The crisis of liberal democracy

It's still 'we the people', right?

If you’re on social media, you’ve probably marvelled at the latest piece of infrastructure built in China. The Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge straddles more than 2,000 feet above the Beipan river and spans 4,600 feet – there’s even a restaurant at the top, if that’s your thing. If that doesn’t impress you, there is also China’s cycling network and their futuristic new railway station.

China currently operates more than two-thirds of all high-speed rail on earth, with 48,000 kilometres of track now laid, and one can’t help but compare these achievements with notable fiascos in the West. In Britain we singularly failed to build a high-speed railway between our three largest cities, by no means the only project to suffer from spiralling costs; in the most notorious case, the application to build a tunnel across the Thames ran to almost £300 million. That’s just the application.

The same is true of construction across the English-speaking world, where judicial review and NIMBYism act as a block on infrastructure. California’s high-speed rail has been another noted debacle, to the extent that the French company responsible just gave up and focussed on a project in North Africa instead.

It is not a coincidence that this problem is so much worse in Common Law countries, whereas things are easier in France, where the notion of individual property rights is weaker; as one French mayor told a journalist, when asked about the letters of objection to a new railway and what happened to them - ‘dans la mer’. What was once a strength of the English-speaking world – its devotion to property rights and the rule of lawyers - has now become a weakness, but that could be said of many things.

It’s not just the Anglophone countries, however, and it’s not just with infrastructure - there is a far more general omnicrisis across the western liberal democracies, with similar problems facing them all: a worsening debt problem, a generational welfare Ponzi scheme, unaffordable housing, cities that look increasingly squalid and unsuited to families, widespread drug addiction, collapsing faith in shared institutions and unwelcome demographic change that has in turn spurred the rise of populism, polarisation and political instability. This has in turn heightened anxiety that liberal democracy is under threat, warnings of a new age of global illiberalism, but a more worrying thought might be that liberal democracy just isn’t working very well.

Winston Churchill famously said of democracy that it was ‘the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time’, and the 20th century certainly proved that theory. During that period liberal democracies did a much better job of enabling the pursuit of happiness than authoritarian or illiberal states, and not just on basic measures like ‘not killing millions of people’. One reason that liberal democracy won the 20^th century battle against both fascism and communism was that this system proved better at the economic growth necessary for military victory, but also ensured better decision-making and feedback mechanisms. As an extreme example, a German deserter who brought intelligence to the Soviets that the Nazis were going to invade was sent to Siberia: moral issues aside, that’s not a very good incentives system.

Today, liberal democracy’s obvious superiority doesn’t seem obviously true. With fascism and communism both in the dustbin of history, they now measure quite poorly when compared to a number of alternatives.

The basic function of any state is to ensure the long-term finances of the country, to defend its borders and to protect the population through law and order. You might also include a fourth factor, which is to ensure the posterity of its citizens. By all four measures, western liberal democracies have done poorly since the age of accelerated liberalism began in the 1990s. While there is angst about how illiberalism is winning, there doesn’t seem much reflection on how illiberal regimes, for all their faults, currently seem more effective at delivering those things.

Contrast the governance – a word that became significantly popular during the 1990s - of liberal western states with illiberal regimes like China, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and Hungary. I use illiberal in the broader sense; Hungary is far more liberal than China or the UAE and is also a democracy, whatever opponents of the regime claim (‘vote the fascists out!’) But it is the one western country which has notably rejected post-90s liberalism: it allows civil unions but not gay marriage, restricts what it regards as ‘LGBT propaganda’ aimed at children and, far more crucially, opposes the mass migration favoured by western European leaders. When American NGOs talk about fostering ‘democracy’ in Hungary, what they mean is getting the country on board with modern liberal shibboleths.

China is the world’s most powerful illiberal country, a one-party post-communist state that appears dystopian in many ways, controlled by a system of social credit and surveillance. Few people would choose to move there, yet there has been a notable vibe shift about the country in the last two or three years, and it’s become clear that the regime is better equipped at fixing its problems than was previously thought.

Photo via Wikipedia. Credit: Glabb

As an example, air pollution in Beijing was seen as totemic of this dystopian state, reflecting a rush to modernisation without any consideration for quality of life. Yet Beijing’s smog is basically fixed, and the number of annual clear days has gone from 13 to 300.

As Tom Ough recently wrote in UnHerd: ‘Long derided as a manufacturer merely of low-quality, imitative goods, China is threatening to lead the world in anti-aircraft drone swarms, humanoid robots, gun-toting robo-dogs, hypersonic fighter jets, and maglev hyperloops that will, sooner or later, make China’s existing network of high-speed trains look as rusty and decrepit as its antediluvian counterparts in Britain.’

One reason Ough cited for the new optimism about China is that the regime actually plans for the future: ‘Democracies are very good at industrial innovation, but less good at long-term industrial planning. China’s recent progress in AI is the fruit of a plan set down in 2017. I’m told that, a little later, the British government was warned by experts that it had a brief window in which to corner a new technology called a large language model. The government acknowledged the opportunity but did not act on it. Training runs multiplied in cost and Britain no longer has the option of getting ahead. A reinvigorated West, along the lines of the one envisaged in the Playbook, will need to relearn how to design, and stick to, far-sighted industrial plans.’

I’m not by any means a China-watcher, but everyone who understands the country says the same thing: that, after centuries of failure and humiliation, they are planning for the long-term.

Short-termism is a major problem with democracies, by their very nature. After the Ukraine War turned Britain’s energy problem into a crisis, an old video circulated of Nick Clegg from the early days of the coalition, in which the then deputy prime minister dismissed the idea of building nuclear reactors because we wouldn’t see the benefits until 2021 or 2022. It feels remarkable that someone running the United Kingdom should not consider even the medium term as his concern rather than, say, dealing with this week’s Westminster rigmarole. In the long term we’re all dead, as Keynes said, but our children and grandchildren won’t thank us for the attitude.

The absence of long-term thinking is also downstream of the biggest weakness of modern democracy: that in countries with sub-replacement fertility, they become a gerontocracy. Each generation is smaller than the one that went before, and is easily out-voted by forebears who vote for generous pensions, to the extent that in France pensioners take home more money than taxpayers.

The Conservative Party in particular came to attach itself to the older generation, and now it might not even outlive them. The older generation requires higher taxes to pay for pensions, they want their homes to increase in value and for the steady arrival of cheap workers from abroad to serve their care and hospitality needs: these are all against the interest of younger workers, who use few public services, are priced out by rising housing costs, and in some sectors see their wages suppressed by foreign competition. The necessity of buying off older voters with pensions and services has resulted in a debt spiral which is only going to get worse, ad which must end eventually. The problem with democracy is you end up running out of your grandchildren’s money.

Of course, no one wants to actually live in China – I certainly wouldn’t – and people vote with their feet, most of all to the United States. On the other hand, quite a few young Brits are heading to Dubai.

The UAE has increased its GDP ten-fold since 1985, and while it has oil, that is not a guarantee of success – Libya and Venezuela have plenty of natural resources, but that hasn’t helped them. Indeed, while ‘Dubai has transformed from an obscure fishing village into a city of global significance’, oil revenues contribute less than 1 per cent of its GDP today.

One reason that increasing numbers of young Britons are moving to Dubai is because of a level of civility which western democracies seem unable to provide. The city has robbery rates one-hundredth that of London, for instance, and I’m not alone in finding it embarrassing to read about Anglophile Gulf Arabs coming to our capital and finding themselves victims of crime.

The UAE is authoritarian in ways that are distasteful to western sensibilities; criticism of the government will get you in trouble, public indecency of any sort will result in jail, and gay rights are obviously non-existent. Its punishments for drug offences are draconian. But most people don’t engage in activities likely to get them in trouble over these issues (and I have even heard of gay Britons moving there, although it can’t be that many). These human rights infringements affect most people far less than the infringements caused by persistent crime. The freedom to walk around with jewellery is ultimately a more important and basic human right than those commonly cited by human rights lawyers.

The UAE also, notably, favours its own citizens. It has a large-scale migrant programme but it is purely for the benefit of the natives, and there is no pathway to citizenship for guest workers. Illiberal states are able to employ these guest worker system as they were initially intended in countries like West Germany, because they are illiberal. (Hungary also offers a limited programme similar in nature.)

The migrants come, and then return when their job is done; this is impossible in western countries, even though both hosts and guests would benefit, because politicians come under pressure from NGOs and other activists who take a universalist and sentimental approach. It would be cruel to prevent low-skilled migrants bringing in their families, and it would be cruel to deport them if they refuse to leave.

Because many of these workers are poor, western democracies end up subsidising them, and in countries like Britain have even designed a social housing system that favours newcomers over natives, placing large numbers of unemployed foreigners in the most expensive and desirable parts of our capital. To the authoritarian rulers of a state like the UAE, that would obviously be insane – it is insane. But western countries like Britain are now needs-based societies run by empaths who wish to save humanity.

Dubai’s system also ensures a sort of demographic stability, even if natives are actually outnumbered, a necessity for stable government which western thought-leaders have completely forgotten. As a result, many are on the path to political extremism and instability. Britain’s commentariat think up all sorts of complex explanations for the rise of populism, and collapsing trust in politicians, when the simple, boring and obvious answer is that mass immigration has dissolved people’s faith in the system.

Perhaps the pre-eminent example of illiberal success is Singapore, the only state which has taken multiculturalism seriously, as a challenge to be worked around rather than a strength. Singapore came into being with a multi-ethnic demographic that could have destroyed it – as it did in Sri Lanka – and adopted a hard-headed attitude to navigating the issue. Singapore’s approach, including forced integration, is again unpalatable, but its founders considered diversity to be a dangerous weakness, and the relative homogeneity of countries like Britain to be a golden ticket – which they just casually threw away.

Singapore is successful in part because its founder avoided the trap of high-minded ideas then engulfing the West; as an example, it pays its politicians salaries that would be impossible in Britain, where the prevailing mood is one of resentment. As a result, we end up with low-quality lawmakers, many of whom do not understand second-order effects, and who seem entirely focussed on being seen to do the right thing.

On the day of the Manchester synagogues attacks, a number of politicians were praising themselves for offering subsidised university places for Gazan refugees, blindly unaware of the huge gravitational power of chain migration. Our system will ensure that they – and large numbers of family members – will eventually be granted refugee status, and the right to settle; a. number of politicians have been lobbying for large-scale Gazan refugee programmes, despite the obvious security risks involved, and the highly negative economic consequences that will certainly follow.

In fact, many politicians in liberal democracies don’t seem to care about economic growth, nor do they understand that their moral crusaders require it. The mood music of the British middle class is that the country is run by market fundamentalists, but an alternative explanation is that we’re run by people who don’t think about money at all, and that’s far worse. Britain might be better run if our political class saw us as ‘merely an economic zone’, as The Critic regular Luca Watson put it:

‘If they thought of Britain as purely an economic zone, there would be no social housing in inner London, no intentional importation of Afghan refugee families, shoplifters would be shot, fracking would be widespread, equality laws scrapped, no bat tunnels or newt survey. Instead we have the opposite: a political class who view getting rich as vulgar and suspect, and who valorise moral commitments - to climate change, refugees, international treaties, ethnic and religious minorities - above all else, no matter the cost.’

In Singapore, the salary of government ministers is linked to the country’s economic growth, a clear example of where they see their priorities. (I wouldn’t go as far as Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian, who suggested in a television debate that the head of the supreme council should be executed if 8 per cent annual growth was not met – but it would certainly provide an incentive.)

Singapore, like Dubai, famously has very low crime rates by western standards, and so does a notable fifth illiberal state. In contrast to hated western politicians, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele has incredible popularity ratings. I’m wary of supporting any Latin American strongman, because it’s only a matter of time before you end up with egg on your face when they start throwing people out of helicopters. Besides which, El Salvador’s crackdown would be inappropriate to relatively safe European country – but his success illustrates that learned helplessness about crime is not inevitable. You don’t have to cede whole areas of your city to junkies. You can jail habitual criminals, you can place the insane inside asylums, rather than letting them run amok on public transport; you don’t have to let junkies openly shoot up in the street. The majority of voters don’t understand why politicians allow this state of affairs, when they see that other countries overcome them. As Bukele says, you can literally just start doing stuff.

Few of us would trade our freedoms for any illiberal regime, but is the relentless squalor of most western cities a condition of liberalism in its broader sense? Can we enjoy freedom of religion, speech, association and travel without being surrounded by the mentally ill and drug addicts, or growing horrendously in debt, signing over our patrimony? If your argument is that they are part of the deal, and the alternative makes you Putin’s stooge, then you are not helping the cause of liberalism. Personally, I still hope we can.

One problem we face is that elites in western liberal democracies seem, paradoxically, more distanced from the public than the rulers of countries where there is less voter feedback. On immigration, most strikingly, European elites are wildly out of touch with the public, far more so than the rulers of illiberal states, with Denmark the honourable exception. Perhaps there is the argument that autocracies must cater to broadly held beliefs among the people, because the price of failure is violent revolution rather than falling upwards into lucrative consultancy jobs or NGOs.

Thomas Hobbes sort of made the point many centuries ago when he wrote that ‘the personal interests of the monarch will tend to coincide with the public interest, and he can after all always consult whom he pleases and “cannot disagree with himself”.’ While favourites may be an ‘inconvenience’ they tend to be few in number, whereas ‘the favourites of an assembly are numerous’.

In his book The People v Democracy, Yasha Mounk noted the declining faith in institutions found across the western democracies. In the early 1970s, over 40 per cent of Americans expressed confidence in Congress; by 2014, that was 7 per cent. Support for military rule has increased among young Americans, as it has to a lesser extent in Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, France and Britain, where there is an especially dark mood.

Mounk wrote that ‘liberal democracy is now decomposing into its component parts, giving rise to illiberal democracy on the one side and undemocratic liberalism on the other’. That is possible true, but it’s also the case that many liberal democracies have become both less liberal and less democratic.

Britain, after all, has become a global leader in harassing and prosecuting the public for things they say online – this is a country where a famous comedy writer was recently arrested by armed police for some tweets. London also has levels of surveillance similar to the People’s Republic, although our system of social credit actually rewards dysfunction.

Decisions are now increasingly made not by democratic institutions but by unelected arms-length bodies, the main block to us enforcing our borders, and the solution is surely to restore power to Parliament. Churchill was right that democracy was the least bad political system available - maybe we just need more of it.