Christmas is, first and foremost, a season of gratitude—for family, for friends, for those closest to us. Yet for some people it has also become a season of gratitude for a political regime: a regime said to be so good that it must be defended at all costs.
To be precise, this is gratitude for a departing regime—the neoliberal order—which must be defended against a new one (currently personified, in Czech politics, by Andrej Babiš), and of course also against the usual external villains: the Chinese emperor, the Russian tsar, and the American president.
What, exactly, are the concrete virtues of this regime?
“We have warmth, light, food, water within reach. There is safety, work, peace for living.” One Facebook user wrote this recently, and the post received hundreds of likes. The author is not wrong. These are important things, and we do indeed have them.
And yet the argument is strangely impoverished.
Karl Marx was demanding precisely these conditions before 1850. They were achieved under Gottwald, and at roughly the same time in Western Europe as well. Later, most of the world achieved them too—including many regimes we are taught to despise. These conditions are not fulfilled for absolutely everyone anywhere—but neither are they fully fulfilled here.
Moreover, we already know that even within this framework conditions can deteriorate. We may have food, but less of it, and of worse quality. (How often, and where, can ordinary people afford meat?) We may have housing, but it becomes ever more expensive, ever less comfortable, and increasingly shared. These developments occur not despite liberal regimes, but within them.
So the question remains: why defend this regime against alternatives capable of providing at least the same basic material guarantees?
A more coherent explanation comes from evolutionary psychologist Kevin Simler, who argues that in the human brain, decision-making is separated from justification. We decide for one set of reasons, and entirely different neural circuits are then mobilized to justify that decision. If we want to understand justifications, we should listen to what people say (or what they themselves believe). If we want to understand real motivations, we should ignore what they say and observe what they do.
What, then, is so attractive about the departing regime? Why do its supporters cling to it so fervently?
Because they themselves are doing significantly better than most of their fellow citizens. Or at least they believe they will soon be doing better. Or, at minimum, they feel superior. Nothing else explains their behavior. Warmth, food, safety, and housing are not the decisive issues for them. If they were, they would be supporting very different political programs.
When a person’s highest priority is the ability to elevate himself above others, it is almost always rooted in dissatisfaction with his own life. This fits neatly with the high prevalence of depression among young liberals. Personal unhappiness and existential dissatisfaction thus culminate in ostentatious loyalty to a mediocre system.
It is an interesting paradox: private misery giving rise to public devotion to a failing order.