Edward Luce > Quotes

“Donald Trump consciously stokes racist sentiment, and has given a rocket boost to the ‘alt-right’ fringe of neo-Nazis and white nationalists. But to write off all those who voted for him as bigoted will only make his job easier. It is also inaccurate. Millions who backed Trump in 2016 had voted for Barack Obama in 2008. Did they suddenly become deplorable? A better explanation is that many kinds of Americans have long felt alienated from an establishment that has routinely sidelined their economic complaints. In 2008 America went for the outsider, an African-American with barely any experience in federal politics. Obama offered hope. In 2016 it went for another outsider with no background in any kind of politics. Trump channelled rage. To be clear: Trump poses a mortal threat to all America’s most precious qualities. But by giving a higher priority to the politics of ethnic identity than people’s common interests, the American left helped to create what it feared. The clash of economic interests is about relative trade-offs. Ethnic politics is a game of absolutes. In 1992, Bill Clinton won the overwhelming majority of non-college whites. By 2016, most of them had defected. Having branded their defection as racially motivated, liberals are signalling that they do not want them back.”
― Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism

“By any numerical measure, humanity is becoming rapidly less poor. But between half and two-thirds of people in the West have been treading water – at best – for a generation. Tens of millions of Westerners will struggle to keep their heads above the surface over the coming decades. The spread of automation, including artificial intelligence and remote intelligence, which some call the fourth industrial revolution, is still in its early stages.”
― Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism

“For those who still believe our age’s disruptions match what happened after 1870, ask yourself which you would first give up, your iPhone or the flush toilet? Laptop or antibiotics? If you have trouble answering those, ponder life without electricity. It is a measure of our solipsism that we take for granted what went before.”
― Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism

“It is not just that people are staying physically put. They are also likelier to stay trapped in the same income group. America, in particular, which had traditionally shown the highest class mobility of any Western country, now has the lowest.”
― Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism

“The emergence of China is the most dramatic event in economic history. We are living in an age of convergence no less dramatic than the age of divergence brought about by European colonialism and the Industrial Revolution. The downward pressure on the incomes of the West’s middle classes in the coming years will be relentless.”
― Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism

“To be clear: the West’s souring mood is about the psychology of dashed expectations rather than the decline in material comforts.”
― Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism

“the Toil Index – the number of working hours it takes a median worker to pay the median rent in one of America’s big cities. In 1950 it took forty-five hours per month. A generation later it had edged up to fifty-six hours. Today it takes 101 hours.”
― Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism

“Democracy’s brand was also damaged by America’s reaction to the Al Qaeda attacks in 2001. George W. Bush’s response to 9/11 dealt a twin blow to Western democracy’s allure. The first came in the form of the Patriot Act, which paved the way for spying on American citizens and gave the green light to multiple dilutions of US constitutional liberties. That imperative was then extended to America’s relations with any country, democratic or not, which pledged to cooperate in the ‘war on terror’. Autocrats such as Putin and Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf went from pariahs to soul brothers almost overnight. When the Bush administration said ‘You are either with us or against us,’ it was referring to the opening of ‘black sites’ where the CIA could waterboard terrorist suspects, and the no-questions-asked exchanges of terrorist lists against which there was little prospect of appeal – a practice known in international law as refoulement. This gave undemocratic regimes an excuse to logroll domestic opponents onto the international lists, with devastating effects on political rights around the world. In the decade after 9/11, the number of Interpol red notices rose eightfold.3 Such practices belied Bush’s democratic agenda. For example, it robbed the US of the moral standing to criticise the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a China-backed body of central Asian autocracies that today operates its own refoulement exchanges of political dissidents in the name of counter-terrorism. The Bush administration’s approach was also geopolitically shortsighted. Just as the West’s support for the Afghan jihad against the Soviets in the 1980s laid the ground for the rise of Islamist terrorism, so America’s Faustian post-9/11 pacts with autocratic regimes helped sow the seeds for the world’s current democratic recession. That is certain to deepen under Trump.”
― Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism

“GDP numbers insist we are doing well, at a time when half the country is suffering from personal recessions.”
― Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism

“Almost half of Americans would be unable to pay a $400 medical emergency bill without going into debt.67”
― Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism

“every single one of America’s 493 wealthiest counties, almost all of them urban, voted for Hillary Clinton.43 The remaining 2623 counties, most of them suburban or small-town, went for Donald Trump.”
― Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism

“The new economy requires consumers with spending power – just as the old one did. Yet much like the farmer who eats his seed corn, Big Data is gobbling up its source of future revenue.”
― Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism

“But when the economic tide went out in 2008, it suddenly became clear how many people had been swimming naked. The left-behinds looked rather more numerous than the cosmopolitans had supposed. The difference was that they no longer had a party to speak for them. It was not just the economy that had left them stranded – the Clintons and the Blairs had moved along too. Having built their political careers on the aspirational vote, the Third Way leaders were unable to find the vocabulary to engage the losers. The new left had long since become fluent in McKinsey-speak – the lingua franca of Davos.”
― Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism

“The meritocratic society has given way to a hereditary meritocracy.”
― Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism

“M + D = C, Monopoly plus Discretion equals Corruption”
― Edward Luce, In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India

“the murder rate has fallen by 16.7 per cent in the US cities since the turn of the century, while rising by 16.9 per cent in the suburbs – almost an exact mirror image.42”
― Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism

“in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Science fiction likes to depict a dystopia in which the robots have taken over. A less fantastical idea is that the robots will indeed take over. But it will be at the behest of a narrow elite of human masters.”
― Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism

“We learn from history that we do not learn from history. FRIEDRICH HEGEL”
― Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism

“Davos has become the emblem of a global elite that has lost its ability to listen.”
― Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism

“Shortly afterwards Addis Ababa launched a crackdown on its opponents that resulted in hundreds of deaths. If America’s president was in two minds about democracy, how was the rest of the world supposed to feel? It was on Obama’s watch that the tally of global democracies fell most sharply. The world now has twenty-five fewer democracies than it did at the turn of the century. In addition to Russia and Venezuela, Turkey, Thailand, Botswana and now Hungary are deemed to have crossed the threshold. According to Freedom House, more countries have restricted than expanded freedom every year since 2008.5 ‘There is not a single country on the African continent where democracy is firmly consolidated and secure,’ says Larry Diamond, one of the leading scholars of democracy.6 What we do not yet know is whether the world’s democratic recession will turn into a global depression.”
― Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism

“For all the emphasis we place on our multicultural cities, they epitomise our oligarchic reality.”
― Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism

“Writing in the 1950s, Daniel Bell, the great American sociologist, said, ‘economic growth has become the secular religion of advancing industrial societies’.”
― Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism

“Cowen detects conformism even in the liveliest Silicon Valley companies. Most of its denizens wear some variation on the casual hipster uniform and all dutifully strip the paint off their office walls. They litter their workplaces with the same multicoloured pouffes. ‘We are using the acceleration of information transmission to decelerate changes in our physical world,’ writes Cowen. ‘Most Americans [today] do not like change very much unless it is something they can manage and control.’26”
― Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism

“Mitt Romney”
― Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism

“Today, the US median income is still below where it was at the beginning of this century.”
― Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism

“Belief in an authoritarian version of national destiny is staging a powerful comeback. Western liberalism is under siege.”
― Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism

“The paranoia of strongmen far outweighs the supposed efficiency of their methods. Trust is the glue of a successful free society; fear is the currency of the autocrat. It is the former that is most desperately needed. By this measure – the most important of all – Trump is an unabashed autocrat. The more resistance he encounters, the more he will sow mistrust. Technology is Trump’s friend. Science is his enemy.”
― Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism

“The left urges incremental steps such as better worker training, smarter schools and infrastructure. These are worthy causes. But they are a bit like prescribing aspirin for cancer. Before her ill-fated run for the presidency, Hillary Clinton was asked about rising structural unemployment: ‘I don’t have a quick glib answer for you. There are no easy fixes.’ Even the non-populist right has thrown up its hands. In its study of the future of work, the laissez-faire Baker Institute admitted it had been ‘unable to find any solutions based on the free market’. Karl Marx predicted that capitalism would push the workers of the world to unite. He got it back to front. It is the elites who are loosening their allegiances and workers who are reaching for national flags.”
― Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism

“The West’s global cities are like tropical islands surrounded by oceans of resentment.”
― Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism

“History tells us that inequality soars when societies develop.”
― Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism