The Crisis in Liberal Democracy

I started writing this post days before the attack on the United States Capitol. That attack makes, in my opinion, the issues raised here even more urgent. In May 2020, I posted a blog entitled “Why I am a Progressive, and the proud history of Progressivism in America.”  In this post, which takes much from an interesting article by Francis Fukuyama, I want to discuss why I am also a “liberal” in its 19^th century guise. Fukuyama asserts that “liberal democracy” is being attacked today from the Right and the Left. He goes on to define “liberal democracy” as refer[ring] primarily to a rule of law that constrains the power of government and requires that even the most powerful actors in the system operate under the same general rules as ordinary citizens. Liberal democracies, in other words, have a constitutional system of checks and balances that limits the power of elected leaders.”  

Fukuyama asserts that “classical liberalism can best be understood as an institutional solution to the problem of governing over diversity. Or to put it in slightly different terms, it is a system for peacefully managing diversity in pluralistic societies.”  According to Fukuyama, liberalism arose in the 17^th and 18^th centuries as a response to the wars of religion that followed the Protestant Reformation.  Millions of people died in these wars, which raged for over 250 years, ending with the last Swiss Civil War in 1712.

Fukuyama goes on to say, “The founders of modern liberalism like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke sought to lower the aspirations of politics, not to promote a good life as defined by religion, but rather to preserve life itself, since diverse populations could not agree on what the good life was. This was the distant origin of the phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence. The most fundamental principle enshrined in liberalism is one of tolerance: You do not have to agree with your fellow citizens about the most important things, but only that each individual should get to decide what those things are without interference from you or from the state. The limits of tolerance are reached only when the principle of tolerance itself is challenged, or when citizens resort to violence to get their way.” Does anyone believe that contemporary politics in America value tolerance?

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Classical liberalism is (was) a wildly successful form of government. In the first place, liberal democracies avoided internal violence. The one exception, of course, was the American Civil War, in which the American democracy determined that the acceptance of the continuation of the institution of slavery was incompatible with the basic tenets on which America was built. Elsewhere, in Britain and its Commonwealth, in Switzerland, in the Netherlands and in Scandinavia, once liberal democracy was established internal conflict tended to disappear.  Moreover, it was the liberal democracies, which tended to follow laissez-faire economic policies in the 19^th century, which had the most rapid transformation of their economies during the industrial revolution.

In general, the discontent with liberal democracy, stems from a discontent with the society created by liberalism.  On the Left, the main problem with “liberalism” is its inability to provide economic benefits to those at the bottom of the economic, political and social ladder. In fact, the species of liberalism (neoliberalism) which has become identified with the tendency to advocating for limited state intervention in the economy and, as a consequence, to support market outcomes, whatever they are, has led to rising income inequality and the persistence of systemic racism in the economy. (I’ve written about this quite a lot).  However, I believe that this type of problem is quite amenable to traditional liberal measures such as tax reform, strengthening of labor rights, increased consumer protection, and control of monopolies. This bouquet of policies was first put on the table by Teddy Roosevelt and the original Progressives such as Robert Lafollette.

The most serious criticism of Liberalism is that it elevates the individual above the group, This criticism notes that groups are important in allowing individuals to cluster together in order to both increase their power and to augment their identity.  Hans Kohn was one of my professors in college (this was during the height of the Cold War) and he argued that the defining idea of modern times was the idea of “nationalism.” From the mid-19^th century onward, European Empires gave way to nation-states. Nationalism led to the creation of modern Italy and Germany, to the dissolution of the Austrian Empire in World War 1, and to the enfeebling of the Turkish Empire in the same period and eventually to the break-up of the Soviet Union. Nationalism led to the Balkanization of the Balkans.

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American and European society are marked today by a conflict between liberalism and communitarianism. Fukuyama writes, “This instinct for bonding and the thinness of shared moral life in liberal societies has shifted global politics on both the right and the left toward a politics of identity and away from the liberal world order of the late 20th century. Liberal values like tolerance and individual freedom are prized most intensely when they are denied: People who live in brutal dictatorships want the simple freedom to speak, associate, and worship as they choose. But over time, life in a liberal society comes to be taken for granted and its sense of shared community seems thin. Thus, in the United States, arguments between right and left increasingly revolve around identity, and particularly racial identity issues, rather than around economic ideology and questions about the appropriate role of the state in the economy.”

The graph below shows the precipitous decline in support for democracy among younger cohorts in six Western countries including the United States.

In the post-Cold War world, nationalism continues to confront liberal democracies, particularly that liberal ideology that claims a global identity, and promotes international trade and migration.  All across the United States and Europe a fundamental conflict has emerged between communitarian values of nationalism and group identity, and traditional liberal ideas that support individualism and internationalism.  This is an issue on both the Left and the Right.

The Left has seen the rise of identity politics, where a person is identified as being part of a group, usually a group that has experienced discrimination. Thus, politics on the Left is often seen as righting discrimination against racial minorities, women, and the LGBTQ community. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. argues that a liberal democracy “requires a common basis for culture and society to function. Rather than seeing civil society as already fractured along lines of power and powerlessness (according to race, ethnicity, sexuality, etc.), Schlesinger suggests that basing politics on group marginalization is itself what fractures the civil polity, and that identity politics therefore works against creating real opportunities for ending marginalization.”

Donald Trump’s rise to the Presidency was, in part, a result of his understanding that many white middle-class and working Americans saw themselves as discriminated against as well. The “Silent Majority” tradition dates back to Richard Nixon.  But in recent years, the disappearance of good working-class jobs, and the demographic trend toward a minority-majority population has renewed the feeling among many Americans that their country was becoming less familiar and more unwelcome. Thus, Trump’s attacks on immigrants, on Eastern liberals and on minorities were seen as his standing up for whites left behind by modern society. His slogan, Make America Great Again, resonates deeply with those who see the America they cherished as vanishing.

The threat of communitarianism to liberal democracy is compounded by the increasing indifference to the importance of protecting our democracy. The “guardrails” are currently threatened by a Republican Party, many of whose leaders, value more highly their political fortunes than the preservation of our democracy. The biggest threat to America is our increasing ifnorance and venality. As James Madison warned us, without a virtuous people, no system of checks and balances will work.”  Unhappily, virtue is no longer a characteristic of our politics. 

Dr. Roberto Foa, one of the authors of the article on disillusionment with democracy discussed above, said “The main message from what we are seeing is that we shouldn’t be complacent about our democracies and democratic institutions. It was Karl Marx who wrote that history repeats first as tragedy and then as farce. The 1930s led to tragedy, but I think right now we are in the farce phase with the election of President Trump and the rise of figures like Marine Le Pen in France and Nigel Farage in the UK. But it is by not being complacent that I think we can avoid the worst possible outcomes.”