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.