“American exceptionalism” is a sturdy if contested trope. But large changes in American politics since the end of World War II have been anything but exceptional. Rather, the United States has moved in tandem with other Western democracies.
In the three decades following the war, democracies on both sides of the Atlantic built systems of social provision and protection, which Europeans call social democracy and Americans the welfare state. A broad consensus across party lines supported this policy. In the United States, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower ended his party’s effort to roll back the New Deal, and Republican President Richard Nixon expanded the federal government’s activities in virtually every domain of social policy. As inflation surged, Nixon outraged devotees of the free market by imposing wage and price controls.
Starting in the mid-1970s, the expansion of the welfare state slowed amid rising concerns about its impact on public finances and private-sector growth. “The Crisis of Democracy,” a much-discussed Trilateral Commission report published in 1975, went on at length about democratic “overload”—public demands exceeding the government’s capacity to finance and administer them.1
The intellectual and political forces opposed to the welfare state helped bring about the second political convergence of the postwar era—conservative retrenchment—led by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Retrenchment was not reversal. Reagan did not seriously challenge core social insurance programs such as Social Security and Medicare, and Thatcher left the United Kingdom’s iconic National Health Service largely intact. But they did raise doubts about government’s competence, and they reinvigorated market mechanisms as models for the public as well as the private sector. The reoriented Republican Party in the United States and the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom each won three consecutive national elections.
Across the Channel, Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl became the chancellor of West Germany in 1982, after thirteen years of Social Democratic dominance, and proceeded to cut public expenditures, reduce regulations, and privatize public holdings. Even France’s François Mitterrand, who came to power in 1981 on a bold program of expanding socialism, was forced to execute a U-turn toward austerity after less than two years in office. During his presidency, moreover, he twice had to cohabit with conservative prime ministers whose parties prevailed in parliamentary elections.
Confronted with resurgent conservatism, reform-minded leaders worked to renovate left-leaning parties. This brought the next convergence of Western politics, the Third Way. Bill Clinton led the charge, becoming president in 1993 as leader of the New Democrat movement within the Democratic Party. Inspired by Clinton’s example, a New Labour team clustered around Tony Blair and Gordon Brown revived the British Labour Party, replacing its hard-edged socialism and pacifism with an internationalist and market-friendly agenda. The remodeled Labour Party swept the Conservatives from power in 1997 and went on to win national elections in 2001 and again in 2005. In 1998, Gerhard Schröder, the leader of the Social Democratic Party, became Germany’s chancellor and worked successfully to modernize social welfare policies, reduce taxes, and reform his country’s labor market, helping to lay the foundation for a German economic revival after years of slow growth.
For some years, international Third Way forces had the wind in their sails. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the Soviet Union signaled not only the end of the twentieth century’s last remaining ideological challenge to liberal democracy but also the more rapid integration of the global economy. At first, Western countries were well positioned to take advantage of this emerging reality, and the “Washington consensus”—which included fiscal discipline, pro-growth public investment, liberalization of trade and investment, and deregulation—became canonical for developed as well as developing countries.
The Great Recession ended this era. Across the West, governments struggled to stave off financial collapse, halt the downward slide of output and employment, and restart economic growth. Advocates of austerity battled with supporters of stimulus. Even when growth resumed—earlier in the United States than elsewhere, earlier in northern than southern Europe—it was too slow and uneven to meet public expectations.
This brings us to the present, to the fourth—and most troubling—convergence of postwar democratic politics. From Mitteleuropa to England’s Midlands to the American Midwest, a revolt has developed against the arrangements that have shaped the democratic West since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. A populist surge threatens the assumptions and achievements of mainstream politicians and policymakers from the center-left to the center-right. Economic policies based on free trade and flexible labor markets came under attack. Cultural norms celebrating diversity and promoting immigration lost traction. International agreements and institutions yielded ground to nationalist forces.
Although the Great Recession helped set the stage, these discontents were exacerbated by surges of migration across Europe in response to civil war in Syria and drought in Africa. The failure of past reforms to stem the tide of illegal immigration had similar consequences in the United States.
But larger forces are at work. Technological change has triggered new modes of production and a shift toward more knowledge-intensive economies, weakening mass manufacturing throughout the West. These forces have also catalyzed the rise of an education-based meritocracy that dominates government, the bureaucracy, the media, and major metropolitan areas. The emergence of this new elite has left less educated citizens in outlying towns and rural areas feeling denigrated and devalued, sowing populist resentment. As David Goodhart vividly puts it, these economic and social developments have divided democratic citizenries into “Anywheres”—individuals whose identities are professional and who can use their skills in many places, at home and abroad—and “Somewheres”—individuals whose identities are tightly bound to particular places where their forebears have lived for generations.2
These trends are deepening social divisions: between more and less educated citizens; between those who benefit from technological change and those who are threatened by it; between the cities and the countryside; between long-established groups and newer entrants into the civic community; between those who celebrate dynamism and diversity and those who prize stability and homogeneity. Elites’ preference for open societies is running up against public demands for economic, cultural, and political closure.
But the challenge goes even deeper. Some parties on the left and the right are calling into question the norms and institutions of liberal democracy itself, especially freedom of the press, the rule of law, and the rights of minorities. Throughout the West there is rising impatience with governments that seem incapable of acting forcefully to deal with mounting problems. Rising insecurity has triggered a demand for strong leaders, risking a return to forms of authoritarianism that many thought had been left behind for good.
To be sure, there are signs that liberal democracy’s capacity for self-correction is beginning to stir. In France, Marine Le Pen lost the presidential contest by a margin of two to one to a dynamic young centrist politician whose new En Marche! party then won an absolute parliamentary majority. In the United Kingdom, Theresa May’s snap election blew up in her face, forcing her to soften her stance on Brexit and compromise with the 48 percent of British voters who wanted to remain within the European Union. In the United States, the system of separated powers has curbed the newly elected populist president’s most serious challenges to the constitutional order. A heightened sense of the need for change has spread throughout the West’s established democracies.
None of this means that liberal democracy is out of the woods. Its defenders have been given a reprieve, not a pardon. It remains to be seen whether they will prove equal to the occasion. And the clock is ticking. Marine Le Pen’s father, the first National Front candidate to reach the final round of a French presidential election, received only 17 percent of the vote. In 2017, Mme. Le Pen doubled his share. If Emmanuel Macron fails to revitalize France’s economy and narrow the breach between its thriving metropolitan areas and declining manufacturing regions, the National Front could be France’s future. In several of Europe’s postcommunist countries, elected governments are weakening liberal institutions. And there is no way to know how U.S. voters will react if Donald Trump cannot honor his campaign promises to reopen coal mines and steel mills, revitalize the manufacturing sector, and reverse the declining fortunes of the Rust Belt and small-town America.
Empirical evidence reveals clear signs of democratic erosion during the past decade. Between 1974 and 2006, electoral democracies rose from 29 percent to 61 percent of governments around the world, and liberal democracies from 21 percent to 41 percent. Then the democratic surge ended, and the tide has ebbed ever since. The year 2016 was the eleventh straight year in which countries suffering net declines in political and civil liberties outnumbered the gainers. In nearly all these years, the losses substantially exceeded the gains.3
More broadly, this period has seen a decline in the quality of democracy, as measured by political rights, civil liberties, transparency, and the rule of law. Between 1986 and 2006, the share of countries with political and civil freedoms rose from 34 percent to 47 percent, and the share without them fell from 32 percent to 23 percent. Between 2006 and 2016, the share of free countries fell from 47 percent to 45 percent, while the share without freedoms rose from 23 percent to 25 percent. And there has been an alarming shift in the locus of decline. As the annual report “Freedom in the World 2017” puts it, “While in past years the declines in freedom were generally concentrated among autocracies and dictators that simply went from bad to worse, in 2016 it was established democracies . . . that dominated the list of countries suffering setbacks.”4 There were signs of decline in Hungary, Poland, and even France. Many observers have begun to worry about the strength of democratic institutions even in the United States. There is broad agreement that the energy, efficacy, and self-confidence of the world’s democracies and the forces supporting democratic expansion have waned.
Democracy faces a renewed external challenge—the authoritarian surge. This phenomenon may have begun as a defensive response to the wave of “color revolutions” that began in Georgia in 2003 and spread to Ukraine, Belarus, and elsewhere before reaching Iran in the Green Revolution of 2009. But it was not long before Russia, China, and Iran went on the offensive, bringing new states into their spheres of influence. Cooperation among these and other authoritarian governments has increased. Countries with deep pockets, especially China and the Gulf States, used their financial reserves to diminish pro-democratic threats and strengthen friendly nondemocratic regimes. Many autocrats have attacked civil society institutions, especially those with substantial funding from abroad. Russia has aggressively used cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns to weaken established democracies and even influence their elections.
Although the authoritarian surge has put pressure on democratic countries and movements, internal challenges are likely to prove more consequential. These challenges begin as opposition to decades-old policies of liberal democracies such as free trade, international institutions, and relative openness to immigrants and refugees. In countries where traditional values remain strong, segments of the population oppose liberal social policies (especially concerning gender relations and same-sex marriage) and movement toward what they regard as secularism. Often this opposition takes the form of antipathy to political, economic, and cultural elites.
Patrick Chamorel’s study of Marine Le Pen’s National Front (FN) vividly portrays this ensemble of developments: “A majority of FN supporters reject the right/left dichotomy and what they see as an altogether corrupt political class that goes with it. They believe that France is in deep decline, has too many immigrants, and needs a strong leader to restore order. For many of them, the world is changing too fast and in the wrong direction, and they perceive a need for the state to protect them. The party’s inclination is to bring back an idealized past more than to invent a radically new social order. It nurtures a traditionalist and Catholic proclivity and yet is split on gay marriage. . . . In foreign policy, it is not unlike the former ‘paleo-conservatives’ of Pat Buchanan in the United States, with an isolationist, protectionist, anti-immigration, and traditionalist message.”5
None of this necessarily threatens liberal democracy. “Strong” leaders—Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle—have often been fully compatible with representative institutions and respect for individual rights. In dark times, they can be essential for the preservation of liberal democracy. But sometimes the yearning for strong leadership gives rise to antidemocratic sentiments. “Like so many European extremist parties,” Chamorel observes, “the Front National has expressed its admiration for Vladimir Putin’s nationalist and traditionalist values, his cult of order and authoritarian leadership.”6
These developments are taking place against a backdrop of mounting threats to the postwar liberal democratic order. Since the end of World War II, a bargain between political leaders and citizens has defined this order’s perimeter. Working through bureaucracies, popularly elected governments would deliver economic growth and rising living standards; social protections for health, employment, and retirement; domestic tranquillity; and the abatement of international threats. In return, the people would defer to political elites.
For half a century after the war, the bargain held, and public support for both liberal democracy and its leaders remained high. But as governments have failed to deliver their end of the bargain, public confidence has waned. While for some people liberal democracy may be an intrinsic good, an end in itself, for most it is a means to prosperous, peaceful, and secure lives. It is a tree known by its fruit. If it ceases to produce the expected crop, it can be cut down.
The decades of sustained and inclusive economic growth after World War II have given way to slower growth, much higher unemployment, and stagnant wages. Throughout the West, democratic governments failed to address the fallout from the Great Recession, and public discontent swelled accordingly. The United States, where the recession began at the end of 2007, did better than most. Nevertheless, its economic recovery was the weakest in decades, averaging just 2 percent GDP growth per year, and household incomes are no higher than they were at the end of the 1990s. Although growth has finally resumed in the European Union, its pace is muted, and unemployment, though declining, remains elevated by historical standards.
Growth, such as it is, has been unbalanced. Some sectors have boomed while others have languished. Global competition has hit mining and manufacturing especially hard, with predictable effects on the regions heavily dependent on these industries. Throughout the West, working-class citizens are in full revolt against these developments. Few governments have found effective remedies for the downsides of globalization and technological change, and political leaders’ reluctance even to acknowledge them has added insult to injury.
Equally pervasive is the growing gap between metropolitan areas on the one hand and smaller communities and rural areas on the other. Most cities are thriving; most smaller towns are not. At one time, the fortunes of large cities and their hinterlands were linked; now cities are like black holes, absorbing skilled labor and resources while emitting neither wealth nor opportunity to surrounding areas.
The challenges to liberal democracy go well beyond economics. Waves of immigration have aroused fears that national identities will be irreversibly altered. As demography shifts, “old stock” citizens fear a loss of status and cultural centrality. The perception that immigrants are winning the battle for scarce social resources has made matters worse. Antipathy to minorities, domestic and foreign-born, has intensified.
There are fears, moreover, of attacks by immigrants and refugees harboring terrorist sentiments. The consequence is a demand for unattainable levels of security. Governments face the delicate task of protecting their citizens without abandoning liberal commitments to the rule of law. Balancing the interests of citizens against the claims of migrants facing economic hardship and political persecution is equally challenging, and many governments have failed this test.
The cultural cleavage between cities and the countryside is as old as human history, but recent events have exacerbated it. Urban dwellers tend to prize heterogeneity and dynamism, while people in small towns and rural areas prefer homogeneity and stability. Cities lean toward social liberalism, nonurban areas toward tradition. Religion, especially conservative religion, tends to be stronger in the countryside. City folk often regard the residents of rural communities and small towns as country bumpkins, uneducated and unsophisticated, generating a backlash against elites who are seen as lacking respect for their fellow citizens.
Broader political trends have contributed to democratic erosion. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the range of political debate in the West narrowed. As economic globalization and international institutions became the lingua franca of political discourse, center-left and center-right parties converged. In several countries they came together in “grand coalitions.”
This consensus politics proved workable as long as favorable economic and security conditions prevailed. But when the tide started turning in 2008, established parties and institutions found it difficult to respond to rising public discontent. Gridlock preserved a status quo that more and more citizens found unacceptable. They grew impatient with political arrangements that seemed incapable of responding boldly, and their frustration found outlets in new, often marginal political parties whose leaders promised more effective institutional arrangements, even at some cost to democracy.
The unpopular, ineffective response of international institutions to economic and refugee crises contributed to a resurgence of nationalism in many parts of the West. The United Kingdom’s stunning decision to leave the European Union was a sign of this, as was Donald Trump’s “America First” foreign policy. In Central and Eastern Europe, long-muted nationalist sentiments resurfaced.
Although nationalism has often led to antidemocratic changes, these developments do not necessarily represent an erosion of democracy. The vote for Brexit, for example, was a peaceful exercise of democratic decision-making. Many British citizens said they voted to leave the European Union in order to regain democratic self-government, which they thought had been surrendered to unelected bureaucrats in Brussels. The rising nationalist tide in Poland and Hungary, on the other hand, does pose a threat to liberal democracy. The American presidential election is hard to assess, and its effects on American institutions are harder to predict.
Looking back, it is difficult to avoid concluding that democratic elites were complacent. Scholars thought that once countries had reached a certain level of economic development and had made the transition to democracy, they would never turn back. After the epochal events of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Francis Fukuyama discerned the “end of history”—the disappearance of serious alternatives to liberal democracy. Systems that combined representative institutions with protections for individual and minority rights were the only game in town, or so it seemed.
The economic and governance failures of Russia’s new democracy represented the first blow to this optimistic narrative. China’s remarkable economic surge showed that market mechanisms were not necessarily incompatible with authoritarian politics. The erosion of the manufacturing sector throughout much of the West accelerated working-class disaffection, and the painfully slow recovery from the financial crisis and ensuing Great Recession created an opening for new political voices, many of which evinced little sympathy for liberal democracy.
When democratization was on the march, the liberal world order was strong and self-confident. The message to countries emerging from economic stagnation and political repression was clear: join the winners, because we can give you moral and material support during your difficult transition to open economies and democratic self-government. As authoritarian governments went on the offensive and democratic self-confidence waned, this message lost some credibility. If the world’s most powerful democracy continues to challenge such institutions as NATO, the European Union, and the World Trade Organization, this trend may well intensify.
The spread of democracy in successive waves after the end of World War II took place under an international canopy of incentives and protections. If liberal democracies are to regain their élan, democratic leaders must find ways to re-create the international environment that allowed self-government to flourish.