Liberal Democracy and its Discontents

[Valin]

Dispatches:

Michael J. Totten

Aug. 17 2016

 

A set of disturbing essays and reports has landed on my desk over the summer that together paint a grim picture of the state of liberal democracy in the early 21st century—and the grimness is not restricted to the dumpster fire of an election we’re currently enduring in the United States.

 

Let’s start with political scientists Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk. They published an unsettling report in the July issue in the Journal of Democracy that portends a rough road ahead for nearly all the Western countries.

 

“Citizens in a number of supposedly consolidated democracies in North America and Western Europe have not only grown more critical of their political leaders,” they write. “Rather, they have also become more cynical about the value of democracy as a political system, less hopeful that anything they do might influence public policy, and more willing to express support for authoritarian alternatives. The crisis of democratic legitimacy extends across a much wider set of indicators than previously appreciated.”

 

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[Valin]

Money Quote

 

 

Those born as late as the 1980s have no memory of living in a world where democracy was threatened in any serious way. It is so much easier for youngsters to take democracy for granted. For them, it’s like taking oxygen for granted. They have fewer real-world foils to compare democracy with. Churchill’s quip that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others doesn’t resonate with them in quite the same way.

[Valin]

The End of the Liberal Tradition?
A new paper suggests young Americans are giving up on democracy
Mark Movsesian
8 . 17 . 16

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Now, as commentators have pointed out, this is just one set of data. It’s possible that the World Values Surveys overstate liberalism’s diminishing appeal and miss trends that favor its long-run prospects, such as “the high levels of social tolerance among young people.” But Foa and Mounk’s paper certainly seems plausible. In fact, the paper helps explains some of what is happening in American political culture.

 

Liberalism is often understood as propositional, as a series of abstract principles. This understanding has led scholars like Fukuyama to think that liberalism can be easily exported to other cultures; it has formed the basis for much American foreign policy, especially in recent decades. In important ways, this understanding is correct. Liberalism does justify itself largely on the basis of ideas. The Framers of the American Constitution, for example, were strongly influenced by Enlightenment concepts of reason and rational government.

 

In a deeper sense, though, liberalism generally, and American liberalism specifically, is a tradition, the organic working-out of precedent, over time, in a particular political culture. The American Framers were figures of the Enlightenment, true, but they also thought they were restoring the traditional rights of Englishmen, rights that could be traced back to Magna Carta and beyond. The American conception of religious liberty, for example, is deeply influenced by the historical experience of the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution, and also by the particular understanding of religion that took hold in a colonial, frontier society. This explains why it differs so much from its cousin on the European continent, the French doctrine of laïcité.

 

But American culture is changing. Our traditions are not so popular nowadays, including our political traditions; and when we discard our traditions, we can fall for many things, including, apparently, authoritarianism. That, it seems to me, is the upshot of this important paper. The authors identify authoritarianism in our politics with Donald Trump, and it’s easy to recognize Trump’s authoritarian appeal (“I alone can fix it”). But there is authoritarianism on the left, as well, which the authors ignore. American college students increasingly oppose free speech, at least with respect to certain viewpoints, and insist on shutting down speakers with whom they disagree, often with the approval of administrators and faculty who should know better. Not to mention the left’s continuing assaults on religious liberty, including attempts to get nuns to cover contraceptives for their employees and threats to remove the tax-exempt status of religious schools that disapprove of same-sex marriage.

 

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