Asked what he thought of western civilisation, Mohandas Gandhi is said to have answered that it would be a good idea. Debate about liberal democracy in the era of United States President Donald Trump is suffused with similar pessimism about western achievement, bordering on self-damaging despair. The “liberal” mix of capitalism and democracy is denounced for yielding social inequality, cronyism, kleptocracy and sheer governmental incompetence — failings that opened the door to Trump’s presidency and that may be entrenched by it in turn. In the wake of the recent G20 summit, some went so far as to claim that the chief threat to Americans was not from the aggressively illiberal despots of Russia, North Korea, China or the extremist theocracies. Rather, it was from the perverse fruit of the West’s own system.
This intellectual bandwagon needs to be stopped. Liberalism faces two challenges — on the one hand, external enemies; on the other, an internal crisis of self-confidence — and it is time we all acknowledged that the external threat is more severe. However bad Trump may be, he is not Russian President Vladimir Putin or North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. And although it is true that liberalism faces an internal crisis, it is worth remembering how liberalism got started two centuries ago.
As Edmund Fawcett has argued in his magisterial history of liberalism, the creed originated as a set of principles for managing bewildering change. For most of human history, economic growth and social evolution proceeded at a snail’s pace, but between 1776 and the first decades of the 19th century, revolutions both political and industrial caused everything to speed up. Liberalism offered a means of handling the resulting tumult. If head-long technological and economic dislocation made political conflict unavoidable, humanity needed a way to contain it, civilise it — a way to hang on to timeless standards of humanity while providing an escape valve for argument and change.
Seen in this light, today’s technological and economic convulsions — the part-time jobs of the “gig” economy, the menacing shadow of the robots — are not signs that the liberal system is in crisis. To the contrary, they are signs that liberalism is more essential than ever. We are in the midst of another Industrial Revolution, which will create winners and losers and bitter political arguments — and Trump is testament to that. Liberalism will not end these conflicts; only absolutist doctrines create political silence. But liberalism will set the rules of the game that allow the conflict to be managed. For now, Trump is expressing the frustration of a part of the country, but liberal checks and rules of process are containing the impact.
In its long history of facilitating clamorous argument, liberalism has succumbed, unsurprisingly, to repeated neuroses. In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev boasted of the superiority of state-directed industrialisation, telling a group of westerners, “we will bury you”; some in the West made the mistake of believing him, especially when the Soviet Union launched the first-ever space satellite the following year. In the 1960s, US democracy was rocked by political assassinations, violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and a bubbling up of radical challenges to the system. Amid the stagflation of the 1970s, a business school dean sounded a warning about “an end-to-western-capitalism syndrome”; and no less a figure than the US president lectured the nation on its moral turpitude. All these episodes generated existential crises, just as Trump today leads people to doubt the resilience of American system. But pessimists should note that liberalism emerged robustly from those moments of self-doubt.
The second Industrial Revolution
What’s more, pessimists should remember that, if a few dice had settled differently, the current conversation would be completely different. Absent strong proof to the contrary, Trump’s election must be accepted as legitimate, but a small swing in a few places would have put the status quo candidate in the White House. Similarly, Britain’s Brexit referendum was decided 52 to 48 per cent; and a recent poll suggested that the voters now have doubts. In France, to cite a contrary example, the ambitious liberal Emmanuel Macron was lucky to face a bevy of weak opponents, and France was even luckier that Macron emerged out of nowhere, clad in white. None of these events should be interpreted as durable signals that liberalism is either moribund or resurgent.
Finally, it pays to remember that the two disasters that discredited the liberal establishment — the 2008 financial crisis and the Iraq War — were not errors that flowed from liberalism itself. There was nothing liberal about taxpayer backstops for private financial risk-taking, nor about the failure to temper the objective of Iraqi regime change with a sober calculation of available resources. These episodes do hold lessons for American democracy — avoid cronyism, avoid hubris — but they absolutely do not show that liberalism is wanting. To the contrary, liberalism arose during the first Industrial Revolution. We need it to navigate the second Industrial Revolution as it roils around us now.
— Washington Post
Sebastian Mallaby is the Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of The Man Who Knew: The Life & Times of Alan Greenspan.
