The Retreat of Western Liberalism

by Edward Luce

The British East India Company, for example, suppressed Indian textile production, which had led the world. Indian silks were displaced by Lancashire cotton. Chinese porcelain was supplanted by European ‘china’. Both suffered from variations on what Britain later called Imperial Preference, which forced them to export low-value raw materials to Britain, and import expensive finished products, thus keeping them in permanent deficit. There was nothing free about such trade in any sense of the word.

Hobson captured it starkly: ‘[The] investors and business managers of the West appear to have struck in China a mine of labour power . . . it seems so enormous and so expansible as to open up the possibility of raising whole white populations of the West to the position of “independent gentlemen”’.

– the 1426 richest individuals on the planet – are worth $5.4 trillion, which is roughly twice the size of the entire British economy and more than the combined assets of the 250 million least wealthy Americans.

Writing in the 1950s, Daniel Bell, the great American sociologist, said, ‘economic growth has become the secular religion of advancing industrial societies’.

There is now a higher share of French males in full-time jobs than Americans – a statistic that reflects poorly on America, rather than well on France.19 America’s opioid epidemic is another warning light. Émile Durkheim, the father of modern sociology, said that when societies hit a civilisational break the suicide rate soars.

a land of opportunity. Imagine that between a half and two-thirds of its people, depending on how the question is framed, disagree. They believe the system’s divisions are self-perpetuating. They used not to think that way. Imagine, also, that the meritocrats are too enamoured of their just rewards to see it. Sooner or later something will give.

how much lip service its more fortunate denizens pay to a progressive worldview. We really couldn’t ask for a nicer elite. Yet the effects of how they spend their money are hardly progressive. For all the emphasis we place on our multicultural cities, they epitomise our oligarchic reality. In the US, the more liberal a city’s politics, the higher the rate of inequality.45 The most glaring examples, such as San Francisco and New York, are demonised by conservatives as citadels of far-left politics.

In 2006, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. It had sixty-five employees, so the price amounted to $25 million per employee. In 2012 Facebook bought Instagram, which had thirteen employees, for $1 billion. That came to $77 million per employee. In 2014, it bought WhatsApp, with fifty-five employees, for $19 billion, at a staggering $345 million per employee.54

The US economy produces more than a third more today than it did in 1998 with the same-sized labour force and a significantly larger population. It still makes sense for people to obtain degrees. Graduates earn more than those who have completed only high school. But their returns are falling. The median pay for US entry-level graduates fell from $52,000 in 2000 to $46,000 in 2014.55

Gordon points out that for most of history, growth was absent. Between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages there was basically none. England’s per-capita income doubled between 1300 and 1700, a rate so slow as to be imperceptible.59 Life for most people was unimaginably stunted. Only in the nineteenth century did that change.

Between a fifth and a third of the Western labour force is already engaged in independent work, the McKinsey Global Institute estimates, which it defines as ‘short-term, piece rate and autonomous’. Society’s move towards self-employment is still in its infancy yet it already totals 162 million people.64 These are either fully self-employed, or supplementing full-time jobs with part-time work. A growing share of such work is done online, or found online.

Almost half of Americans would be unable to pay a $400 medical emergency bill without going into debt.

‘It’s not a result of some evil scheme,’ writes Lanier, ‘but a side effect of an idiotic elevation of the fantasy that technology is getting smart and standing on its own without people.’

By 2016, he was warning that the public’s tolerance for expert solutions ‘appears to have been exhausted’. He advised a new ‘responsible nationalism’, which would ‘begin from the idea that the basic responsibility of government is to maximize the welfare of its citizens, not to pursue some abstract concept of the global good’.

We cannot simultaneously pursue democracy, national determination and economic globalisation. They are incompatible. One of them has to go. Under the old General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which ended in 1995, any nation was free to veto any deal. Nowadays democracies routinely suffer reversals in the WTO’s appellate court. For example, the European Union’s objections to importing genetically modified foods and hormone-infused beef were overruled by the WTO even though it conceded the science was unsettled.

America had just experienced its own colour revolution. From Georgia’s Rose Revolution in 2003 to Ukraine’s Orange Revolution the following year, and Moldova’s Grape version in 2009, we had cheered the fall of pro-Moscow regimes along Russia’s borders. Trump’s victory revealed that two could play that game.

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. Operation Enduring Freedom, which began after 9/11, was followed by Operation Iraqi Freedom. Both were rashly named. It is one thing to go to war in the name of liberty; quite another to be clueless about it. Even without the doublespeak of the ‘war on terror’, it is highly questionable whether democracy can be installed from the barrel of a gun.

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

Yet we have always known there is no such thing as the people. It is a useful fiction. Perhaps the curtain has now been pulled too far back for us to keep up the pretence. In another flight of wit, Brecht once said: ‘All power comes from the people. But where does it go?’

The curse of conformity is not peculiar to America’s educated liberal class. In one way or another, the technocratic mindset has gripped political elites across the Western world. The late political scientist Peter Mair called it ‘ruling the void’.14 The more the established parties detached themselves from the societies in which they had once been anchored, the greater the indifference they generated. It is no accident that the heyday of stable Western party politics coincided with the post-war golden decades of the rising middle and working classes. Political parties were embedded in the churches, veterans’ clubs and trade union halls of ordinary life. The Dutch called this ‘pillarization’.

Pretty soon, the big parties began to look and sound alike. As Jan-Werner Müller put it, ‘The third way turned elections into a mere choice between Coke and Pepsi.’

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 responses hold when people are asked if they would support a ‘strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with parliament and elections’.

As we cross the frontier to swarm drones and robot soldiers, the rich will have less need of large-scale civilian armies – a key reason they expanded the franchise 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.54

The same utopian leaps of faith recur with each new technological breakthrough. In the 1850s, the telegraph was proclaimed as the great unifier of humanity. ‘It is impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should any longer exist,’ said an editorial in the New Englander.59 Henry David Thoreau had a more realistic grasp of its potential: ‘We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas,’ he wrote, ‘but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.’

Putin is a better student of Huxley than Orwell. When he was a KGB agent based in Dresden in the 1980s, most of its population could pick up television from the West on their transmitters. These were the most politically quiescent parts of East Germany. Far from being glued to the West German news, they were hooked on Dallas, Baywatch and Dynasty. As Evgeny Morozov pointed out in The Net Delusion, there was one part of the east that could not receive West German TV. It was known as the Valley of the Clueless. Yet it was also the most politicised part of the country. People from here applied in far higher numbers for exit visas than their supposedly better-informed neighbours. Sometimes the illusion of freedom is all people need.

The utopians believe the Revolution will be Twittered.

The counter-revolution can also be tweeted.

Even Trump’s vastly better-informed predecessors found it hard to see the world from China’s point of view. It is a difficult habit to shake. The West in general has imposed its preoccupations on China for more than two hundred years. From Hegel to John Stuart Mill, our greatest philosophers unanimously wrote off China as a lost cause to modernity. Each of them had different reasons. Hegel and then Marx dismissed China as an oriental despotism. Mill saw it as a flawed civilisation. Social Darwinians classified the Chinese as belonging to the lower races. Max Weber said Confucian culture would forestall the rise of capitalism since it had no conception of life after death.

There is a ‘deeply held unconscious assumption that the West remains, in one way or another, a morally superior civilization,’ writes Kishore Mahbubani, one of Singapore’s foremost foreign policy thinkers.

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.