairly liberal and productive (the Democratic party, geekdom, academia, etc) seem to hate themselves more than I ever remember before. Be it the fact that we’re still fighting over the Bernie/Hillary primary, or explosions like Gamergate, there’s just a phenomenal eagerness to turn on each other and expend more energy proving you hate the neargroup villain than on anything productive. I was hopeful a Trump administration would unify the left in the way it had shattered under Obama, but uh, no. Now all intra-left fights have just taken on the extra dimension of “and you being wrong/impure is the reason Trump won!” Everyone’s full of fear at being called the next traitor, and turning that into the passion to call others traitors first.

I think we’ve all seen witch hunts based on flimsy evidence that in previous years we would have been amazed at the idea of devoted liberals falling for. There’s no trust in the norms or institutions to regulate these sort of problems appropriately anymore.

It may look like I am exaggerating, but remember the deal with internal contradictions is that they build up tension for a while then explode all at once (a la gamergate.) Liberalism feels like it’s at a point where the entire intellectual edifice could collapse in short order.

If it doesn’t, great. But if it does, I want to be in the space to offer an alternative for the evacuees to believe in, that isn’t alt-right rage-addiction, or one of the many other failure modes of ideological burnout. I want to construct an intellectual edifice for universal compassion instead.

[2. And on my second section, uh, it doesn’t seem that either politicians or politically passionate voters believe in Constitutional governance anymore. The rules of government exist in most actors’ mind now not because they are good in spirit, but just as obstacles to be overcome. The Republicans seem to be willing to break the norms and exploit the letter of the law much faster than Democrats, but both parties move in that direction. Examples of this are too numerous to mention, but I expect to see more things like the NC legislature voting after the election to strip the governor of many powers - wholly undemocratic calvinball. (Not to mention opportunistic times when one party figures they can just ignore the rules, like with Garland.)]

People need to believe checks and limits exist for a good reason in order for the norms of liberalism to have power. Without that, we’re just an unstable system waiting around until someone figures out how to become a dictator.