The best books on the crisis of liberal order and democracy

Wolf, chief economics commentator for The Financial Times, asks, “What do democratic capitalism, the global order, and the global environment have in common? The answer is ‘fragility’.”

Wolf sees democracy and capitalism as “symbiotic twins” that have developed together but that can, in the wrong conditions, threaten each other.

The threats today come from within and from outside – from plutocratic populism in advanced democracies and from the obvious external challenges of a rising China, a vengeful and rogue Russia, and from climate change.

He explains how to repair capitalism, strengthen democracy, and manage global tensions.

Ikenberry is the leading scholar writing about the origins, the evolution, and the working of the liberal international order.

He sees deep connections between liberal internationalism, liberal democracy, and democratic capitalism.

Ikenberry charts the transformations that have occurred in the liberal order, from its successful creation after the Second World War to its consolidation and expansion after the end of the Cold War to the challenges it currently faces.

He is acutely aware of liberal order’s faults and limitations, but insists that it remains the world’s best hope.

Hacker and Pierson argue that “plutocratic populism,” their term for what currently ails the United States and other democracies, is the latest solution to a structural dilemma in modern democracy.

Conservatives are regularly determined to protect wealth and privilege but need to win over voters who typically lack wealth and privilege to elect them. That means a continual effort to craft appeals that, in effect, disguise their aims.

The recent turn to populism means relying on non-economic issues – race, nativism, and various culture war issues concerning sex and gender most potently – to attract voters to support parties whose first allegiance is to the economic interests of elites.

This strategy can also lead, at times, to attacks on democracy and voting as well. 

Cultural Backlash is aimed at sorting out the roots of the recent rise of what the authors call authoritarian populism, which is much the same thing as plutocratic populism.

They locate its origins in a backlash against the social consequences and policies that grew from socio-economic shifts that began in the 1960s and 1970s.

These include, obviously enough, the sexual revolution and changing gender norms, the civil rights movement and the increasingly multi-racial and multi-cultural character of modern societies, and the turn toward values that Inglehart, decades ago, termed post-materialist.

The book is distinguished by the vast amount of quantitative data it presents and deploys to illustrate its central argument.  

When scholars write about liberal order, they date it to the 1940s, when the reaction against depression, fascism, and war led to the creation of institutions designed to prevent their recurrence.

What this view misses is the recalibration of the liberal order in the 1980s that Gerstle describes. Earlier policies were largely inspired by Keynes, supportive of more government intervention and social provision than was normal in the 1930s, and of trade unions.

What replaced them was neoliberalism—a turn toward (increasingly unregulated) markets, tax reductions that deprived government of the means to intervene in the economy and fund the welfare state, and hostility to trade unions.

The liberal order on offer from the late 1980s was therefore less generous and less attractive than it once had been. That would matter when the opportunity to extend liberal order presented itself after 1989.

Gerstle sees recent developments, especially the Great Recession, as weakening and perhaps ending the dominance of neoliberalism.