The Winter of Liberal Democracy (Part 1)
Liberal Democracy’s Days of Future Past
This is the first of a three-part essay that I have originally inserted in an ebook titled The Winter of Liberal Democracy and Other Substack Essays. On top of this essay, the ebook contains a selection of essays that has been published on this Substack in 2024. It can be dowloaded as a PDF or EBUB. Parts 2 and 3 will be published here in the coming days.
Around the same time last year, many commentators (including this one) glossed over the fact that 2024 would be the year of elections, with elections planned to be organized in a record number of more than 60 countries – or groups of countries as in the case of the European Union. Ultimately, about two billion eligible voters had the opportunity to cast a ballot in 2024, making it the largest election year in history. In an obvious way, this is to be celebrated. That citizens are invited to express their views and, eventually, to have a real influence over the political course of their country is part of the democratic ideal. The irony has however not been missed by anyone. The “year of elections” comes when the form of democracy that has prevailed in the West for more than a century, liberal democracy, is facing its most serious crisis since the end of the Cold War.
Ironic as it is, there is nothing inherently paradoxical in this observation. Liberal democracy is not merely about organizing elections. First, there are growing and not-so-recent concerns about the declining integrity of elections. These concerns are not only directed at “electoral democracies” or even autocratic regimes that generally don’t even try to pretend that the election process is fairly competitive. The integrity of elections in long-standing constitutional democratic regimes has also been put under pressure, due in particular to outside interferences from non-democratic foreign powers. Second, the organization of fair elections is only part of what liberal democracy is. Elections are a key mechanism for making collective decisions but they are part of a broader socioeconomic and political framework that guarantees that the views citizens express are formed in a context that meets requirements to ensure that these views are meaningful and relevant. This is the socioeconomic and political framework that is under attack today.
Signs of this attack are discernable if we look at the results of elections in established democracies in the Western world, where liberal democracy is supposed to prevail.[1] Almost everywhere, “populist” parties and candidates ostensibly rejecting and violating constitutive principles of liberal democracy have improved their scores compared to previous elections. In some cases, they even won. Trump’s election last November is obviously the most significant illustration of this populist backlash against liberal democratic principles and institutions. Almost as worrying, however, are the results of the European parliamentary elections. Despite the mistaken impression that “mainstream” political parties have maintained their dominance, groups welcoming most of the far-right populists (European Conservatives & Reformists and Identity & Democracy) have reinforced their numerical positions, especially in the EU’s two most important economies, France and Germany.[2] Besides, the recent political instability in well-established democracies like France or, even more dramatically, South Korea, illustrates the growing difficulties of liberal democracies to self-govern and defend themselves against destructive pressures coming from the inside or, in an increasingly tense geopolitical context, from the outside. These observations raise the prospect that liberal democracy is about to enter into “a winter” where its principles and institutions lose their special status and where their actual implementation progressively recedes worldwide. The latter has already been the case since the mid-2000s, while the former has still to happen yet, in the Western world at least. The question is how long should we expect this winter to last, or even if it will end.
The story is now familiar. The falls of Berlin’s Wall and the Soviet Union were interpreted by many respectively as the symbolic and concrete proclamations of the definitive victory of the Western political and economic model over its communist nemesis. Francis Fukuyama’s article “The End of History” and his subsequent book with the same title captured the zeitgeist.[3] Thirty years later, the widespread triumphalism of that time seems grossly misplaced. Behind this triumphalism, lurked a “liberal” philosophy of history as mistaken as the one that grounded the communist ideology in the 20th century.[4] Though widespread, this triumphalism was not however unanimous nor unconditional. A few voices raised skepticism, or at least warnings that even if democracy could seem to be the only serious political player in town, its ability to maintain itself where it already prevailed and to gain ground where it didn’t, should not be expected to be automatic and would depend on a series of conditions. Such warnings are in particular presciently formulated in a Foreign Affairs 1997 essay by the American historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “Has Democracy a Future?”[5] This essay makes several points that, for the 2024 reader, ring a bell, if not several.
Schlesinger notes that what was true during most of the 20th century is likely to remain true in the 21st, namely that liberal democracy is often, here and there, the only protection against the threat of totalitarianism. Where liberal democracy fails, there seems no other alternative than a totalitarian outcome. This is what happened a century ago where, under partially endogenously economic, social, and political forces, several democracies and capitalist economies saw their own populations turning their back to a political regime and an economic system that had, yet, made them freer and richer. The intellectual and ideological powers of seduction of communism maintained the totalitarian threat during the Cold War and only a staunch liberal resistance, helped by communism’s self-undermining tendencies, prevented totalitarianism from conquering the planet. History seems to repeat itself today. There is the sense that where liberal democracy cedes ground, the vacuum will be filled by a form of “illiberal democracy” with autocratic tendencies, if not by a full-blown authoritarian power. There seems to be no middle ground between genuine liberal democracy and, if not totalitarianism, something ranging from “soft” to violent despotism.
In his Foreign Affairs essay, Schlesinger identifies three threats that may potentially compromise liberal democracy’s ability to circumvent the totalitarian and autocratic atavisms that sleep deep in any political body. First, technological change. Though writing at a time when AI was definitely more fiction than science, Schlesinger already envisions that the “computer revolution” is likely to change the very nature of democracy. The perspective of an unending increase in computational power makes in particular more plausible the realization of what James Madison called “pure democracy,” i.e., “a system in which citizens assemble and administer the government in person.”[6] While appealing from a populist perspective where democracy is nothing but the expression of the will of the People, it is far from a desirable prospect as “[i]nteractivity encourages instant responses, discourages second thoughts, and offer outlets for demagoguery, egomania, insult, and hate.”[7] In 1997, X/Twitter didn’t exist but the adverse political implications of this kind of virtual forum were already not beyond human imagination.
Schlesinger identified “unbridled capitalism” as a second threat to liberal democracy. Though recurrent from today’s perspective, this concern was not necessarily in the foreground by the end of the 20th century, when free market economies were growing everywhere on the planet. While Schlesinger is clear that private property rights are an indispensable protection against political tyranny, he also acknowledges that the creative destruction that is constitutive of capitalism puts liberal democracy at risk, especially in the context of the computer revolution. While in the economic domain, destruction goes with creation (of jobs, of wealth), in the political domain, total openness puts traditional forms of democratic authority in jeopardy. Once destroyed, it’s just not obvious which alternative forms of polity can emerge, especially when national borders become increasingly less relevant.
The third threat discussed by Schlesinger is nowadays often referred to as the “cultural backlash.” Schlesinger’s discussion essentially focuses on the American context and identifies race and religion. Global integration, the loss of religious meaning, and the growing importance of identity politics are all factors that encourage the kind of tribalism and fundamentalism that is antinomic with the spirit and the practice of liberal democracy. This warning anticipates the “post-liberal” thesis that has gained a large audience today regarding the destruction of the moral foundations of democracy.[8] Contrary to post-liberals, there is no hint by Schlesinger that the destruction of these moral foundations is endogenous to the very functioning of liberal democracies and market economies. At least in principle, it might be resisted. But Schlesinger rightfully warns that a democratic regime does not work on top of a moral vacuum.
It is, in a way, alarming that a historian writing at the end of the 20th century has been able to foresee so many of the difficulties that plague liberal democracy nowadays. Historians’ job is rather to look backward, eventually to provide useful insights for the present. Besides the fact that Schlesinger was a brilliant mind, this also indicates that there is nothing that is happening that could not have been anticipated during the first two decades of the 21st century. The different threats that Schlesinger then identified are based on the acknowledgment of relatively basic economic, social, and cultural mechanisms. An important question however that remains open is, as mentioned in the previous paragraph, whether and to which degree the actual realization of these threats is endogenous to liberal democracy, i.e., if by its very nature, liberal democracy is generating the causes that lead to its fragilization. A related question is whether liberal democratic regimes have at their disposal countermeasures to lessen the mechanisms that undermine their foundations. How we answer these questions will determine how long we should expect the winter of liberal democracy to last.
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[1] The democratic situation in Western countries is of course far from being homogenous. If we use as benchmarks reliable indicators such as V-Dem’s Liberal Democracy Index or EIU’s Democracy Index, many of those countries are counted as “liberal democracies” (or “full democracies” in EIU’s Democracy Index). Some of them, such as Austria, Greece, and Portugal, are however only characterized as “electoral democracies” by the V-Dem Institute. EIU’s Democracy Index is even more conservative, putting prominent democratic countries like the U.S.A. or Italy in the category of “flawed democracies,” i.e., the category of countries falling short of being genuine liberal democracies because, for instance, of problems in governance, underdeveloped political culture, or low level of political participation. See EIU, Democracy Index 2023. Age of Conflict and V-Dem, Democracy Report 2024. Democracy Winning and Losing at the Ballot.
[2] The results of EU’s parliamentary elections are briefly addressed in essay §12 “Democracy, Nationalism, and Public Reason.”
[3] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, Reissue edition (New York: Free Press, 1992 [2006]). I discussed Fukuyama’s account this year on the blog.
[4] Though, it should be noted, Fukuyama was far more prudent about the future of liberal democracy than is usually claimed in popular discussions of his account. As I shall discuss below, Fukuyama already acknowledged that the very same forces that seem to irresistibly steer the world toward liberal democracy could also, under adverse conditions, deflect it in a different direction.
[5] Arthur Schlesinger, “Has Democracy a Future?,” Foreign Affairs 76, no. 5 (1997): 2–12.
[6] ibid., p. 6.
[7] Ibid., p. 7.
[8] I discuss this thesis in “The Parasitic Liberalism Thesis Revisited.”