Three Threats to Liberal Democracy

Will Marshall President, Three Threats to Progressive Policy Institute Liberal Democracy Commentary Prepared for the Biennial Colloquy on the State of Democracy Loyola University Chicago, John Felice Rome Center, and hosted by the Centro Studi Americani Rome, April 10-11, 2018 For much of the 20th century, Today’s neo-nationalism isn’t the humanistic and unifying kind championed by Italy’s Guiseppe the main threat to liberal and Mazzini, but the “blood and soil” nationalism of democratic societies came Germany’s Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismark.1 from militant and totalizing This strain of illiberal nationalism is the common ideologies: Fascism and thread running through the three most potent external threats to liberal democracy: the rise of communism, or revolutionary national populism and political tribalism around socialism. Now the principal the world; Russia’s reversion to despotism at home and adventurism abroad; and, the challenge to liberalism springs emergence of the Chinese model as a plausible from a surprising resurgence alternative to market democracy. of the ethnic and cultural THE RISE OF NATIONAL POPULISM nationalism of the 19th In the western world, there’s been slow-boiling anger against globalization among workers century. Ideas that modern displaced by economic change – the shift democracies thought they had of comparative advantage in labor-intensive evolved beyond and consigned manufacturing to the developing world, the digital revolution and the steady loss over to history’s dustbin have come decades of blue collar jobs to automation, trade back with a vengeance. and global supply chains. For less-educated workers, these changes have meant the disappearance of good jobs, downward mobility, and growing stress on working class families2 (including a dramatic decline in marriage) and communities. P1 But migration is the spark that lit the populist corporations have rigged economic competition bonfire. Since the Syrian refugee crisis started against average working families. He railed in 2015, European politics has been roiled by a against “unfair” trade agreements for shipping growing public backlash against open borders, U.S. factory jobs overseas, and blamed immigration and its previously welcoming environmentalists for choking the energy stance toward refugees. Germany alone industry with regulations and killing America’s experienced an influx of more than one million coal industry. refugees that year. Anti-Muslim sentiment has The billionaire developer, however, doesn’t make flared across Europe, as has anger toward the a very convincing class warrior. As his eagerness European Union, which sets basic rules on to slap tariffs on foreign import shows, Trump borders and migration. Populist movements is genuinely an economic nationalist who sees have proliferated because working class voters trade deficits as proof that other countries are feel abandoned and unrepresented by the “taking advantage” of the United States. In any established political parties. case, a passion to rectify economic injustice or In Britain, the impulse to stop mass migration create a kinder, gentler capitalism doesn’t seem and keep out “Polish plumbers” fueled the rise of to be the molten emotional core of national UKIP and was a major contributor to the Brexit populism. As the U.S. economist Tyler Cowen decision. Viktor Orban has consolidated power points out,4 some of the world’s most virulently by promising to protect Hungary’s “cultural nationalist leaders are found in countries – e.g., homogeneity”3 from phantom waves of political the Czech Republic, the Philippines and Poland and economic refugees from the Muslim Middle -- that have enjoyed robust and sustained East and Africa. Italy’s Lega, France’s National economic growth. Rally, and insurgent nationalist parties in “It’s time to admit that the nationalist turn in Austrian, Holland and Poland similarly feed on global politics isn’t mainly about economics xenophobia. or economic failures. Instead, the intellectual Anti-immigration sentiment in the United States and ideological and cultural battles in some takes a different form, but it proved decisive in countries have led to these new political Donald Trump’s 2016 victory. His incendiary directions under a wide variety of economic rhetoric about “criminal aliens” and promise to conditions, some of them quite positive. It’s a build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border forged cultural crisis more than an economic one, as an unbreakable bond with white, working class citizens see their national identities shifting,” voters who propelled him to both the Republican asserts Cowen. nomination and the White House. Here at It’s a provocative thesis, especially for economic last was someone willing to defy “political determinists on the progressive left. Their correctness” and give voice to their sense of rejoinder goes something like this: If the United cultural displacement. States and Europe still enjoyed robust economic To be sure, Trump also sounded themes of and labor productivity growth as they did during economic populism. He echoed Sen. Bernie the golden decades after World War II, and Sanders’s charge that Wall Street and big if workers were receiving a fair share of that P2 growth, we wouldn’t be talking about a populist democracy, which they think has been hijacked revolt. Perhaps so, but the high salience of by technocratic elites, but with liberalism. cultural grievances and friction goes a long way As Bill Galston put it in his penetrating Lipset toward explaining why the populist surge has Lecture to the U.S. National Endowment for mostly pushed politics to the right,5 and why Democracy,6 populists aim to drive a wedge left-wing economic populism has gained so little between democracy and liberalism. Orban traction in either the United States or Europe is explicit on the point, styling himself as the (outside of Greece). EU’s first and foremost champion of “illiberal At the same time, the rising tide of national democracy.” He’s also an unapologetic admirer populism seems to be scrambling the old, of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, which left-right axis altogether, reframing politics raises the key question: Will the contempt as a struggle between the “people” and self- national populists show for liberal ideas and dealing elites. The new political fault lines pit institutions – the primacy of individual rights highly educated and supposedly deracinated and liberties; a free press and independent “globalists” who live and work in metropolitan judiciary; respect for political and cultural areas against defenders of national sovereignty pluralism -- bleed over into disdain for and identity, who have less formal education and democracy itself? That’s already happening live in exurban working class neighborhoods and in Eastern Europe. the countryside. (In the United States, the picture Says Galston, in summarizing the basic is complicated by the presence of working class incompatibility of national populism and liberal minorities in the cities, who are often socially democracy: conservative but who vote Democratic.) “In short, populism plunges democratic National populists seek to undo almost societies into an endless series of everything liberal internationalism has wrought moralized zero sum conflicts, it threatens since the end of World War II: the attenuation of the rights of minorities, and it enables state sovereignty through the UN system, the EU strong leaders to dismantle the check- and the WTO; the integration of once sheltered points on the road to autocracy.” national economies into a hotly competitive global marketplace; increasing migration To this list we must add the existential threat and multiculturalism; and, the ascendancy of that national populism already poses where it cosmopolitan and secular values over traditional has achieved its biggest political breakthrough – social and religious mores. The exception is the the United States. Under Donald Trump, America social welfare state, which populists want to is erecting walls and tariffs and retreating into preserve and even expand – but for the exclusive insularity, protectionism, nativism and belligerent benefit of their ethno-religious compatriots. unilateralism. Trump is frontally assaulting the main precepts and institutions of the It’s important to underscore that, in the internationalist strategy America adopted after transatlantic world at least, national populists World War II to defend itself by enlarging and consider themselves the authentic voice of strengthening the “free world.” Can that world democracy. Their beef isn’t so much with cohere if its chief architect, the United States, is P3 no longer willing to uphold it? National pride and nostalgia for past glories are driving Putin’s policy. That’s why economic Richard Haass of the U.S. Council of Foreign sanctions aren’t likely to deter him from Relations, is pessimistic: interfering in nearby countries like Ukraine, “America’s decision to abandon the role it Georgia, Moldavia and the Baltic states, which has played for more than seven decades have sizeable ethnic Russian minorities. He thus marks a turning point. The liberal world wants pliable neighbors and at least de facto order cannot survive on its own, because recognition from the outside world that Moscow others lack either the interest or the means has the right to call the shots in what he regards to sustain it. The result will be a world as its historical sphere of influence. Putin’s that is less free, less prosperous,

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