In a recent exchange on the fate of liberal democracy, British historian Niall Ferguson and the Canadian scholar-politician Michael Ignatieff offered almost diametrically opposed views of the short-term political future. Both acknowledged democracy’s retreat in the new century, but one heard a death knell while the other noticed only a series of temporary setbacks.
Ferguson argues that although some measures of global freedom have been stable for the last 20 years – Freedom House deems roughly 45 percent of the world “free”, 30 percent “partly free” – current trends suggest that there has been a steady decline in liberal democracy. Illiberal demagogues have come to power in places like Russia, Turkey and Venezuela; several mature democracies face “mind-boggling amounts of debt” (in the US “total public and private liabilities … are approaching 1,000 per cent of Gross Domestic Product”), and divisive politics has flourished on digital platforms, which “incentivize extreme views and fake news, and hollow out the centre ground of politics.”
Ignatieff counters with the idea that liberal institutions ought to endure precisely because they were built to absorb, and outlast, such crises. Far from being evidence of weakness, impeachment and the Brexit election show that liberal democracies can still “restrain and control and check, and occasionally punish arbitrary power” or settle “a fundamental disagreement” peacefully. Illiberal rulers may seem entrenched in China, Russia, Hungary and Turkey, but all of their regimes share the “critical weakness” of imminent discontinuity. “What comes after Xi Jinping?” asks Ignatieff: “No one knows. What comes after Putin? No one knows. What comes after Orbán? No one knows. What comes after Erdogan? No one knows.” Free societies, by contrast, can continuously course correct through elections in which “rascals get thrown out, new rascals get elected, and on we go.”
Fledgling democracies, several of them in Latin America and the Caribbean, face all of the challenges that Ferguson and Ignatieff refer to. In recent decades, both right- and left-leaning leaders have imposed a range of economic follies on credulous voters, and often exacerbated ethnic, social and political tensions. Periodic violence and disorder has occasionally filled the resulting power vacuums, and bequeathed cultures of corruption and impunity. But it feels premature to write an epitaph for liberal democracy, so long as Ignatieff’s questions remain unanswered, perhaps unanswerable.
Although little on either side of the Atlantic suggests that liberal democracy will soon recoup its recent losses, the fact that Brexit-era Britain has redefined itself through three general elections and Trump faces a competitive election later this year is proof that however uncertain the global future of liberal democracy may be, it is still inseparable from the political culture of the free world. As we ourselves gear up for another general election, that is something worth remembering, and protecting.
