Revival for the West depends on dealing with the internal weaknesses, policy mistakes and self-entrapping habits of democracy that have made life so difficult over the past decade. Such a revival always requires leadership, as it did in the UK of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, or the more consensual revivals of Sweden in the 1990s under Carl Bildt, or Canada in the 1990s and 2000s under Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin. But the leadership that has succeeded in such cases has been a leadership that opens doors rather than closes them, that removes obstacles so as to release energies and new
...more
