The Retreat of Western Liberalism

by Edward Luce

Since 1970, Asia’s per-capita incomes have increased fivefold.4 Even in Africa, the world’s worst-performing continent, incomes have almost doubled. The West’s median income, meanwhile, has barely shifted in the last half-century. In some parts of Asia, such as Singapore and South Korea, incomes have either overtaken or are level-pegging with the West. In others, notably India, they still languish at less than a tenth of the Western average. But the direction is clear. If you chart a global economic map, the centre of gravity in the twentieth century could be found somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, according to the Singaporean economist Danny Quah. That point has now shifted eastwards to Iran.5 Over the coming decades it will settle at a point somewhere between China and India, in the Himalayas. From the middle of the Atlantic to the roof of the world in fifty years – our generation is present at the re-creation.

Among other techniques and inventions, Europe took far-superior iron and steel production; the printing press; navigational tools, including the compass; gunpowder; and paper money from China. From Islam, Europe took binary mathematics (originally from India), astronomy, double-entry bookkeeping and much of its own forgotten knowledge from classical Greece and Rome. ‘[Much] of the European revival was based on the ideas, institutions, and technologies borrowed from the advanced civilizations in the Middle and Far East,’ notes Richard Baldwin, whose book on today’s Great Convergence is rightly acclaimed.9 The shift of power from the Islamic world to the Christian in the late Middle Ages had, in turn, been enabled by the destructive westward sweep of Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes in the thirteenth century.

Between 1870 and 1970 – the century of the West’s greatest productivity growth – incomes grew far faster than ever experienced. They also exceeded anything we in the West have seen since. With the exception of the 1990s, when the digital revolution hit our desktops, productivity growth has slowed sharply in the past half-century. In America it dropped from an average of 2.7 per cent a year in the 1950s and 1960s to below 1 per cent in the last decade. As a result, income growth has also slowed. The median US household income in 2014 was $50,600. If we had maintained pre-1970 productivity growth, it would have been $97,300.63 We are already well into a slowdown that, in Gordon’s view, is likely to slow further.

The first wave of modern democratisation happened in 1974, when Portugal’s Carnation Revolution toppled Salazar’s fascist regime in Lisbon.1 It was followed swiftly by the overthrow of the military junta in Greece. More or less the same happened in Spain the following year, after the death of General Franco. These closed the accounts on fascism’s defeat a generation earlier. It was not until the fall of the Berlin Wall that the floodgates really opened. By the turn of the millennium there were more than a hundred democracies worldwide.

Things started to go wrong after 2000. The first great blow was in Russia, where Vladimir Putin replaced Boris Yeltsin as president and set about closing down the system of free and fair elections while retaining its trappings. The West is good at screening out local detail when it is inconvenient, particularly in regard to Russia.

‘Moscow can feel like an oligarchy in the morning and a democracy in the afternoon, a monarchy for dinner and a totalitarian state by bedtime,

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.

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.

unintended consequences. The bigger one came in March 2003 with the US-led invasion of Iraq. It is hard to overstate the damage the Iraq War did to America’s global soft power – and to the credibility of the West’s democratic mission.

National Endowment for Democracy,

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.

‘By demonstrating that advanced modernization can be combined with authoritarian rule, the Chinese regime has given hope to authoritarian rulers everywhere,’ says Andrew Nathan, a leading Sinologist.7

the oxymoronic Gongos (government-organised non-governmental organisations). Gongos are another Chinese speciality. As I say, success breeds imitation.

In the British general election of 1964, the working classes outnumbered voters with professional qualifications by two to one. By 1997, when Tony Blair’s Labour swept to power, they were level-pegging. Union membership had halved. Only one in twelve of those born before 1931 had a degree, compared with two out of three for those born since 1975.17

Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia University, called for an end to ‘identity liberalism’. The American left had ‘slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message,’ he wrote.27 Moreover, if the Democratic standard-bearer insisted on namechecking different groups at her rallies she had better mention everybody,

Fascism is based on group rights. Liberal democracy is founded on individual rights.

The period since then has coincided with the most dramatic expansion of the European Union. Not only did Europe’s club almost double from fifteen to twenty-eight members (soon to be twenty-seven, after the completion of Brexit), but the powers concentrated in Brussels grew dramatically. Whatever else you can say about the EU, it is not a democracy. ‘European integration, it needs to be emphasized, was part and parcel of this comprehensive attempt to constrain the popular will,’ says Harvard’s Jan-Werner Müller.49

comitology.

The term illiberal democracy was devised by Fareed Zakaria more than a decade ago. The public’s idea of democracy is that it is a simple process in which people elect their representatives to carry out their instructions. Scholars call this the ‘folk theory of democracy

The sophisticated view of democracy is that it can only work if it is checked by a system of individual rights, independence of the judiciary, the separation of powers and other balances.

In the words of one Dutch scholar, Western populism is an ‘illiberal democratic response to undemocratic liberalism’.

Many millennials do think there are viable alternatives, including military government. One in six people of all ages in America and Europe now believe it would be a good or a very good thing for the ‘army to rule’. That has risen from one in sixteen in the mid-1990s – a near trebling. Similar

democracy more strongly than any other income group in America and Europe. That has turned upside down. The poor are now democracy’s strongest fans, the rich its biggest sceptics.

In 1995, just 5 per cent of wealthy Americans believed army rule would be a good thing. By 2014 that had more than tripled. An even higher share of upper-income millennials support autocracy. People tend to form political beliefs in their early years and then stick with them for life. If today’s rich young are tomorrow’s thought leaders, democracy has a shaky future.

De Tocqueville’s most acute insights on America were about its ‘democracy of manners’. The aristocratic Frenchman, whose travels coincided with Andrew Jackson’s presidency, did not fear a totalitarian future but a more insidious one that would emerge from the breast of our democratic temper. ‘The nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal,’ de Tocqueville wrote, ‘but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or wretchedness.’

Orwell envisioned a future in which an all-seeing dictatorship would stamp out free thinking and outlaw human intimacy. But the internet has given us something far closer to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World than Nineteen Eighty-Four. Sales of both books shot up the charts after Trump was elected

Putin, who is the only world leader Trump admires, has applied these lessons well in today’s Russia. The media is relatively free. Unlike in China, where the Great Firewall blocks a lot of Western media, most Russians have access to most global news sources. Sometimes a journalist is bumped off. Others are intimidated. More often, they are co-opted by the Russian state. Putin may have grasped something that has eluded the net evangelists, who had a strong influence in Mrs Clinton’s State Department. The utopians believe the Revolution will be Twittered.62 Putinists believe they are far too happy digesting Western entertainment to bother. Far from reading dissident blogs, Russians are just as enamoured of kittens and listicles. Such sites are where the bulk of our traffic goes. There is no reason to think Westerners are inherently savvier than their Russian counterparts. ‘[The] new Kremlin won’t make the same mistake the old Soviet Union did: it will never let TV become dull,’ writes Peter Pomerantsev. ‘Most [Russians] are happy with the trade-off: complete freedom for complete silence.’63

Finally, there is the judiciary, America’s third branch of government. There is nothing to stop a US president from ignoring the courts. Pretending otherwise has been a civic duty of almost every US president, barring Nixon. Andrew Jackson was also an exception. When John Marshall, the great US Chief Justice, issued a stay on Jackson’s plans to uproot the Cherokee Indians, Jackson said, ‘Now let him enforce it.’ The courts never did. It is the president, not the judiciary, who controls the firepower. Presidential constraint is the most essential ingredient of the proper functioning of the American system. Here, too, character is the ultimate key. Readers who have made it this far need no disquisition on the content of Mr Trump’s character. Yet I cannot resist re-telling one of Trump’s favourite anecdotes.

Later, when I asked the mayor how he had got crime down so low, he said that local criminals had a taste for flying. One solution was to take them up in a helicopter and simply help them on their way. ‘They never fly again,’ he chuckled. I still get shivers when I think of how much laughter that provoked. The mayor’s name was Rodrigo Duterte. He is now president of the Philippines.

If you want a case study in illiberal democracy, Duterte’s Philippines would be a good place to start. More than seven thousand Filipino ‘drug addicts’ have lost their lives in the nine months since he was elected. Some human rights groups estimate the

Plato believed that democracy was the rule of the mob – literally demos (mob) and kratos (rule). In his view, the mob could not distinguish between knowledge and opinion. Aristotle’s answer was to combine the rule of the knowledgeable with the consent of the many.

Of the West’s leaders, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has taken matters the furthest. It no longer makes sense to talk of Hungary as a bona fide democracy. Having rewritten the country’s constitution to suit his party, and rushed it through on a low-turnout referendum, Hungary’s opposition faces an impossibly tilted playing field. The chances that Orbán’s opponents could win an election under these conditions are slim to vanishing. Orbán now boasts that Hungary is an ‘illiberal democracy’.

A true populist is not just opposed to the elites, he is also an enemy of pluralism. Without a plural society democracy loses

Since 1979, America – and most of the rest of the world – has accepted the ‘One China’ policy that entailed exclusive recognition of China. But the rest of us were slow to pick up on its implications. This was Trump messing with his Twitter account, we reassured ourselves. The system will guide him to a safer place once he takes office.

The barriers to nuclear entry keep falling. Countries that are considered capable of carrying out a rapid nuclear breakout include Japan, Egypt, Australia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran. Moreover, the two big nuclear weapons states, Russia and America, are no longer so intimate with each other’s nuclear protocols. The trust has gone. Under Putin, Russia is far less of a responsible nuclear custodian than it was during the post-Cuba decades. Meanwhile, China and India are both in the midst of their own undeclared arms race: China’s nuclear deterrent is mostly targeted at the US; India’s is mostly aimed at countering Pakistan.

Barack Obama tried his best. I was in Prague with Obama in 2009 when he made his famous speech calling for a world of zero nuclear weapons.17 It was a laudable goal, though he did not get very far. But he bravely declared it to be urgent and made an effort to launch a global dialogue.

Donald Trump has expressed no interest in the subject. Before taking office, his knowledge of nuclear weapons was worse than rudimentary. During one of the presidential debates, Trump made it clear that he had no idea what the nuclear triad meant (launch capabilities from air, land and sea). He is also the first US president to have openly speculated about using them. ‘Somebody hits us within Isis – you wouldn’t fight back with a nuke?’ he said in one campaign interview.18 While Trump is president, global proliferation is almost certain to get worse. Indeed, he has expressly called for a new nuclear arms race. ‘[If] countries are going to have nukes, we are going to be top of the pack,’ he said shortly after becoming president.19

The US Cyber Command believes the next global war will start in cyberspace.