In just twenty-five years, the partisans of liberal democracy have moved from triumphalism to near despair. Neither sentiment is warranted. History is not a linear movement toward a liberal democratic world. Liberal democracy is not the end of history; nothing is. Everything human beings make is subject to erosion and contingency. Liberal democracy is fragile, constantly threatened, always in need of repair.
But liberal democracy is also strong, because, to a greater extent than any other political form, it harbors the power of self-correction. Not only do liberal democratic institutions protect citizens against tyrannical concentrations of power, they also provide mechanisms for transforming the public’s grievances and unmet needs into effective reforms. These mechanisms do not run on their own; they need determined leaders with clear ideas. Fortunately, they permit such leaders to gain power: witness the astonishing victory of French president Emmanuel Macron, who upended an ossified system and heads a parliamentary majority party that did not even exist two years ago.
To be sure, the power of self-correction is not always enough to prevent liberal democracies from crumbling. As we learned in the 1920s and 1930s, the combination of public stress and strong undemocratic movements can be irresistible. But the oft-heard analogy between those decades and our current situation obscures more than it reveals. Today’s economic ills pale in comparison to the Great Depression of the 1930s, and today’s autocratic regimes lack the ideological power that fascism and communism enjoyed at their peak.
The inaptness of this comparison is no cause for complacency. The current ills of liberal democracy are deep and pervasive. Surmounting them will require intellectual clarity and political leaders who are willing to risk their careers to serve the long-term interests of their countries. Human choice, not historical inevitability, will determine liberal democracy’s fate. For now, democratic publics only want policy changes that give them hope for a better future. Left unmet, their demands could evolve into pressure for regime change.
When I began writing about the travails of liberal democracy a few years ago, I believed economics represented the heart of the matter. Contemporary liberal democracy, I argued, rested on a tacit compact between peoples on the one hand and their elected representatives and unelected experts on the other. The people would defer to elites as long as elites delivered sustained prosperity and steadily improving living standards. If they stopped managing the economy effectively, all bets were off.
This compact began to weaken with growing competition from developing nations, which put pressure on policies designed to protect citizens against labor market risks. In many Western democracies, the erosion of the manufacturing sector destabilized regions and political arrangements. The urbanization of opportunity—the shift of economic dynamism away from smaller communities and rural areas toward a handful of metropolitan areas—intensified these effects. Inequality rose. A globalized economy, it turned out, served the interests of most people in developing countries and elites in advanced countries—but not the working and middle classes in the developed economies, which had done so well in the three decades after World War II.
Against this backdrop, the Great Recession following December 2007 represented a colossal failure of economic stewardship, and leaders’ inability to restore vigorous economic growth compounded the felony. (A McKinsey Global Institute study found that 81 percent of U.S. households, 70 percent of U.K. households, and 97 percent of Italian households had experienced declining incomes since 2005.)1 As economies struggled and unemployment persisted, the groups and regions that failed to rebound lost confidence in mainstream parties and established institutions, fueling the populist upsurge that upended American politics, threatened the European Union, and challenged liberal governance itself in several of the newer democracies.
While this account is not wrong, I now believe it represents only a portion of the truth. An explanation that places economics at the base and treats other issues as derivative distorts a more complex reality. Alongside economic difficulties, other problems weakened the foundation of popular support for established institutions.
For example, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union all failed to deal with waves of immigration in ways that commanded public support. Not only did immigrants compete with longtime inhabitants for jobs and social services, they were also seen as threatening long-established cultural norms and even public safety. The spread of higher education created new cultural divisions: a college degree not only expands economic opportunities but also reshapes individuals’ entire outlook. College graduates tend to be less wedded to traditional norms, more comfortable with rapid change, and more accepting of diversity. Many less educated citizens came to feel that their lives were outside their control, not only individually but also collectively. The national and international governing institutions they thought would step in when individual agency proved insufficient seemed frozen as leaders stalled and bickered. Many citizens lost confidence in the future and longed instead for an imagined past that insurgent politicians promised to restore. In the United States, partisan polarization gridlocked the system, preventing progress on problems that demanded concerted action. In Europe, the opposite phenomenon—a center-left/center-right duopoly that kept important issues off the public agenda—had much the same effect.
Liberal democracy has two characteristic deformations. Elitists claim that they best understand the means to the public’s ends and should be freed from the inconvenient necessity of popular consent. They regard themselves as the defenders of liberal values, but they have doubts about democracy. They are sure that they are promoting the public interest, but they understand it through the prism of their own class interests and biases. Their efforts to insulate themselves from the people—in the quasi-invisible civil service, in remote bureaucracies, in courts and international institutions—inevitably breed resentment.
The result has been liberal democracy’s other deformation: the rise of populist movements—and in several cases governments—across the West. Some observers argue that populism is a vacuous category, the omnibus label for everything educated elites despise. I disagree: populism is a form of politics that reflects distinctive theoretical commitments and generates its own political practice. Populists view themselves as arch-democrats who oppose what they regard as liberalism’s class biases. Their majoritarianism puts pressure on the individual rights and the limits on public power at the heart of liberal democracy. More dangerous still is the populists’ understanding of the “people” as homogeneous and unitary, which leans against the pluralism that characterizes all free societies in modernity. Because the assumption of homogeneity is always false, it leads first to denial and then to suppression. Faced with disagreement, populism responds with anathemas: the dissenters are self-interested, power-hungry elites who aren’t part of the virtuous and united people. They are rather the enemies of the people and deserve to be treated as such.
Even this more complex account still does not suffice to explain the worrying retreat of liberal democracy. A quarter century ago, it was possible to believe that all serious alternatives had faded and that liberal democracy would continue its inexorable global advance. Ensuing developments have dispelled this dangerous complacency. Autocracy, ethnonationalism, messianic religion, and China’s brand of market-Leninism are all advancing while claiming superiority to self-government by popularly elected representatives. Liberal democracy addresses many human desires, but not all of them.
Nonetheless, there is much that liberal democratic governments can do to mitigate their insufficiencies. Public policy can mitigate the heedlessness of markets and slow unwanted change. Nothing requires democratic leaders to give the same weight to outsiders’ claims as to those of their own citizens. They are not obligated to support policies that weaken their working and middle classes, even if these policies improve the lot of citizens in developing countries. They are certainly not obligated to open their doors to all newcomers, whatever the consequences for their citizenry. Moderate self-preference is the moral core of a defensible nationalism. Unmodulated internationalism will breed—is breeding—its antithesis, an increasingly unbridled nationalism.
While today’s problems are distinctive, they are hardly unique. Nor are they temporary. The basic structure of liberal democracy creates tensions that can never be expunged. At best they can be managed in response to ever-changing circumstances.
Liberal democracy rests on a foundation of a broadly accepted tolerance that asks a good deal of citizens but undermines itself when pushed too far. It stands in a distinctive relation to truth, freely sought and freely discussed, as the requisite for social freedom and sound policy. But unscrupulous forces can abuse this freedom for their own advantage. Demagogy is democracy’s shadow.
Liberal democracy needs leaders who eschew the extremes of populism and elitism. They should not pander, but neither should they substitute their own ends for those that the people espouse. Their task is to find effective means for achieving public goals while helping the people better understand their long-term interests.
Although liberal democracy is the most capacious form of political organization, it is not equally hospitable to all ways of life. Its individualism cannot meet the craving for intense and persisting communal solidarity. For some, its antiheroic culture lacks nobility, and its egalitarianism devalues excellence. Its politics, which tends toward incremental compromise and the conciliation of diverse interests, leaves the desire to revolutionize an imperfect world unsatisfied. It represses some permanent features of human psychology—the tendencies toward cruelty and aggression and what Augustine termed the libido dominandi. Individuals who crave social stability must look elsewhere, as must those who experience individual freedom and responsibility as burdens rather than blessings.
Civilization, Freud reminded us, always has its discontents, and liberal democracy is no exception. But every other form of political organization is worse, and the friends of liberal democracy should not be shy about saying so.