Retreat of Western Liberalism

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce, 204 pages

In 1989, the world experienced one of the greatest revolutions in human history.  After decades of oppression and mass murder, the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union crumbled with barely a shot being fired.  Marxism, which had inspired human suffering on a scale entirely without parallel, was seemingly consigned to "the ash-heap of history" overnight, and globally even those dictatorships that remained justified themselves in the language of capitalism and democracy.  The ideological wars which had raged since the French Revolution had finally ended, and liberalism had won.

Nearly thirty years later, the picture is decidedly different.  China, the rising superpower, remains a one-party state despite economic reforms.  A resurgent Russia is once again a dictatorship in all but name.  Throughout the world, the belief that progress and prosperity are dependent upon an acceptance of Western values has been abandoned.  In the West, the "New World Order" consensus has been cracked, if not broken, by the unexpected electoral victories of Brexit and Donald Trump.  Right wing nationalist populists have grown in power and prominence, while the left increasingly places its faith in a technocratic "managed democracy".

Of course, it is important not to place too much faith in trends: in the '70s, the West was in terminal crisis; in the '80s, communism and capitalism were converging, and neither could conceivably win a "victory" over the other; in the '90s, again, liberal capitalism was everywhere triumphant.  Only a fool believes that a pendulum will never reverse course.  At the same time, it is easy to miss the significance of a historical moment.  Unfortunately, Edward Luce's analysis of our current moment is handicapped by an acute case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.  Although he knows intellectually that Trump is a symptom rather than a cause, the substantial bulk of the book focuses on the current president, reaching absurd heights in a prolonged, pointless fantasy in which Luce has Trump incite a war with China.  While he is highly critical of global elites for being insulated from the concerns of ordinary people, Luce nonetheless somehow seems to imagine them to be the guardians of liberal values.  As a result, he hints darkly about the possible necessity of limiting democracy and restricting free speech, all in the interest of saving classical liberalism from demagogic populism.  

In the end, Luce combines the weaknesses of an economist with those of a journalist.   Although he understands the significance of a loss of civility and social trust, he diagnoses these as primarily the result of economic stagnation - from this perspective, the Information Revolution is an economic shift comparable to the Industrial Revolution, and therefore just as disruptive to settled ways of life, but nothing time and prosperity (and new social programs) cannot cure.  Meanwhile, his journalistic ahistoricism erases decades of attacks on Western values and the institutions that embody them.  For these reasons, he is unable to understand the cause of the collapse of the West's civilizational confidence, and therefore also unable to suggest real solutions.