The week of 11 July 2016 may be a turning point in history:
There are years, decades even, in which history slows to a crawl. Then there are weeks that are so eventful that they seem to mark the dissolution of a world order that had once seemed solid and to foretell the rise of one as yet unknowable.
The week of July 11, 2016, has every chance of being remembered as one of those rare flurries of jumbled, inchoate, concentrated significance. The centrifugal forces that are threatening to break political systems across the world may have started to register a decade ago; they may have picked up speed over the last 12 months; but never since the fall of the Berlin Wall have they wreaked havoc in so many places in so short a span of time—showcasing the failures of technocratic rule, the terrifying rise of populist strongmen, and the existential threat posed by Islamist terrorism, all in the span of seven short days.
At first glance, a political crisis in London; a terrorist attack in Nice, France; a failed putsch in Ankara, Turkey; and a bloviating orator on his way to becoming the Republican nominee for the presidency of the United States look like the dramatic apex of very different, barely connected screenplays. To my eye, they are garish panes of glass that add up to one unified, striking mosaic. Looked at from the right distance, they tell the story of a political system, liberal democracy, that has long dominated the world—and is now in the midst of an epic struggle for its own survival.
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In the long run, Trump’s particular views and quirks matter less than we would like to think. He is ultimately no more than an extra in an unfolding horror show—the most prominent beneficiary of an epochal shift whose roots predate Trump’s entry into politics and whose effects will continue to shape our societies long after he has retired to one of his many estates.
Across the affluent, established democracies of North America and Western Europe, the last years have witnessed a meteoric rise of figures who may not be quite so brash or garish as Trump and yet bear a striking resemblance to him: Marine Le Pen in France, Frauke Petry in Germany, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, and many of the leading Brexiteers in the United Kingdom. They too harness a new level of anger that is quite unlike anything liberal democracies have witnessed in a half-century. They too promise to stand up for ordinary people, to do away with a corrupt political elite, and to put the ethnic and religious minorities who are now (supposedly) being favored in their rightful (subordinate) place. They, too, are willing to do away with liberal political institutions like an independent judiciary or a free, robust press so long as those stand in the way of the people’s will. Together, they are building a new type of political regime that is slowly coming into its own: illiberal democracy.
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Political elites are understandably terrified by the speed with which illiberal democracy is coming into its own. But if the populists are pushing for a political system that does away with one half of liberal democracy, the truth is that a large number of establishment politicians are increasingly tempted to embrace a system that does away with the other half. Where Trump and Le Pen seek to establish an illiberal democracy, a lot of sensible centrists are quietly seeking their salvation in what I call “undemocratic liberalism.” If the people want to violate the rights of unloved minorities, setting up the prospect of democracy without rights, the political establishment is increasingly insulating itself from the people’s demands, opting for a form of rights without democracy.
To be sure, undemocratic liberalism usually retains a democratic sheen. The standard rigmarole of political life in a supposed democracy is jealously observed: There are regular elections and hard-fought campaigns, grand speeches and parliamentary votes. The institutional apparatus that supposedly serves to translate the will of the people into public policy remains in place. And yet, the actual purpose of these institutions—to let the people rule—is increasingly forgotten. To anyone who cares to take a skeptical look, it is obvious how ineffectual representative institutions have become at delivering on the noble task they supposedly serve.
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Ordinary people are angry at the political system in part because they recognize to what extent they have been shut out of key decisions. But, by the same token, the process is becoming so unresponsive in part because the rise of illiberal populists has given the political establishment a good reason to insulate itself from the people’s anger. A pendulum is swinging from illiberal democracy to undemocratic liberalism, then back again. And its swings are getting wider and wider.
This sounds dramatic, and the worry about the rise of illiberal democracy is very real – but I am a lot less concerned about “undemocratic liberalism” that he is complaining about.
Undemocratic liberalism allows true representative liberal democracy to continue to function at a local level, with mostly net positive results (as long as other key ingredients such as critically-thinking electorate and free press continue to exist, counterbalancing the inevitable low-level corruption). This is exactly the reason I’ve been mostly happy with the likes of Bloomberg, Obama and both Clintons. I only wish people who are influential would think of inequality and dangers it can bring more strategically, and address it before it destroys them.
Yascha Mounk, The Week Democracy Died: Seven Days in July That Changed the World as We Know It
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