The Retreat of Western Liberalism

by Edward Luce

The world now has twenty-five fewer democracies than it did at the turn of the century.

The future of Western democracy looks bleak if American politics hardens into two racially hostile camps. 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.

In Enlightenment terms, our democracies are switching from John Locke’s social contract to the bleaker Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes. We are on a menacing trajectory brought about by ignorance of our history, indifference towards society’s losers and complacency about the strength of our democracy. It has helped turn society into a contest of ethnic grievances, in which ‘awakened whites’ – as the alt-right now call them – are by far the largest minority.

tension between the neat democratic folk theory and the more complex liberal idea. Nowadays they have turned into opposing forces. Here, then, is the crux of the West’s crisis: our societies are split between the will of the people and the rule of the experts – the tyranny of the majority versus the club of self-serving insiders; Britain versus Brussels; West Virginia versus Washington. It follows that the election of Trump, and Britain’s exit from Europe, is a reassertion of the popular will. In the words of one Dutch scholar, Western populism is an ‘illiberal democratic response to undemocratic liberalism’.

But the most troubling finding is how sharply the rich have lost faith in democracy across the West as a whole. In the 1990s, the wealthy backed 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. This survey’s data only goes up to 2014. If it had been taken after Trump and Brexit, the gulf between how rich and poor see democracy would be even wider.

As Keynes told the Bloomsbury circle almost twenty years later, ‘We were not aware that civilization was a thin and precarious crust erected by the personality and the will of a very few, and only maintained by rules and conventions skilfully put across and guilefully preserved.’

Whatever right is in dispute, those who oppose it are invariably told they are on the wrong side of history – another frequent Obamaism. Such language is open to two criticisms. First, it reinvents the past. For example, Obama himself did not support gay marriage until he was nearly four years into his presidency.1 Hillary Clinton waited until 2013. That was not who they were until recently, in other words. Was the truth not self-evident until then? Before the transgender bathroom issue arose, I doubt that either had spared it a moment’s thought. Second, the moral tone almost always boomerangs. People feel patronised. If your opponents are not who we are, where does that leave them? Presumably they are on the wrong side of history, which is not a place anybody wants to be. If politics is persuasion, these are dangerous tactics. There is a thin line between convincing people of the merits of a case and suggesting they are moral outcasts if they fail to see it. Liberal America crossed that line long before Obama took office.

But I have grave doubts about history’s long arc. History is not some self-driving car taking humanity to a pre-set destination. Whichever human is behind the wheel must ensure the others stay in the car. Telling some of the passengers they have no business in the driver’s seat because they are clueless about the destination will sooner or later result in a crash.

If we write off half of society as deplorable we forfeit claims on their attention. We also endanger liberal democracy. It is one thing to persuade ourselves that we know the future. It is another to miss what is happening in front of our eyes. Since the late 1970s, Western governments of right and left have been privatising risk. To one degree or another – most sharply in the US and the UK – societies are creeping back to the days before social insurance. What was once underwritten by government and employers has been shifted to the individual. When people hit the buffers, they knew there were funds to tide them over. Those guarantees have been relentlessly whittled down. The retreat of the state has coincided with a revolution

My own views do not always fit into twentieth-century pigeonholes. But I believe that protecting society’s weakest from arbitrary misfortune is the ultimate test of our civilisational worth. It seems blindingly obvious that universal healthcare ought to be a basic shield against the vicissitudes of an increasingly volatile labour market. Humane immigration laws should be enforced, and the link between public benefits and citizenship restored. Ours is an age of lawyers and accountants. Micro-regulation of the workplace ought to be replaced with broad guidelines; free speech, in whatever form it takes, must be upheld on campuses and in the media; the tax system should be ruthlessly simplified; governments must tax bad things, such as carbon, rather than good things, like jobs; companies should be taxed where they conduct their business. Governments must launch Marshall Plans to retrain their middle classes. The nature of representative democracy should be re-imagined. Above all, money’s stranglehold on the legislative process has to be broken.

Ancient thinkers always thought the rich posed a greater threat to the republic than the poor: they cling on far more tenaciously to what they have. ‘No tyrant ever conquered a city because he was poor and hungry,’ said Aristotle. If nothing else, history offers us a vast early warning system. Let us hope we are capable of paying it some attention. As winter follows autumn, it is not Trump that I fear most – though he is scary enough. It is whoever might follow him.

There is no rule that says populists fizzle out. As president, the means at Trump’s disposal to divert public anger and target his enemies are chilling. At best, history is ambivalent on this question. Trump is no deus ex machina. The conditions that enabled his rise are only likely to deteriorate during his time in office. We should also fear whatever may follow Trump. Imagine how things would look with a competent and sophisticated white nationalist in the White House. In the years ahead, we must be especially alert to Benjamin Franklin’s wise words: ‘The price of liberty is eternal vigilance’. Liberal elites, in particular, will have to resist the temptation to carry on with their comfortable lives and imagine they are doing their part by signing up to the occasional Facebook protest. For Trump, if you are not against him you might as well be with him. Trump’s opponents must also learn to separate the man from the people who vote for him. It would be lethal malpractice to continue writing off half of society as hidebound. Someone once said that the difference between erotica and pornography is the lighting. There is an equally hazy line between illiberal democracy and autocracy. We will know the difference when we see it. NOTES PREFACE 1 Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’, National Interest (summer 1989). 2 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 1941–1991 (Abacus, London, 1995). 3 Dan Jones, Magna Carta: The Birth of Liberty (Viking, New York, 2015), p. 4. 4 I...