DICTATING THE AGENDA

Liberal democracy in danger.

Cooley, professor of political science at Barnard College, and Dukalskis, associate professor of politics and international relations at University College Dublin, open with the West’s celebration of the USSR’s collapse in 1989. Victory in the Cold War was hailed as a triumph of freedom, and many pundits predicted that respect for human rights and free market capitalism would become so universal that it would mark “the end of history.” China was welcomed into the world economy with the universal assumption that its people would force democratic reforms, and soon-to-be-autocratic Russia, with an economy no larger than Italy’s, was of little consequence. Democracies spread, national incomes rose, and few disagreed with the maxim that capitalism and prosperity required freedom. Readers will squirm when the authors describe how matters began to change. Until the beginning of this century, dictators stumbled when dealing with Western “soft power,” which emphasized, besides movies and pop music, a quarrelsome liberal democracy, toleration of contradictory opinions within a nation, and opposition to injustice everywhere. No fools, they learned from their mistakes. Using a combination of modern technology and psychology (humans remain tribal; they love theirs and distrust others), old autocracies got their act together, and jingoistic right-wing movements, learning the same lessons, began thriving even in European social democracies. Once a modest threat, reformers barely exist today in the established autocracies of China, Russia, and the Middle East. Elsewhere, hypernationalistic autocrats began winning free elections decades ago, and to America’s 2024 victors, “liberal” is a dirty word. No polemic, this is a sober report, dotted with statistics, graphs, and political analysis.

A dispassionate argument proposing that the lights are going out.