Giancarlo Bosetti
The purpose of this meeting is to examine a complex problem, the troubling health of liberal democracies, with the concurrence of several disciplines. It is an essentially political problem: why liberal democracies (primarily those of North America and Western Europe) are failing to deliver the performance of which until not so long ago they were capable, and why the discontent they are producing is increasingly manifesting itself in extreme forms that tend to push outside the boundaries of the system. This is a complexity that therefore calls for everyone to contribute not only with his or her specialized knowledge, but possibly by looking out over the border to other disciplines. General thoughts are needed. Kant would call this the “public use” of reason. There needs to be a collaborative effort, but there also needs to be a challenge, as is required of knowledgeable citizens, to step out of one’s specialized area of expertise. This was done, for example, by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, in an article in the New York Times, corroborated by the support of several essays.[1]
There are evidently reasons of a different nature, economic, social, cultural, political, and geopolitical, why liberal-democracies no longer seem able to meet the expectations of their voters, who tend to abandon the ballot box to an increasing extent or express their anger in problematic, anti-political, extreme and even subversive forms of the given order. There are polls that show disaffection for democratic systems; extreme, nationalist or variously radical electoral lists are successful, manifesting a clear rejection of liberal elites, from Brexit to Trump, from the growth of neo-Nazi or variously nostalgic lists of fascism, to popular protests, from gilets jaunes, to farmers and truckers against green policies, and again the no-vax movements, as if environmental or pandemic issues were inventions of elites to subdue the masses.
The curve of global democratic deterioration is clear: The number of countries moving toward democracy “skyrocketed after 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall reaching its peak in 1992, when 70 countries were democratizing at the same time. But the number then plummeted to 29 in 1997 sliding down to 14 by 2017, which was the lowest point in 50 years. In 2023, there are a few more – 18 countries – in an ongoing episode of democratization. 42 countries are currently in ongoing episodes of autocratization. 28 of the 42 autocratizers were democracies at the start of this phase. Of these 28 only about half, or 15, remain democracies in 2023.”[2]
The V-Dem Deliberative Component Index (DCI) captures to what extent the deliberative principle of democracy is achieved. It assesses the process by which decisions are reached in a polity.[3]
These indicators show a peak in quality in 1995 and then the beginning of a slow decline in 2000, more pronounced since 2010.
The same deteriorative process also characterizes the indicators of freedom and participation over the past fifteen years, accompanied by an increase in political polarization, which taken to the extreme severely erodes or erases the deliberative component. There is, in short, for the eighth consecutive year a global recession of democracy; in the past five years, almost half (47 percent) of countries have experienced a decline in democratic indicators. Between 2020 and 2024, in almost one in five elections, a defeated candidate or party has rejected the election result, and at almost the same rate, elections are being decided by court appeals. (See also International Idea, The Global State of Democracy 2024).[4] The year 2023 saw the worst decline in the indicator of election credibility and parliamentary control, due to government intimidation, foreign interference, misinformation and misuse of artificial intelligence in election campaigns.
The way people engage in electoral processes has also changed in recent decades: voter turnout has decreased from 65.2 percent in 2008 to 55.5 percent in 2023, while the incidence of protests and riots has increased. As Sam van der Staak, director of International IDEA’s Europe Region Program, reports, one of the main problems at the European level is the increasing polarization of politics. Although countries such as Spain, Greece, Portugal and the United Kingdom are still functioning and all in all healthy democracies, “you can see that in some parts of the system things are cracking. And this is often due to politics that is putting a lot of pressure on the functioning of democracy.”
Pressures on democracy are not only coming from within but also from external actors, such as Russia. Moscow and other authoritarian powers would be trying to exploit the weakness of our democratic systems to their own advantage, exacerbating widespread discontent among the population.
Contributing to the liberal democracy’s dangerous malaise are several factors that I try to summarily list: economic discontent, the loss of household purchasing power in both Europe and America, the pronounced decline of wages in real terms over the past three decades, geopolitical changes with the globalization of financial markets, manufacturing relocations, large migrations and waves of refugees, the weight of pandemic, wars, which have exacerbated polarization and extremism. We add political and cultural-political phenomena such as the green backlash, i.e., the unpopularity of policies to reduce emissions; the nationalistic and identity tensions; the culture wars around minorities, and the alleged excesses of minority protection, from the disabled to foreigners; anti-Semitism, anti-Islamism, the most varied forms of racism and intolerance; the partisan emphasis on wokeness and political correctness as denigratory labels against all liberal policies. We have in the background more or less silent majorities, increasingly less silent, I would say, as the result among other things of changes in family, in reproductive choices, sexual habits, in religious traditions that hurt a part of the population struggling to adapt. These changes produce sometimes violent and vulgar reactions (such as: discrimination of homosexuals and different people of all kinds), but also an ambitious literature that presents the white heterosexual Christian man as “the real victim of our time” (to name no names Pascal Bruckner in France) and the West as the victim of itself, of its own cowardice, its inability to enjoy the inheritance of its own merits, its pride in its own civilization, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, in the benefits of modernity and science, to be lived without complexes, in every sense. As if the ability to critically discern the history of these advances, the lights but also the dark pages (colonialism, slavery, oppression, genocide) was not also an important, distinctive merit to be claimed.
So, we have to look at aspects of the malaise of liberal democracies that have social, economic, cultural but also psychological roots and that combine to produce a situation that threatens their life. Naturally, illiberal leaders are on the scene to espouse this malaise and make it the guiding principle of a nostalgic agenda, give us back our great country, give us back the cohesion of the old rural life, of patriarchal, united and supportive families, inspiring a romantic vision, to which, however, corresponded in reality a subjugation of women and even children under conditions similar to servitude. The path of liberalism in its long journey to emancipate the individual, from the power of the patriarch, from the bonds of community, from the obligations of serfdom, and even from the bonds of religious order through a long secularization has brought immense benefits in the societies where it has been most successful, it has brought about changes that are being challenged today in other respects from a post-secular or communal perspective (Habermas, Taylor, Sandel, Böckenförde: the liberal state lives on premises that it is unable to reproduce, because if it did it would belie its liberal nature of neutrality toward a specific model of the good life). To that outlook you can bring closer the more recent writing of Yuval Levin (If you weaken family, faith, community, nation, where does the moral formation come from? You cannot enjoy responsibly freedom, without that preparation that liberal thinkers are always taking for granted).[5] These deficits include the loss of common protective factors, the increase in individual isolation, the weakening of generational knowledge transfer, as if a heightened neutrality toward moral choices and attachment, to family, community, homeland, and one’s own history, prevented the handing over to new generations some defined moral baggage. And as if pluralism of values prevents any value judgment from being pronounced. Widely and successfully applied here is the critique of liberal universalism by the positions of communitarian liberalism, right and left, as well as the critique of post-liberal thinkers.
The decline and/or disappearance of mass parties is also the fruit of this process of disenchantment, to the extent that what remains of them on the scene still appears, especially in several European countries as the remnant of a bygone era. The alternative forms of partisan engagement that emerged from it have already largely run their season and in several cases have already fully shown an outcome of delusion and disappointment.[6] A politics withered and deprived of partisan ideologies seems to find itself bereft of normative resources once rooted in family and religious traditions, and even in the old mass parties. This has made it more difficult to envision a future-oriented politics that balances individualism with solidarity and that is capable of orienting the gaze to the future, capable of generativity, capable of inspiring the will to transmit values and principles to new generations. Communitarian criticism of liberalism is growing, while extremist attacks on elites are becoming louder and more hostile.
If this unhealthy situation arises from discontent, anger and frustration because, after nearly two decades of clear and strong malaise, we do not see the desired corrections and changes coming, the question is: why are liberal and democratic elites failing to respond adequately? Why do they appear deaf to the needs and fears of the many?
Is it enough, and right? as an answer to say that the structures and dynamics of financialized capitalism put such pressure on democratic politics as to undermine its credibility and “governing capacity”? This vast incapacity to “get things done,” that is widely perceived and (irrationally) responded to by populist and authoritarian movements, can deserve other answers?
In addition to the objective nature of the problems and the economic dynamics that disproportionately reward a narrow oligarchy of the few, the culture of the ruling class is also open to question. How was it possible that meritocratic principles designed and sometimes applied to promote upward social mobility became the target of a resentment that fuels political life explosively by rewarding the preachers of a populism that thrives on anti-elite rhetoric.
It is necessary to face the onslaught of critics who claim that liberal democracy is itself incapable of offering an inclusive political discourse, that liberalism shows in practice that it is incapable of an inclusiveness that can absorb fears and frustrations. It is necessary to do so even if the rhetoric of these critics do not seem capable of turning into evidence of effective governance but are prone to abandon democratic terrain, to push toward authoritarian regimes. The only really obvious effectiveness of this populist wave is in sharpening the divide between educated elites and general populace, as seen in the United States, where a lower level of education is the biggest predictor of voting for Trump. Some postliberal critics have gone so far as to argue that the growing inequality between wealthy minorities and the bulk of the population now shows that it can produce a hostility and rejection “by the many toward the few” great as, but more painful than, the historic divide between the aristocracy and the subjects of the ancien régime, because the “liberalocrats” of our time have been educated “in a deep self-deception that they were not a new aristocracy but the very opposite of an aristocratic order” (Patrick Deneen).[7] A provocative hyperbole (only?) that highlights the need to reconsider the whole state of affairs in the most successful liberal societies and also to put under scrutiny the cultural and educational frameworks shaping today’s liberal, economic and political elites, who seem unable to focus on the problem. The fall of social mobility has indeed created a crystallization of differences in income, status, habitus and culture to the extent that it legitimizes the question of whether social differences are not taking on the nature of caste. This is a question that deserves to be explored and in the face of which it is right to think about ideas, programs, and policies that aim to reduce the chasm between elites and millions of workers of all kinds. A goal that could be the core of that course correction that seems indispensable, as the beginning of a general new course in the life of liberal democracies, before their crisis reaches a stage of no return.
[1] D.Acemoglu, J.Robinson, Our Solution to the Crisis od Democracy, 2024 July 19, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/19/opinion/inequality-democracy-trump-solutions.html
[2] V-dem.net, Report 2024
[3] A deliberative process is one in which public reasoning, focused on the common good, motivates political decisions – as contrasted with emotional appeals, solidary attachments, parochial interests or coercion. According to this principle, democracy requires more than an aggregation of existing preferences. There should also be respectful dialogue at all levels – from preference formation to final decision – among informed and competent participants who are open to persuasion. V-dem.net, Report 2024. https://v-dem.net/documents/43/v-dem_dr2024_lowres.pdf
[4] https://www.idea.int/gsod/gsod#gsodreports
[5] https://www.firstthings.com/article/2014/10/taking-the-long-way
[6] Lea Ypi, Jonathan White, The Meaning of Partisanship, Oxford 2016
[7] Deneen, Patrick J. Why Liberalism Failed, (Politics and Culture). Yale University Press, 2018, p.152