In his 1941 memoir, The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig recounts the optimistic mood of Europe before 1914 and World War I. Bourgeois civilization seemed to be on a permanent upswing. Technological marvels such as the Zeppelin were filling everyone with hope for a borderless future.
“We still felt only slightly uncomfortable when shots rang out from the Balkans,” he wrote.
However, what he and his friends took for the red hue of dawn was “really the firelight of the approaching international conflagration.”
Illustration:Yusha
We are in danger of making the same mistake again.
“Enough about democracy’s weaknesses. Let’s talk about its strengths,” said Fareed Zakaria, the author of a prophetic 2003 book, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad.
“Time and history are not on the dictators’ side,” said Michael Abramowitz, the president of Freedom House, an organization that can hardly be accused of an excess of optimism in the past few years.
It is easy to see why there is so much buoyancy. The twin leaders of “team autocrat,” Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), have made a succession of serious errors. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is draining his treasury and credibility, as is Xi’s war on COVID-19.
Former US president Donald Trump is fading, with 61 percent of Republican Party voters saying they would prefer someone else to be the party’s champion in 2024, a new USA Today poll showed.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has not only lost an election, but accepted the result. With French President Emmanuel Macron making nice to US President Joe Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz writing an essay in the new edition of Foreign Affairs promising that Germany would do more and spend more to defend the international order, the leaders of the Western alliance seem to have more lead in their pencils than they have had for years.
However, many of these signals are open to a different interpretation. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated how dependent Europe is on Russian energy. Moscow’s energy weapon could bring down Western governments. Xi has abandoned his “zero COVID” policy in the light of mass uprisings, suggesting that he is capable of flexibility when his back is up against the wall. The Trump presidency has made European leaders rightfully distrustful of the US’ capacity to remain leader of the free world.
However, that is also good news for serious architects of conservative populism. The age of the rules-based international order has given way to a new age of great power politics.
Look at the deeper patterns, and things are even worse for liberalism. The onward march of democracy that characterized the post-war era, and gathered pace with the collapse of communism, has come to a shuddering halt.
Stanford University professor of political science and sociology Larry Diamond said the percentage of countries with populations of more than 1 million that are democracies peaked at 57 percent in 2006 and dropped to below 46 percent in 2019.
Pew Research Center surveys consistently show that large shares of the public in democratic countries are dissatisfied and want substantial political reform: A median of 56 percent across 17 countries said that their systems need major or complete rehabilitation.
Backsliding has been particularly worrying in two places: the US, democracy’s greatest champion for much of its history, and India, the world’s biggest democracy.
Even if Trump is fading — and his capacity to regenerate should never be underestimated — his fall cannot remove the problems that created Trumpism in the first place.
A CNN national exit poll taken during the US midterm elections found that 93 percent of Republican voters, and 60 percent of all voters, believed that Biden was not legitimately elected, while 75 percent believed that democracy is “very” much or “somewhat” in danger.
A Gallup poll taken earlier this year found that a paltry proportion of respondents had moderate to high confidence in vital institutions: 25 percent in the US Supreme Court, 16 percent in newspapers and 7 percent in the US Congress.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has succeeded in hollowing out most of India’s liberal institutions in the name of Hindu majoritarianism, packing the judiciary and electoral commission, intimidating the media and casting a pall over minorities.
Legions of Hindu nationalists — men who parade through the streets wearing uniforms and issuing blood-curdling chants — strike terror into his opponents. India’s identity is increasingly that of an assertive Hindu nationalist power, rather than an exponent of liberal democratic values.
Liberals have always had an optimistic tendency to think that the arc of history bends in their direction; that the march of progress would lead to the decline of autocratic populism, which depends on antique traditions — Russian despotism, for example — or ancient prejudice such as xenophobic tribalism.
However, many of the central features of modernity are driving the return of illiberalism.
Globalization makes it easy for authoritarian regimes to export corruption to the free world. Such corruption does not just take the form of fellow dictators and dodgy business people taking cash in paper bags. Some of the West’s most prestigious institutions, not least in the UK, act as money butlers: barristers, tutors and estate agents are lickspittles to politically connected oligarchs.
Social media and cable television channels stoke division and spread misinformation.
“Fox was the gas station where Trump stopped to fill up his tank of resentment,” former CNN media correspondent Brian Stelter wrote in his book Hoax.
Whatever Trump’s future, Fox News remains central to the US’ media. Even democracy itself can prove to be the most effective enemy of liberal democracy: Authoritarian-minded leaders, particularly Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, have perfected the art of using majoritarianism — or the illusion of majoritarianism — to curtail minority rights, constrain political competition and remove constraints on their exercise of power.
Illiberal forces have plenty of material available to support their cause. The economies of the developed, democratic world seem to have lost the capacity to grow in any sustained way, squeezing the financing of the welfare state that their citizens take for granted. The flow of refugees from poorer countries is putting a growing strain on the richer world, while draining the well of popular compassion.
The combination of the energy crisis and pent-up demand from COVID-19 is sending a wave of inflation across the rich world that is producing wage demands, strikes and a general sense that things no longer work.
The UK, which led the world out of the malaise with the 1979 election of then-British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, is leading it again — backward.
Populists have set fire to this combustible material. They know how to capitalize on people’s grievances about economic conditions, demographic shifts and rapid social change. They know how to summon up images of a lost age of harmony and benevolent progress. They know how to use flash points, such as refugees staying in hotels or gangs killing pensioners, to polarize opinion.
The tension between the West’s need to import immigrants to compensate for its low-birth rate, and its fear of the loss of its distinctive identity, provide populists with ever more fuel. The emerging doctrine of national conservatism — with its appeal to protectionism, popular resentment of elites and lost identity — could provide the post-Trump right with a rallying cry and an agenda.
At the same time, liberalism has lost its popular touch. An idea that was forged by fearless 19th century radicals has become the doctrine of today’s comfortable and frequently self-dealing elites.
Liberalism has split into two branches, neither of which has much popular appeal.
There is neoliberalism, which appeals to technocrats, but is increasingly flummoxed by technical problems, not least the problem of restoring growth; and there is left-liberalism, which flatters the vanity of the educated elite even as it treats the masses as bigots and fools.
It has also abandoned the ideas — overturning the comfortable establishment, placing the common good before sectarian interests — that once gave it such wide appeal. Without a serious attempt to revive liberalism’s radical and reforming spirit, the advantage lies with the populists.
Let us not give up hope. The liberal world order is still infinitely more appealing than conservative populism.
However, let us not make the mistake of Zweig and his contemporaries, and assume that the red glow on the horizon must be dawn.
The writer recovered his optimism after 1918, becoming one of the most successful authors of the interwar period. He relished the return of cosmopolitanism, liberalism and artistic experimentation, particularly in Weimar, Germany. Then everything fell apart again, smashed by his fellow Austrian, Adolf Hitler.
Zweig fled his schloss in Salzburg for a single room in London, tried in vain to warn the appeasement-minded British of the Nazi threat and then fled again to Latin America. In February 1942, as Hitler’s conflagration burned bright across Europe, he and his wife killed themselves in a suicide pact in Brazil.
Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at The Economist, he is author of The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of
the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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