Whither Democracy?

Three Hours.

That’s how long it will take to read The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce. On the back cover, one of the odes exhorts: “Read this book: In the three hours it takes you will get a new, bracing and brilliant understanding of the dangers we in the democratic West now face…” However, the three-hour estimate was made by Luce himself at the end of the preface in a quid pro quo with the reader. “So I propose a pact with the reader: if you take my pledge at face value, I will try to redeem it. My guess is it will take you roughly three hours.”

The book’s title carries shades of another Edward – Gibbon’s ominous-sounding Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It is a monster of a tome in six volumes. Luce clocks in at 200 pages of reasonably sized print with sufficient white space. But his message is equally sobering because it deals with today rather than once-upon-a-time. His theme is nuclear, with four trite chapter titles. Fusion. Reaction. Fallout. Half Life. Another back cover ode summarizes the main thrust of the book. “What is the future of Western liberal democracy? How did it get into its current mess, and how will those origins shape its forthcoming evolution? This volume is the very best guide for starting to grapple with those questions.”

Luce takes a historical slant, as does the book I just finished reading, Simplifying Electricity. There is even a passage that strikes a similar chord, but starts with Edison rather than Franklin. “For those who still believe our age’s disruptions match what happened after 1870, ask yourself which you would first give up, your iPhone or the flush toilet? Laptop or antibiotics? If you have trouble answering those, ponder life without electricity. It is a measure of our solipsism that we take for granted what went before.” But Luce has a more ominous slant as he begins the book with a Hegel quote: “We learn from history that we do not learn from history.”

Just before the Hegel quote, the author shows the Elephant Chart (without explaining it). The chart underlies several bleak notes, with at least one on higher education. “The developing world is making most of the capital goods that are used to displace the jobs of the middle-income people in the developed world. Their work is now increasingly devoted to looking after the rich. Should we cling to the idea that sending everybody to university is a solution? Apart from the fact that the impact of education reform would take twenty or more years to be felt, the machine is almost certainly moving faster. Technology would have long since overtaken updates to the curriculum.” But then he proposes a liberal arts solution: “reviving a focus on the humanities, including basic levels of political literacy.” This is followed by a strong indictment and plea to the wealthy ‘elite’. “Ancient thinkers always thought the rich posed a greater threat to the republic than the poor: they cling on far more tenaciously to what they have. ‘No tyrant ever conquered a city because he was poor and hungry,’ said Aristotle. If nothing else, history offers us a vast early warning system.”

It took me about three hours to read Luce’s book from the comfort of my own couch this weekend. While my income and lifestyle certainly does not put me in the elite, I chose to stay at home on a cold day rather than be out supporting the Women’s March. Distraction and apathy, are the tyrant’s weapons of today. Not too different from the bread and circuses of Rome. What use is having a democracy if voices stay silent? So much for my own liberal arts training; I feel truly indicted. But will I take up the next opportunity? I don’t know yet.

Whither democracy? The Arab Spring has withered away, while a whiter democracy is the aim of provocateurs in the U.S. and Western Europe. This is the story Luce traces to the present. We are dealing with the Fallout. Content to live a Half Life. Winston Churchill supposedly said that “democracy was the worst form of government… except for all the others that have been tried.” Demos kratos could be Power of the People, or Rule of the Mob.

Luce indicts liberal elites to “resist the temptation to carry on with their comfortable lives and imagine they are doing their part by signing up to the occasional Facebook protest.” He also quotes Benjamin Franklin, not on electricity, but rather on liberty: “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.” If a liberal democracy is not careful, it will slip imperceptibly into an illiberal democracy, and the rule of tyrants is not far behind.