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The Liberal Democratic order is over - as can be seen from the Bush v Gore decision, which at a stroke overturns all of the legal notions on which the Liberal Democracy was founded. The prediction, when I wrote the first draft of the Fourth Republic in July 2001, was that Bush would, as all reactionary moments must, pursue a radically different monetary order, and a radically different constitutional order. No one, at the time, truly believed me, and no one, at the time, would publish such a contention. I note that on the cover of Harper's Magazine this month there is an article that screams about how the Right wing has engaged in a "Putsch" with the media.
Putsch is right, but "media" is wrong. The reactionary order has come about because there was a demand for it - namely those holding value in the old system could no longer have that value protected by the old monetary system. They had to change the nature of money to continue to hold an ever increasing percentage of the society's wealth. Just as the end of slavery's expansion ended the Federalist Republic, and the end of the ability to settle the interior ended the Union, the end of the ability to create wealth from technology, ended the Liberal Democracy. A Constitutional order dies when it has no new worlds to conquer.
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