Liberal democracy is dying before our very eyes

Telegraph

24-05-2025

Is this the end of the Western democratic idea? Watching the run of events, it would seem reasonable to conclude that the concept itself – the democratic nation state – is now in terminal crisis. The countries that embodied its principles, sometimes incorporating them in binding documents and legal systems, are losing credibility with their own populations whom t hey were designed to serve.
The governments of the power bloc, which had seemed to be impregnable after having won the ideological argument of the 20th century, are falling into disrepute by failing to fulfil an implicit promise to their electorates of constant progress. Many of them are literally going broke in the pursuit of what was supposed to be the optimal solution to the problem of societal organisation: the perfect balance of individual freedom and personal responsibility.
How has it come to this? The political leaders of the day are so witless and mediocre that electorates are drawn in their desperation to dangerous extremists. In Europe, neo-fascist parties such as Germany's AfD, which should be regarded in the post-war world as untouchables, are on the rise, and the US – perhaps the most self-conscious incarnation of the Enlightenment ideal – has elected a president who talks like a belligerent twelve-year-old.
Why, having won the Cold War, has the political leadership of the West gone into such catastrophic decline? It is important to recall that, in Europe, there has been a quite deliberate running down of the basic rule that elected governments should be directly accountable to their own voters.
The European Union was formed in the wake of the horrendous 20th-century rise of elected dictators, with the conscious intention of reducing the power of national governments. There was an explicit, well-documented decision to see to it that the unreliable will of the people should never again be permitted to put murderous criminals in power.
That, and not the undermining of the US as Donald Trump appears to believe, was the real objective of the European project which began with the European Coal and Steel Community: an economic agreement designed to ensure that France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands could never go to war with one another again.
There would be new supra-national institutions and legislative bodies created which would be out of the reach of public opinion with its dangerous volatility and inchoate hatreds. Electoral democracy was to be replaced by a permanent benign oligarchy of appointed bureaucrats. But the British electorate, perhaps because its courageous history of standing against fascist regimes was so exemplary, was instinctively hostile to this reinvention.
My own reason for supporting Brexit was (and still is) precisely this: you should elect the people who make your laws. Once that sacred principle is abandoned, the whole edifice of democracy is bound to become a sham, and the quality of the politicians who participate in it will inevitably decline.
But removing ourselves from the post-democratic EU has not, alas, made us immune from the collapse of confidence that seems to have infected the whole of what was once known as the Free World. British politics is now often described as being nothing more than managerialism: a passionless morass of pragmatic (but not necessarily effective) adjustments to a system run by faceless officials, which maintains the same assumptions and objectives of whoever is nominally in power.
The occasional disruption from an ideological direction only has influence if it falls within the acceptable bounds of current discourse – which, oddly, can include some quite bizarre social extremes such as the trans movement.
But these are eccentric side issues that are tolerated precisely because they have little bearing on the fundamental questions of how, for example, the economy is organised. In fact, it is precisely the decadent triviality of most of the concerns that dominate public life that is the real giveaway.
We are not arguing about serious things anymore because there is a consensus about what government is for, which rules out even the voicing of doubt about its precepts. In the UK, for example, it is not even possible to raise the question of whether an entirely state-funded healthcare system is sustainable even though other sorts of arrangements are commonplace in most of Europe.
So why has the modern democratic nation state, with a government directly accountable to its own population, become unworkable? Perhaps when democracy became identical with democratic socialism? After the Great Depression and the Second World War, there was an identifiable shift in the function of government. It was no longer sufficient to offer internal protection from criminality and external protection from foreign enemies, or to guarantee individual rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Government was to be seen now not simply as the guardian of existing human inclinations but as an active redistributor of advantages and resources. This is often described as a shift from the principle of equality of opportunity to equality of outcome – which sounds, semantically, not all that profound a change.
In fact, it is enormous. It reconstructs the entire project of the state and puts a staggering amount of power and responsibility in the hands of government, which is now the effective owner of all the wealth that is produced in the society. Meritocracy – which had been one of the most important pillars of democratic life – becomes the enemy of equality rather than an advantage for society as a whole.
For some people to be more talented, or resourceful, or strong-willed than others is cast, by definition, as unfair. But penalising them in order to equalise the condition of those without their capabilities, makes the nation less productive and creative – and so it becomes poorer.
The people no longer have moral authority over their elected rulers because private, individual desires and concerns are a danger to the collective good, which can only be established by the state, the sole arbiter of 'fairness'. Eventually this could only end in one way: a system that penalises those who create wealth (or the opportunity to create it) in order to support the unproductive, will go bust – and discredit the political system that presided over it.