Democracy in Crisis: The Neoliberal Roots of Popular Unrest

Abstract

The past three decades have not been kind to liberal democracy. In the aftermath of the Cold War, a considerable body of opinion held that the West’s victory marked the final triumph of liberal universalism over its enemies. Exemplified by Francis Fukuyama’s famous invocation of the ‘‘end of history,’’ this optimistic assessment fed expectations of a new international order built on free markets, democracy, and individual rights. Today, however, such triumphalism seems hopelessly naı̈ve. Across the globe, the liberal order has come under increasing strain in recent years. In the West, democratic politics has become increasingly polarized since the 2008 financial crisis, feeding the rise of a growing collection of populist parties and movements, from Greece’s Syriza and Spain’s Podemos on the left, to the extreme right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France. In 2016, fears of an authoritarian backlash against globalization seemed to be confirmed with the passage of the U.K.’s Brexit referendum and the shock victory of Republican Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election. This is the backdrop for Boris Vormann and Christian Lammert’s book, Democracy in Crisis: The Neoliberal Roots of Popular Unrest. First published in German in 2017, and now translated into English, the book situates these developments in what it describes as a long-term crisis of ‘‘depoliticization.’’ Over the past five decades, Vormann and Lammert argue, democracy has gradually been hollowed out by neoliberal globalization. This process has given rise to a ‘‘politics of no alternatives,’’ in which the imperatives of democratic government are increasingly subordinated to the economic logic of the market. For the authors, the emergence of this ‘‘politics of no alternatives’’ reflects a political and ideological crisis of liberalism, which they define as ‘‘a worldview that . . . accords high priority to the market mechanism as a means of preventing the centralization of state power and protecting the rights of individuals’’ (p. 11). Gradually, however, ‘‘the economic philosophy of markets’’ has displaced the original aims of political liberalism. The roots of this shift lie in the collapse of the postwar ‘‘Fordist compromise’’ during the 1970s. Resting on an agreement between the state, capital, and labor, that compromise facilitated three decades of economic growth and rising social mobility. Vormann and Lammert only briefly touch on the reasons for its collapse (such as technological change, the breakdown of the Bretton Woods global monetary system, and the emergence of ‘‘stagflation’’). But they see this as the context for an attack on the redistributive policies of postwar governments by free-market ideologues and political leaders. The result has been a long-term shift in the balance between market and society, manifested in rising inequality, declining social mobility, and falling public trust in government. For the authors, these developments lie at the heart of democracy’s present crisis. Rejecting the notion that this was an inevitable consequence of globalization, they argue that globalization was itself part of a broader political project carried out by national governments. That project reflected an emerging political consensus, which held that the economic priorities of the market should take precedence over the needs of citizens. Embodied in the slogan ‘‘there is no alternative,’’ this consensus drove a ‘‘depoliticized’’ approach to democratic government, exemplified by the technocratic centrism of the ‘‘Third Way.’’ This account of the crisis is indicative of the influence of Karl Polanyi on the authors’ thinking. Like Polanyi, they view markets as politically constituted and socially embedded. Their neo-Polanyian framework is central to their understanding of contemporary populism. For Vormann and Reviews 185