China and Russia may be struggling, but tensions in Western systems of government persist.
China and Russia may be struggling, but tensions in Western systems of government persist.
I f American politics post-2016 has been suffused with concerns about a crisis of “liberalism,” the past few weeks have seen a sudden shift among much of the commentariat: a democratic spring, in which regime alternatives to democracy have faced major challenges.
Richard Hanania in a recent Substack post offers a triumphalist example of this trend: The year 2022 has proven Francis Fukuyama right. History is still over. Characterized by paranoia and a seemingly indefinite series of lockdowns, the response of the People’s Republic of China to Covid has both slowed the Chinese economy and discredited Beijing’s hyper-technocratic approach to politics. Facing setback after setback in his invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has at once galvanized a transatlantic alliance and raised doubts about the viability of his effort to create a Russian counterweight to Western democracies.
Instead, “normie theories of democracy” seem more persuasive, if not vindicated: “Democracy works because it provides checks and balances, allows for the peaceful transfer of power, and the correction of mistakes. It takes account of public opinion and gives citizens a say in how they are governed, thus creating some level of social peace.” Projecting limits to future disruption, Hanania claims that many preexisting social trends and the basic structure of American constitutional government will remain unchanged. Far from inheriting a multipolar future, “the rest of the world . . . will continue to become more like us. There really isn’t any other option.”
As someone sympathetic to “normie theories of democracy,” I am pleased to see them acquire a strange new respect. And I think recent history has indicated some of the deeper resources within the United States’ constitutional settlement.
However, I might frame the matter differently: The democratic model is indeed more robust and resilient than some of its critics have alleged. The political freedoms of a republic do provide a method of internal self-regulation, and the habits of liberty can also protect the institutions that nurture virtue. However, this formulation is contingent and partial — it’s about the possibility of self-correction and of the framework being used rightly.
A few distinctions should be posed at the outset. The first is that between a democracy with robust civil liberties and some project of “liberalism” as the uncritical emancipation of the individual. Liberties and democracy both long predate this flavor of “liberalism” as an ideology, which is not the only mode of the “liberal.” The geopolitical power of the United States and its allies should also be distinguished from some “liberal” ideology and the practices of democracy.
One of the underappreciated elements of Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man was his attempt to combine a recognition of the tensions within modern democracy and the proposition that history moves in a certain general direction. In drawing attention to those tensions, Fukuyama participated in a tradition stretching at least as far back as Alexis de Tocqueville and Democracy in America, in the 19th century. For Tocqueville, keeping democracy vital and free demanded a play of contrasting forces. Democratic survival required maintaining the networks of solidarity that commerce and bureaucracies would ever seek to dissolve. A certain amount of latitude would keep tradition from collapsing into dogmatism, and ethical instruction would continually be required to tame the tendency toward atomism.
Fukuyama thought that the “rational recognition” provided by liberal democracy was likely stronger than the risk that those inherent tensions would lead to liberal collapse. Many critics of “liberalism” today make the opposite case when they argue that the tensions of “liberalism” will eventually cause its downfall. Even Fukuyama by the end of The End of History and the Last Man finds that there might be something dissatisfying about history’s end — a flattening of the person and a loss of vital power. In a recent “crisis of illiberalism” column, Ross Douthat alludes to that prospect of uneasiness within liberal modernity.
So it might be worth returning to that question of tensions, not to indulge in despair but rather to explore the incomplete character of democratic life. I’ll put to the side questions of geopolitics and look instead at the domestic.
As has been long recognized, one of the great challenges to a democratic regime is that it can decay from within. The protection of democratic freedom depends on deeper ethical and social capital as well as on a balance of economic, social, and political forces. Even well-intentioned power that grows too dominant can threaten the underlying architecture of liberty. The fantastic might of Gilded Age “robber barons” risked the creation of a patchwork of corporate feudalism. In the 21st century, activists have captured some of the key mediating platforms of the digital economy. Efforts to ban “misinformation” on digital platforms could allow for tremendous corporate intervention in the democratic process, and the threat of digital unpersoning could very well pose its own dangers to freedom. A recently announced (and then hastily retracted) PayPal policy that would have fined users $2,500 for circulating “misinformation” is a portent of the kind of centralized control possible in the digital age.
The United States faces other internal challenges. Escalating polarization has led to new attacks on the legitimacy of American institutions. Efforts to delegitimize presidential elections, pack the courts, and nuke regular order in the Senate all testify to the growing strains on the American political order. In recent years, a revulsion from populism has sometimes been twinned with an appetite for a prosecutorial leviathan to target political opponents. The increasing popularization of lawfare to settle political disputes gives an ominous tinge to President Biden’s claim that “MAGA Republicans” (a category that he has not rigorously defined) are intent on “destroying American democracy.”
The coronavirus pandemic suggested the limits of a neoliberal political framing. Supply chains and domestic productive capacity are not merely fodder for statistics — material networks are an important policy consideration. The hard trade-offs demanded by a crisis show that questions of the common good cannot ultimately be escaped.
In addition to showing the insufficiencies of neoliberalism, the pandemic also revealed a broader challenge to the practices of freedom. The annus horribilis of 2020 demonstrated a dramatic shift away from the norms — of pluralism, tolerance, limited government, and civic order — that buttress a free society. A series of emergency measures to combat Covid detonated a neutron bomb on civil society. And many prominent figures called for even more-stringent containment efforts. In a viral July 2020 Twitter thread, Andy Slavitt, who later became a senior Covid adviser to the Biden White House, called for an unprecedented lockdown that would last for weeks. This “90% lockdown” would entail the closure of most businesses, transit, and churches as well as a ban on interstate travel. In this same thread, Slavitt argued that Covid-containment policies could be indefinite: “Communities would have green, yellow, orange & red days so we would know how to take precautions. Both before and after a vaccine. For as long as necessary.”
The same voices calling for a sustained shutdown of civic and economic life then cheered a “reckoning” characterized by mass mobilization in the streets. The need to combat “misinformation” about the pandemic led to a cottage industry for pro-censorship panels and think-piece writers. (That such “misinformation” would later become accepted as truth only adds to the irony of the attempts to suppress democratic debate.)
It’s true that Covid in early 2020 was a genuine public-health emergency. Especially in the early days of the pandemic, it was not entirely clear how lethal the disease would be, and the long-term consequences of infection were also opaque. But calls for growing interventions continued long after the first few months. Covid policy got sucked into the radical factional conflict driving American politics.
In 2021, the United States began to edge toward imposing a biomedical-surveillance regime. A “vaccine passport” system would have represented a pivot away from the openness and freedom of movement traditionally associated with democratic liberties. Having to present a QR code when entering a restaurant, store, or public building would have laid the groundwork for a regime of coordinated surveillance unprecedented in American life or, frankly, the life of any free society. The omnipresence of such a passport regime would be qualitatively different from a Social Security number or requirements to show a passport or driver’s license to fly. Likewise, the constant scanning of some vaccine passport would be dramatically different from pre-Covid vaccine requirements for public schools. By October 2022, many of these passport programs had been rolled back, but there was great political energy behind them among some portions of the American elite.
Countless thinkers have outlined the tensions between a revolutionary “reckoning” and ordered liberty, and I need not belabor the arguments here. Suffice it to say that it does not bode well for the rule of law if American lawyers begin to internalize the narrative that the wrong sorts of people do not deserve legal representation.
American democracy has mechanisms for coping with these challenges. The heterogeneity of the federal system in the United States allowed for nodes of resistance to the most draconian Covid policies. In Where Are We Now?, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben saw in the pandemic’s extended state of exception a grave challenge to “bourgeois democracy founded on constitutions, on rights, on parliaments, and on the division of powers.” The fervor of Agamben’s denunciation of Covid-containment policies perhaps grows more understandable when one takes into account the stringency of many lockdowns in Europe. Yet Europe, too, has rolled back much of the surveillance and coercion infrastructure erected under Covid. Many Asian democracies have also relaxed Covid restrictions. No democracy could maintain a “zero-Covid” policy indefinitely, and an indefinite “zero-Covid” strategy would threaten to impose grave economic pain and social dislocation. All this speaks to the capacity of democratic governance to shift away from emergency politics to some kind of normalcy. (However, one might note with some wariness the impulse among some of the political class to portray politics as an endless succession of states of exception — from the pandemic to threats posed by domestic enemies of “our democracy,” for instance.)
Likewise, policy-makers can attempt to disrupt the concentration of power in the digital sphere. The economic frustrations of recent decades have begun to prompt new interest in reviving American manufacturing. The attempt to impose a “reckoning” in public schools has ignited new efforts at parental engagement. Behavior that continually transgresses the mainstream norms of American society eventually exacts a significant political cost. Donald Trump’s continued provocations kneecapped his administration, and Joe Biden has delighted some progressive activists but also alienated many Americans.
One of the striking things about many of the recent risks to freedom is that they seem to be deformations of understandable impulses. Government does in part exist to promote security and safety — but a view of politics that reduces human life merely to “bare life” could also create a justification for tyranny. A deeper sense of human flourishing is needed, one that incorporates both survival and various virtues. Democratic life does provide a mechanism for channeling political conflicts, but conflict that becomes too fervid can itself threaten democracy. Charity, patience, and a shared sense of national commitment (“we’re all in this together”) can help temper those disruptive partisan animosities.
This suggests that renewing contemporary liberty and democracy involves going beyond questions of autonomy and the policy consensus circa 1989. In his most recent book, Liberalism and Its Discontents, Fukuyama argues that neoliberalism failed because it exaggerated some aspects of the “liberal” tradition at the expense of others. Various off-liberal routes offer a way of seeing freedom as founded not on the triumphant will but instead on our commitments to others and our need for a greater ethical order. Recovering the fuller resources of human fellowship and self-government could help reinforce the resilience of contemporary democracy.