At RealClearPolitics Michael Barone presents two explanations for why liberal democracy seems to be falling all over its own feet lately:
One answer is that success breeds failure. As the economic journalist Robert Samuelson has argued, the apparent success of 1960s Keynesian pump-priming led to the 1970s stagflation, and the apparent success of 1980s and 1990s central bankers led to the 2007-2008 crash.
Another is that elites remain preoccupied with problems that have long been solved. Angela Merkel, raised in East Germany, naturally abhors walls. But the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, 27 years ago. Eurocrats believe the EU prevents another war between France and Germany. The last one ended in 1945, 71 years ago.
That second explanation is my explanation for the antipathy towards Russia among American elites. It’s a bad habit.
Highly successful people are strongly predisposed to keep doing the things that brought them success in the past. Old Cold Warriors never die; apparently they don’t even fade away.
Is liberal democracy really failing? I’m reminded of a couple of famous quotes. The first is from Winston Churchill to the effect that democracy is the worst form of government except for all of the others.
The other is a riff on something written by G. K. Chesterton. It is not that liberal democracy has been tried and found wanting but that it has been found inconvenient to would-be autocrats and not been tried.
I assume Merkel’s views stem from the history of German refugees following WWII, plus the importance of the guest worker program to the German economic miracle in the 1960s. That is, she is motivated by some combination of idealism and German self-interest.
Liberal democracy means something other than just electing a person to make the “best” or most “enlightened” decisions. If it was, it would be little different from “illiberal” democracy. Democracy means self-government, government by the people for the people. If Merkel’s ideals or policies aren’t those of Germans or not within some range of public tolerance, liberal democracy will resist it.
What you are witnessing and experiencing is a monetary and financial crisis that modern liberal democratic policies cannot fix, and the people implementing the policies and their supporters cannot understand why they will not work. It is Cargo-Cultish, but it is not totally without a basis.
A credit backed money supply and the financial system supporting it are like artificial fertilizer and irrigation. These allow the wonders of agriculture production in places, in quantities, in environments, etc. where anything or the specific crops should not be able to grow.
Done in moderation and responsibility, these are wonders of the modern age, and they allow the population of the Earth be to exceeded many times over. They also allow for many more people to be available to work in non-agricultural industries. This is why we have iPhones, computers, cars, and other fun toys.
In the cases where too much fertilizer or irrigation is used, bad things begin to happen, and if the solution to the bad things that are happening is more fertilizer and irrigation, the amount of bad things happening will increase even more.
Even worse, as fertilizer and irrigation overusage is increased, it will begin to affect totally unrelated things. The water will begin dissolving the chemicals in the fertilizer, and it will allow these chemicals to get into people. The water will start causing electrical equipment to short and metal to rust. It will get under roads causing potholes.
The agricultural scientists will assure everybody that there is no way that any of these problems can be caused by fertilizer or irrigation. A farm has no connection to the basement of a school ten miles away. Except, water can flow underground, and the experts can be spectacularly wrong before anybody has a clue that they are like the little girl in the back seat of the car turning her plastic steering wheel.
When the last financial collapse came, it was fast. The nonsense that “nobody saw it coming” was nothing more than ass-covering by those who should have known better. It was known and predicted. The only unknown was “when” and “how bad” would the bad actually be.
The same people are lined up again, and the same questions are being asked. Will the US be Venezuela? I doubt it, but I doubt that Venezuela thought they would be Venezuela.
It is all fun and games until somebody loses a sh*t ton of money.
I was going to comment that it depends on how you define the “liberal” in liberal democracy, but then I realized that term isn’t in the original article. Nevertheless, I doubt Michael Barone would characterize liberal democracy as an attempted manifestation of classical liberalism.