The Irony at the End of History
The Irony at the End of History
A critic of liberalism argues that, in a way, we are all liberals now.
Francis Fukuyama was right. His original argument about history moving with purpose and intent towards something conclusive has grown more prescient with time. In a recent essay, Fukuyama reminded readers that it is still the end of history, despite everything. With China and Russia facing existential headwinds, the authoritarian alternative has lost its luster. There is nothing new under the sun.
But there’s a wrinkle. Liberal democracy’s apparent victory comes at an odd time. Victory has not led to a revival of the faith. If anything, it’s the opposite. What has come to be called “post-liberalism” is spreading across the West, in the very places where the liberal idea was born. If liberalism itself is being called into doubt, then what sort of victory are we talking about?
One might call it the irony at the end of history. Just as liberal democracy appears weak, so do its alternatives. This is the paradox of liberalism—its strengths and weaknesses are entangled, making it hard to judge whether it is failing due to its very success, or succeeding despite itself.
To make sense of these tensions, we need to break liberal democracy down into its constituent parts. What if the apparent strength of liberal democracy has less to do with the “liberal” part and more to do with the “democratic” part? Indeed, as illiberal far-right parties continue making gains across the globe, liberalism gives off a rarified air, increasingly out of step with who we are and who we want to be. Democracy, on the other hand, is surprisingly resilient, while democracy’s alternatives have demonstrated even more bankruptcy than usual. China is the “best case” scenario for smart and streamlined dictatorship, but even that best case has been collapsing under its own contradictions.
It didn’t used to be like this. There was a time when democracy seemed boring. Political scientists lamented the apathy and indifference of democratic citizens. Today, apathy doesn’t seem to be the problem. Across Western democracies, political engagement and excitement are rising. If anything, there is too much excitement.
But looked at through an optimist’s eyes, vigorous debate—and the polarization that results—is not an indictment of a democracy, but rather evidence that democracy is doing what it should. In the U.S. midterms, worst-case scenarios of democracy dying—to the extent they were ever plausible—did not come to pass. Trump-endorsed election deniers failed spectacularly. When the results came in, most of the GOP’s furthest-right candidates readily conceded.
Meanwhile, across European democracies, old parties are being voted out and new parties, including radical ones, are being voted in. This means that voters are holding incumbents accountable at the ballot box, however inelegantly. We might wish that they did so by voting for “moderate” or centrist parties, but if you’re angry with the way things are, you’re probably going to vote for the way things aren’t. In Italy and Sweden, rising far-right parties are disturbingly anti-immigrant and specifically anti-Muslim, but they have not yet said or done anything to suggest a desire to dismantle democracy as we know it.
You might also like “Francis Fukuyama’s Defense of Liberalism.”
In my new book The Problem of Democracy, I propose what I call “democratic minimalism” as a way of thinking through democratic dilemmas and perhaps even resolving them. For too long, we have projected too much onto the democratic idea, transforming it into something elusive, remote, and nearly mystical. This is not a burden it should have to carry. Instead of conflating liberalism with democracy, it is time to do the work of disentangling democracy (with its emphasis on procedural mechanisms of conflict management through regular elections) from liberalism (with its prioritization of individual freedoms, personal autonomy, minority rights, and a constrained role for public religion).
Of course, it’s not a clean or indiscriminate uncoupling. Democracy—even in minimalist form—requires some liberalism; it’s just a question of what kind. Political liberalism—guaranteeing the right to vote, hold protests, form political parties, and criticize the government—is different from cultural or religious liberalism, which is about expressing a particular conception of the Good. The former is generally concerned with means, while the latter is concerned with ends.
This can help us conceptualize the threat of illiberalism more clearly. For example, laws restricting the right to consume alcohol, have an abortion, or insult prophets and divine texts are about ends, while a law that prohibits public gatherings of more than 100 people is about means. For those who wish to see democracy succeed, political rather than cultural illiberalism is the bigger threat, since it undermines the fairness of electoral competition and makes it harder for the opposition to oppose.
If democracy is doing better than expected—demonstrating its resilience just as the standard-bearers of autocracy enter into decline—then it makes sense to double down on minimalism. Not anything goes, but most anything should go within the context of a democratic process and constitutional framework that protects the “right to recourse,” which would include various basic protections for freedom of association and expression. Without that, opposition parties would not be able to make their case to voters in subsequent elections. Even if you accept this more permissive approach to majoritarianism, it still includes quite a bit of liberalism. In a recent back-and-forth, this is precisely the argument that Fukuyama made to me. And he had a point.
This has major implications for how and whether history discovers its own conclusion. If a minimalist conception of democracy still requires a certain kind of liberalism, then illiberal and post-liberal parties are stuck in a world not of their own making.
They are indelibly constrained by the very system that empowers them. Diverse and divided democracies—and Western democracies today are becoming more rather than less diverse—are simply too fragmented for enough non-liberals to agree on viable alternatives. Even when post-liberal alternatives are effectively theorized and developed, it is difficult for them to win enough elections, by large enough margins, to significantly alter the ideological structure of society and state. So, post-liberals are stuck.
But so is everyone else. As a liberal who is critical of liberalism, I find myself coming to terms, reluctantly, with the fact of being trapped. The problem with liberalism is that it’s not actually all that great. Overwhelmed by endless free choice, we struggle to find purpose and belonging. Yet despite liberalism’s weaknesses, or perhaps because of them, we can’t imagine living without it. I certainly can’t.
Shadi Hamid is the author of the new book 'The Problem of Democracy.' He is a senior fellow at Brookings, a research professor of Islamic studies at Fuller Seminary, and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He is also co-founder of Wisdom of Crowds.
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What an incoherent argument. Democracy began to seem boring? To WHOM?!?
Honestly, this argument does not hold water in too many respects. From a celebrated fellow of the Brookings Institute I would expect better.
"history moving with purpose and intent towards something conclusive" ? I do not recall Fukuyama using those words in his book, although there is a similarity of concepts. But there's the rub, which was the rub in Fukuyama's book too, ultimately: you speak of History as though it were an entity with agency. It is not. Conferring agency to abstract entities is the flaw of Hegelian idealism, which ultimately derives from Plato and brings into the 'lay' observation of the world interpretative tools that belong to religious thought, to the belief in superhuman forces that guide the course of human experience.
Alas. As any historian in good faith can tell you, History has no agency of its own. There is no "purpose and intent", which are ridiculous concepts better suited to a deity. History is a jumble of the agencies of very real and tangible entities (humans and the fluid groups they form) conflicting over their very real and tangible perceived interests.
No arrow of progress. No continual evolution towards better (real Evolution has no agency either... organisms evolve by adapting to circumstances limited in space and time, and what works at a certain time and in a certain place is very likely to be tragically unhelpful to survival at a different time under different conditions -- like a good friend who is a professor of genetics repeats often, 'in the course of evolution, the normal state of species is EXTINCT'). We do not progress towards better: we change; the subsequent state may be exceptionally worse for a great number -- but it is different. Struggling to keep what we value never comes to an end.
History will go on forever -- I have news for you: there have been systems of government that did, in the course of the last 4000 years, last for a millennium or more virtually unchanged. Globalisation has reshuffled the cards, and brought to preeminence the system born in the West with the Industrial Revolution... a mere 300 years since its first baby wail, 150 years since Gladstone and the Liberal party, some 100 years since universal suffrage was first implemented. It is a darn short time, historically, to declare persistence... even more so the end of change.
"Trump-endorsed election deniers failed spectacularly." I love this statement in particular. If for you a loss by extremely slight margin is a spectacular loss, I congratulate you on the efficacy of your rosy-coloured glasses. Your country is steadily moving, on one side, by several State laws and gimmicks to restrict universal suffrage or at least the exercise of voting rights, while on the other side it resuscitated the crime of thought and delights in witch hunts worth of Cromwell's committees. There may be some signs of a shift towards reason, in some places and fields, but they are small. There is nothing spectacular about it.
"it is time to do the work of disentangling democracy (with its emphasis on procedural mechanisms of conflict management through regular elections) from liberalism (with its prioritization of individual freedoms, personal autonomy, minority rights, and a constrained role for public religion)"
Now you will have to explain how is it possible to maintain the first without the latter. Because the procedural mechanisms need, to be implemented, that people believe in their value. It takes acknowledgement of the superior value of individual freedom, to safeguard the freedom of expressing opinions and organising into parties/pressure groups/political entities. It takes commitment to safeguard personal autonomy to enforce the equality of all citizens in exercising their right of association (not, for example, like we did once, having the man vote for the wife, or the poor not vote at all). It takes belief in the value of exercising of civil rights also by minorities, in order to prevent minorities from being excluded from democracy. And it takes a staunch position on the separation of church and state in order to prevent a religion from suppressing all the other religions and removing the civil rights of their adherents and whoever disagrees.
One might want to recall, to cite a trite historical fact that is still too easily forgotten, that the National Socialist Party of Germany was voted in with a strong relative majority (44% of the vote in the last free election in 1933) -- we are used to think that authoritarian systems only come to power through violent revolutions, but it is not always the case; they also come to power in times of deep social unrest, through democratic means.
The problem is what these illiberal parties, which have the support of a significant part of the population) do once they are in power. And their strategy is always to dismantle those "procedural mechanisms of conflict management through regular elections", that is democracy even by your restrictive definition. Inevitably, their goal is to prevent their opponents from expressing dissent, organising consensus and challenging their power. They progress towards increasingly rigged electoral systems, ban opposition parties, and arrive at a totalitarian state, more or less efficient and therefore more or less long-lived.
And the damage that they do to democratic institutions is immense and hard to recover from. Spain, Chile, others, having recovered from awful dictatorships in a bloodless manner, have struggled for a long time, or are still struggling, with the poisoning suffered by all those values that you would like to 'disentangle' from democracy. The European countries come out of the old Soviet Bloc, many of which were rather established democracies before the Soviet era, have been struggling with similar problems, with greater or smaller success.
There is very little to be triumphant about. Although an optimism of the will is salutary, a pessimism of reason comes inevitably from what we see. And a minimalist definition of democracy is not a solution, rather I am afraid would be the paper screen to its death.
For if some of the autocracies that exist seem to have problems, in this last few years, this is far from an established trend -- Russia, the great revenant, is just now sinking deep into its illiberal hell, and it has nukes, and is unleashing on the world famine and recession; China is still in the run for top economic power in the world. And others fare quite well -- see all the totalitarian theocracies in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, where the "procedural mechanisms of conflict management through regular elections" are ridiculous shams, not just because of intimidation and fraud, but because of the nullification of the premises to holding democratic elections, which are freedom of association and freedom of expressing dissent.
I am afraid that with your minimalist definition, the system that existed in the USSR, or that in existence in the Republic of Iran, comfortably would qualify for democracy: after all they have a parliament and hold elections, all of which surely has a lot of neat procedural mechanisms in place. Who cares about the excluded, right?
The problem is that the excluded, the forced and the suppressed are always ticking bombs: and while they may not produce regime changes, they sure guarantee a future of ugly bloodbaths.
We were better off when we believed that elimination of arrant poverty and increased per capita wealth would de facto bring about liberal democracy and its entailed freedoms. At least it was a theory based on what had actually happened in a number of what were later to be called developed countries, following the Industrial Revolution.