As R.J. Rummel has exhaustively documented (blog), liberal democracy has substantially reduced the frequency of warfare, the fatality of wars that do occur, and the frequency and fatality of domestic mass killings such as genocides, which he terms “democides”. And it seems to do this without damaging other desirable goals, such as healthcare access, technological progress, social justice, and material prosperity, at least compared to the other forms of government we’ve been able to observe in practice so far. Indeed, there are plausible arguments that liberal democracy is the best existing system at providing these other goods, though of course many socialists disagree, and there are clear failures, like the material prosperity of India and healthcare access in the US.
(Unlike Rummel, I think the US genocide of its Native American population, the US's current system of mass incarceration, and the mass murder in the French Congo demonstrate that democracy, even liberal democracy, is not a complete solution to the mass murder problem, just a palliative, solving most of it.)
So, if or when we can’t abolish government entirely, liberal democracy is vastly preferable to the other forms of government we have so far been subjected to. But human affairs are not inevitably guided toward what is most preferable, and the relative stability of liberal democracy is contingent on two historical facts which may not obtain.
First, it can only survive where liberalism is popular. Where liberalism is unpopular, you can have liberal undemocratic rule (as in Singapore) or authoritarian democracy (as in Indira Gandhi’s India), but the advent of democracy will extinguish whatever liberalism exists, and quite possibly democracy as well. Morsi’s Egypt and post-Revolutionary Iran are examples of this: given the opportunity to vote, the people voted in authoritarian leaders on the strength of promises to crush freedoms; the soundbite version of the history is, “One person, one vote, one time.” In the US, the same thing could plausibly happen with Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Kamala Harris, or Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, none of whom favor liberalism.
Second, liberal or not, democracy is unstable where small elite armies can defeat large popular armies. States are institutionalized violence, so a more effective manifestation of institutionalized violence can overthrow any particular state. This can manifest externally, as conquest through invasion, or internally, as a military coup. Historically we can see that, in times and places when victory in warfare was mostly determined by numbers of soldiers, some form of republicanism puts the population under arms, and democracy is stable if it is popular — Classical Greece with its spears and the 20th century with its assault rifles, for example. But, in times and places where a military elite of well-equipped warriors can defeat a much larger group of volunteers, frequently aristocracy or colonialism is established, and the worst abuses follow — for example, late 19th-century and early 20th-century colonialism, the post-Columbian Spanish conquests, and medieval European feudalism.
We can explain this by putting ourselves in the position of a proponent of a late-20th-century warrior faction which has just lost a democratic election, involving (as they always do) values you consider to be sacred, which are now destined to be trampled under the feet of the new government. Overturning the results of the election by violence in order to uphold those sacred values involves great personal risk (you will likely die) and, because the voters for the other side are more numerous, it probably will not succeed; they will probably beat you on the battlefield just as they did at the polls. In most cases your best option is to suffer the indignities of enemy rule and hope for a better showing in the next election.
By contrast, consider the position of a member of the British colonial administration in the 01890s, faced with the knowledge that your policies are unpopular (“with the natives”, they might say.) As Hilaire Belloc wrote satirically in 01898 in The Modern Traveller, p. 41:
I never shall forget the way
That [Captain] Blood upon this awful day
Preserved us all from death.
He stood upon a little mound,
Cast his lethargic eyes around,
And said beneath his breath:
“Whatever happens we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not.”
He marked them in their rude advance,
He hushed their rebel cheers;
With one extremely vulgar glance
He broke the Mutineers.
(I have a picture in my book
Of how he quelled them with a look.)
We shot and hanged a few, and then
The rest became devoted men.
Belloc is writing about a caravan, but the same principle applies to the violent subjugation of whole countries. (The book’s illustration of the “look” shows an angry white man with his arms crossed standing next to a wheeled machine-gun; Belloc’s satire extended to skewering the viciousness of his countrymen, but he only barely ridicules the racism which made it so fatal, a racism he seems to have wholeheartedly embraced.)
If you have the Maxim Gun and your political opponents are Zulus armed with spears (or, as in Belloc’s scathingly cynical verse, natives of Liberia, perhaps Mande or Kru), what incentive do you have to permit them a vote, knowing that they may vote to confiscate your property, disestablish Anglicanism, persecute Christians and the Khoi-San (perhaps merely by refusing recognition to their marriages, or perhaps in more severe ways), lay heavy tariffs on your exports, slash the military budget that pays your salary, and purge the universities of professors who oppose their cause? They may not do all of these things, of course, if they are committed to liberalism; but any political faction that accedes to democracy is implicitly acceding to the possibility of being governed by their enemies, who may treat them very badly indeed.
Of course, what the British colonial powers did with this unlimited power throughout Africa was to abuse it thoroughly, even if to a smaller extreme than the Congolese colonies; the African-American colonists of Liberia did the same to the Liberian natives, for that matter. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, so no government is free of corruption, and unassailable governments are enormously corrupt.
Quoting Belloc is of course epistemological malpractice: we cannot deduce anything about what really happened from his intentional fiction. But as Wikipedia says:
The Maxim gun was first used extensively in an African conflict during the First Matabele War in Rhodesia. During the Battle of the Shangani, 700 soldiers fought off 5,000 Matabele warriors with just five Maxim guns. It played an important role in the "Scramble for Africa" in the late 19th century. The extreme lethality was employed to devastating effect against obsolete charging tactics, when African opponents could be lured into pitched battles in open terrain.
Similarly, the open-field battles we know about in the Bronze Age were carried out between chariot-mounted archers, whose horses could easily outrun unarmored massed infantry, dodging their arrows, while the archer picked off the immobile soldiers one by one. Building chariots and maintaining teams of horses involved major expenses beyond what average citizens could muster; consequently they belonged to palaces whose rulers could tax many subjects, and there were no citizens. Iron Age warfare, by contrast, was dominated by mass formations like the phalanx, and maneuvers of infantry like the Greek hoplites, following the “hoplite revolution” around 00700 BCE. This is the era during which (illiberal) democracy flourished in Athens and many other Greek city-states, despite frequent interruptions and setbacks, and (illiberal) republicanism would rule Rome for centuries before the Empire; Livy and Plutarch trace this development to Greek influence. Rousseau argued that it was the “professionalization” of the Roman legions (previously a conscript force) that ended the Republic; he may have been right.
The European Middle Ages were dominated by a knightly class whose power over the serfs was nearly absolute; various “communes” governed by the common people arose from time to time but, except for Switzerland and some Italian republics, were overthrown within a century or three by ambitious kings and knights, notably the Habsburgs. This was possible because the technological basis of warfare at the time enabled a few well-trained warriors with horses and armor to defeat a much larger number of peasants, so democracy, liberal or not, could not withstand contact with warriors — whether external or internal.
Guns, especially smoothbore guns like the arquebus and musket, require much less training to use effectively, enabling large groups of peasants to defeat capital-intensive, highly-trained knights, for example in the Hussite revolt in 01419. In the Early Modern Period, gunpowder thus gave the military advantage to whichever faction was more popular, and Renaissance republicanism took form, with Machiavelli strongly advocating universal conscription. The French National Assembly put Machiavelli’s advice into practice with the levée en masse, allowing Napoleon to defeat the better-trained Prussian army (accustomed to the cabinet wars that started in 01648) by outnumbering them ten to one — and of course the result of this new form of power was bloodthirsty conquest.
This military dynamic was disrupted by the late-19th-century emergence of the crew-served machine-gun, exemplified by the Maxim type mentioned above, then to some extent restored by the emergence of Kalashnikov’s AK-47. Peasant forces armed with AK-47s and similar weapons were able to resist invasions by vastly better equipped armies in some cases in the 20th and early 21st century, notably the US’s defeat in Vietnam, the USSR’s defeat in Afghanistan, and the US’s defeat in Afghanistan in 02021 after 20 years of fighting.
Still, it’s hard to credit that a military élite would be unable to defeat a much larger untrained force in a world full of nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers, near-universal gun control laws (extending even to knives in a few cases, such as the UK since 01953), fighter jets, and pervasive surveillance. Nowadays surveillance enlists cellphone networks, social networking sites, license-plate cameras, RFID toll-road payment schemes, DNA databases, credit cards, and sometimes more extreme measures; to assassinate Osama bin Laden, the US subverted a vaccination program to scan DNA, and in putting down the rebellion in occupied Iraq in 02007, the US used high-resolution telescopes like ARGUS-IS to record all public movement in an area, so as to be able to trace back roadside bombs to the houses of rebels after they exploded.
The US’s moderately successful invasion of Iraq in 01991 demonstrated the effectiveness of precision-guided munitions, which have been pivotal weapons in every war since then; in 02014, Putin gave a speech at Sochi (new location), saying they were as important as nuclear weapons:
Many states do not see any other ways of ensuring their sovereignty but to obtain their own bombs. This is extremely dangerous. We insist on continuing talks; we are not only in favor of talks, but insist on continuing talks to reduce nuclear arsenals. The less nuclear weapons we have in the world, the better. And we are ready for the most serious, concrete discussions on nuclear disarmament – but only serious discussions without any double standards.
What do I mean? Today, many types of high-precision weaponry are already close to mass-destruction weapons in terms of their capabilities, and in the event of full renunciation of nuclear weapons or radical reduction of nuclear potential, nations that are leaders in creating and producing high-precision systems will have a clear military advantage. Strategic parity will be disrupted, and this is likely to bring destabilization. The use of a so-called first global pre-emptive strike may become tempting. In short, the risks do not decrease, but intensify.
Precision-guided munitions can be immensely more efficient than conventional munitions; bombing Dresden into a firestorm took 7100 tonnes of bombs, and the atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima weighed 4.4 tonnes, but it only takes 100 milligrams of explosives, 200 nanograms of botox, 50 nanograms of polonium, or 100 millimeters of knife blade to kill a general or president on the opposing side, or — perhaps more effectively — his son or daughter, if he doesn’t cooperate. There are two tricky parts to this sort of assassination: knowing where the target is, and delivering the weapon to the target. A precision-guided munition solves the second part of the problem, but presently the first part remains the province of centralized spy agencies like the КГБ where Putin grew up.
The wide availability of PGMs, then, which Raskin argued in 02001 was inevitable, would seem to deliver a strong military advantage to whichever group is best at spying on the weak points of its rivals — and concealing their own. The organizations that will be best at this will probably be criminal gangs like Mexico’s Zetas.
There is of course no guarantee that such conditions will permit the continuance of civilization, much less democracy; civilization has collapsed on many occasions in the past (around the Mediterranean in the Bronze Age Collapse, in the Maya collapse, in Egypt under the Christian onslaught in the 5th century, in the collapse of the Anasazi, to a lesser extent the post-USSR age, and so on) and it may do so again. Technological conditions that permit small military élites to militarily defeat much larger popular movements may doom democracy, since it deprives those élites of reasons to accede to electoral defeat; conditions that make attacking easy and defending impossible would seem to doom civilization entirely.
In March we saw ransomware shut down the main oil pipeline on the East Coast of the US, and on December 7 there were major outages of much of the World-Wide Web when the biggest data center of Amazon Web Services went down; many customers were revealed to have no disaster plan. There is no evidence that this incident was due to any kind of hostile action, just that AWS is a central point of vulnerability a malicious actor could attack, possibly commanding a high ransom.