24-1-24
Dear Partners in Thought,
As we go into 2024 we see many articles, in leading publications and from think tanks, stressing the key challenges the world will be facing due to many issues like an increasingly politically unstable America, an ongoing Ukraine war, or a worsening Middle East. As we go into an election year in America and many liberal and not so liberal democracies globally (70, or half of the world population), it is useful to look at the drivers of liberal democratic decline in the West. While addressing this matter, it is worth noting that elections are also held in countries like Russia, but they are more formal than real, with the outcome already known and thus not a sign of democracy.
The main issues that have hurt our democratic West are a hodgepodge of features, at times inter-linked, that, put together, foster a weakened socio-political system that keeps gradually declining, while simpler autocracies and dictatorships keep thriving the world over. Some of these features are the drastic change of younger generations’ political views, the impact of “hate” social media, the decline in formal education, the excesses of capitalism, the mismanaged migration used as a populist selling point, and the lack of defense readiness on the part of most countries – all while rational discourse increasingly falls on deaf ears.
The hodgepodge of Western democratic decline features
The young, who used to demonstrate in major cities the Western world-over in 1968, while wanting governments to adopt very radical economic and social policies, are no longer there, many having grown up conservative or far more moderate in a natural life development. However, today younger generations are often keener to adopt extreme-right policies to deal with key issues such as immigration. The extreme-right National Rally led by Marine Le Pen, now the second political party in France, and a serious contender to lead the country in 2027, enjoys the support of a large part of the younger French today.
Social media have contributed to the younger generations adopting extreme policies, as knowledge is no longer perceived to be based on classical education and schools, but laptop screens and indeed social media. While each country is different, the young generation, as they reach voting age, naturally listen more easily to populist leaders who reflect the extreme views on many a social media channel. The older generations – especially the 60+ age group – will generally tend to be the ones to uphold traditional liberal democratic values, also as they have a more vivid knowledge of the 20th century with its two World Wars and nuclear bomb-flavored Cold War.
The lack of formal education is also becoming a feature (if not a factor) of younger voters backing extreme-right candidates or populist leaders. The US is a case in point, with the vast majority of voters with no college degrees – young or not – backing Trump who, in typical fashion, claims to love “the uneducated ones”. Interestingly the college-educated Americans nicknamed by economist Thomas Piketty “the Brahmin Left” tend to shift to liberal positions also as a reaction to Trump populism, also often reflecting their residing in large urban centers, which tend to be less conservative or indeed reactionary than rural areas.
Capitalism is not helping today. Free markets, that underpinned Western and world growth, are out of control. There is a feeling of Wild West at play, that is also worsening feelings of social inequalities. Growing up the ladder through work, and indeed capitalism, is no longer clear to many. Leading capitalist figures such as Musk, Bezos or Zuckerberg, who are the new and even more powerful Rockefeller or Vanderbilt, while highly successful, are hardly role models (even if Bill Gates and others are around). In addition, the wealth of the top five billionaires has more than doubled since 2020, creating a further social disconnect. Recent news such as the annual salary and dividends of GBP300 m of Denise Coates, the CEO of Bet363, the UK gambling group is simply out of the world we knew. While US CEOs earned 21 times the average salary in 1965, today’s number is 344 times. The news that Taylor Swift, a clearly business-gifted singer, became a billionaire in 2023 are senseless at too many levels, all the more given the inequalities the world (including the West) knows, even if such situations are created as people, at times struggling, attend her concerts and buy her songs. Capitalism has become a system of excesses that are allowed by the legal system that is used and protected by its beneficiaries and their vast wealth, under the pretense that all benefit.
Migration is a key issue in the US today, like it was in Europe since 2015-16, and the aftermath of the Arab Spring, that also created local civil wars, prompting many to go for a better life elsewhere. Migration is used by hard right parties as a tool to grab votes in the name of national identity, while the problem today is also more acute than ever, as seen by the US-Mexican borders or on Italian shores. The problem has been compounded by a combination of moderate European governments losing much voter support through not wanting to adopt policies that would have been seen as akin to racial discrimination, while also needing cheap labor for their economy – as was the case for Merkel’s German economy nearly ten years ago, thus setting precedents that kept encouraging unwanted migration.
Apart from the US, the West and especially Europe may not be prepared today for an unwanted major war scenario. Old military powers, like France and Britain, are still very good at special operations, as often seen in the Middle East and Africa. But the talented professional soldiers on their own might not be able to counter a large-scale military aggression from a country like Russia and its allies in Europe. After 30 years of peaceful globalization, we live in times taking us back to the 20th century and its major conflicts. As a Dutch senior commander of NATO rightfully sadly stated, the populations of Europe would simply not be ready or able to fight today, even to defend their freedom and democratic system. This fact also reflects a lack of community feeling at the national level of many countries, whose populations are no longer concerned on matters of war and peace or freedom preservation, as if those themes were from another age.
Rational discourse no longer resonates well with many voters also, when they face daily situations like those living in the Southern American borders with Mexico. Principles are hard to matter in those cases also, as time goes by and nothing happens to fix what is not livable with 35% of Republican voters (likely hard core and Trump supporters) still believe in a rising trend that the “January 6” insurrection that stormed the US Capitol was a product of the FBI, which defies any logic. Ninety-one indictments against Trump do not seem to matter to his supporters, who feel invigorated by these actual facts, as if they were proof of a conspiracy by a deep state against their good leader. Re-elections of moderate governments look increasingly challenging, with polls showing only a one-third success rate across Western countries today (although polls do change as elections get closer and are under-way).
It is also clear that once rising to power, or having won key elections, many populist leaders, especially in Western countries, put “water in their wine” as the French would say. The recent examples of Georgia Meloni, as Italian prime minister, is very telling, but so are the examples of Geert Wilders in Netherlands or so far Javier Milei in Argentina. The reality of power, all the more in major Western countries, dictates populist winners to throw away many of their principles, a fact that should be stressed to the younger generations and all voters. All the more so as these populist winners are made to win elections these days, but not to exercise power in the best of ways, also given their overall backgrounds.
Some thoughts to revive the Western liberal democratic course
While possibly naïve, there are solutions which, put together, could change the self-harming decline of Western democracy, and indeed civilization. These simple, but at times tough measures, all inter-linked and part of a Western society revival program, could involve an old-fashioned return to more driven parental guidance, civic education in schools, more sensible regulation of social media, increased taxes of top corporate and individual earners, as well as new tech developments like AI, and more realistic policies on the part of Western governments on issues like migration, as well as the institution, or return, of a national military service given our challenging times and societal needs.
Some could argue that this proposed wide-ranging approach would amount to a form of “dirigisme” that would go against liberalism and its spirit of “laissez faire” (do what you want), but countries need to go back to better social frameworks through which liberalism and democracy can endure. Liberalism should not be a tool for chaos, and our times require some decisive action, both from democratic governments and societies at large in partnerships – so we can survive and keep thriving.
Both parents (admittedly in traditional families) and schools should work together to ensure that children in their teenage years are able to deal with domestic and world issues in a rational and sensible way. Parents should be more assertive in taking care of their children, and not allow them to stay for hours locked in their rooms watching and listening to social media, whose contents are often damaging to society, or playing video games for hours at a time (on a light note, this approach will come short of dealing with “watching one’s phone while walking down the street” so as to avoid any collision but it is a sound start). Schools, starting in early grades, should develop civic duty courses focused on societal and political matters, stressing the different viewpoints attached to them. The parental-school partnership goal would be to decrease the “hate” social media mind invasion, while giving children a fairer understanding of the issues of our time, and why democracy needs to be preserved. It is worth noting that some Western governments are already taking some steps, as seen with President Macron’s proposed policies—part of his “civic rearmament” in January to regulate children’s screen time, and also introduce compulsory school uniforms, the latter to develop some better sense of community beyond social differences.
Regulations should be more severe as to the hate contents from social media, while being fair as to freedom of speech, the latter a challenging balance to reach and an issue especially sensitive in the US today. The point is not to favor any political agenda, but to bring some normalcy leading to more reasonable thinking, and thus approaches to key societal matters, all the more by young generations who will also grow up and lead societies in the future. Similarly, and putting aside all their clear benefits, tech and AI companies should be regulated in a suitable manner to ensure they do not end up “managing” societies directly or indirectly. The EU has already taken steps, now followed by the US, to control notably Big Tech more adequately, also given their strong financial power and massive societal clout.
Taxation should be reviewed, ideally in a coordinated manner throughout the West, to ensure that sanity comes back and net earnings are no longer out of this world, this for corporations and individuals, and not to let a societal disconnect, however legally framed, to endure. There is a need for governments to keep supporting fair free markets while restoring societal sanity via taxation and fund the lives of those in real need, so as to preserve the social contract. Similarly, AI companies should be taxed in a way that would help fund jobs to be likely lost by so many individuals due to this key tech development that is still unclear and quite worrisome as to its real benefits for society and its well-being (it is amusing to know that both Bernie Sanders and Bill Gates suggested a tax for “job-taking robots” in the past). While the West would engage in a societally-driven tax reassessment it would take appropriate measures to ensure that countries that do not follow suit, or top earning corporates or individuals that move to low if not zero tax jurisdictions, do not benefit from any resulting economic advantage and are publicly identified – putting the start of an end to new non-exotic tax paradises as they would think of rising.
Government policies led by liberal democratic governments should be able to address sensitive issues liberal democrats traditionally averted from managing, out of social unease, like immigration. It should not be an expression of Nazism to want one’s country to keep its national identity and manage a sensible immigration program. Nor should it be forbidden to enforce the control of one’s own borders. New approaches to these issues would deprive extremist populist parties from winning elections across the West, while forgetting about them once in power and facing its reality. Democracies need to address unwanted migration as it should be, and frontally – with care for all parties involved, notably their own citizens. It would be best to set and enforce workable policies to deal frontally with unwanted immigration, while realizing that some immigration is needed in many key economic and social sectors in the West, and avoiding drastic and last resort questionable programs of shipping back individuals to Rwanda or Albania.
Finally, there is a dual need to restore a sense of community at the national level of most Western countries, while getting their populations better ready to defend their freedom, and indeed liberal democracy, against any aggression from autocratic powers using wars as an easier way to cement their power at home. The best way to achieve this dual objective, that is key given our newly challenging times, is to institute or re-institute a form of national military service to educate young populations in the basic art of warfare, and also to cement national communities across social classes. Until the mid-1990s, France had a one-year military service for all physically able young men to train them on military matters and give them a sense of national belonging. The end of the Cold War put an end to that process which could be restarted with EU nations also managing exchange programs, as a way to cement the EU project. And young women could also take part in this key process. From a geostrategic standpoint, European nations alone should reconsider national military services, all the more so in the context of a potential return of Donald Trump in the White House and an always-possible withdrawal from NATO (some even seeing this drastic scenario as a disguised blessing, needed to build a stronger and more independent EU or Europe).
Those suggestions, the list of which could easily be increased, would be clearly challenging, if not impossible for some, to put in place. There is no simple solution, but a concerted and inter-linked approach, which while not being perfect, may be the only way to focus the minds and gradually reverse a trend that risks destroying a still-young historical concept we call modern liberal democracy. Holding elections is not enough today, and may lead to autocracy going forward. Doing nothing and hoping for the best only benefits ill-equipped populist-extremists without any meaningful societal gains in sight.
Warmest regards
Serge
Desperate Measures 