Project Syndicate - PS On Point - Yascha Mounk: Trumpism - A New Era in World Politics?
What do the coup attempt in Turkey, Donald Trump’s US presidential candidacy, the Brexit referendum, and the rise of populist parties in France, Germany, and elsewhere have in common? They all reflect deep anxieties among many citizens about the functioning of their democracies and the openness of their societies.
We are accustomed to thinking of our political system as a set of countervailing forces, in which discontent among one segment of the population leads to corrective action, like a social program to ease their problems and defuse their anger. But once the system becomes sufficiently dysfunctional, countervailing forces may give way to mutually reinforcing feedback loops.
This implies that redistribution and compensation of globalization’s losers will not be enough, and that liberal democracy is likely to become an increasingly unstable political compound. As the conflict between liberalism and democracy escalates, we should expect two new regime types to emerge. One is illiberal democracy, in which public policy reflects populist frustration and anger, regardless of the cost to economic health or the rights of minorities. The second is what I have called “undemocratic liberalism,” a system in which rational economic policies and the rule of law are upheld by technocratic elites who routinely overrule their supposed constituents.
Either way, Lévy’s “bling brigades” herald more than an age of bad taste. They remind us that the political epoch in which we could trust that the champions of continuity would ultimately defeat the agents of disruption is over, probably for good.
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- 另一篇PS On Point： Lies, Liars, and Lawlessness
The age of Erdoğan, Trump, and Putin, with its representatives’ contempt for rules and norms, is generating serious challenges to global peace and prosperity with alarming frequency. Is there a way forward that doesn’t lead backward?
- Stephen Walt: The Collapse of the Liberal World Order
liberal societies are in trouble today because they are vulnerable to being hijacked by groups or individuals who take advantage of the very freedoms upon which liberal societies are based. As Donald Trump has been proving all year (and as Jean-Marie Le Pen, Recep Erdogan, Geert Wilders, and other political entrepreneurs have shown in the past), leaders or movements whose commitment to liberal principles is at best skin-deep can take advantage of the principles of open society and use it to rally a popular following. And there is nothing about a democratic order that ensures such efforts will invariably fail.
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