Mick Hartley

Simon Sebag Montefiore in the Atlantic on the crisis of the “comfort” democracies that are seeing a new generation seemingly blind to the liberties and the luxuries that we take for granted:

Democracies won the 20th century on the battlefield as well as in the marketplace and the war of ideas, resulting in a world order made in their own image. But they did not prepare for or predict the resurgence of autocracies, nor the way that the postcolonial states—and the supranational institutions they now controlled—would, after many decades, reject the liberal democratic world order. The autocracies are surging, and democracies ebbing. It is impossible to define exactly what causes one state to fall and another to rise, but Ibn Khaldun identified asabiyya, the cohesion essential for a society to thrive: “Many nations suffered a physical defeat, but that’s never marked their end. Yet when a nation becomes the victim of psychological defeat, that marks the end.”

That would very much appear to be the case now across much of the west, with a widespread contempt for the achievements of the liberal world order and the enlightenment. The cohesion is fraying at the edges.

Democracies are built on invisible trust: Over and over again, when anomie strikes, trust disappears, and so does openness. “As soon as any man says of the affairs of state, What does it matter to me?” Rousseau wrote, “the state may be given up as lost.” The lesson of recent years is that the gains and values that were taken as won after the atrocities of 1939–45—making racism and anti-Semitism taboo, the legal structure that defined and banned crimes of genocide and war-making, the right to abortion and the other triumphs of the great liberal reformation of the 1960s—have to be fought for again.

The so-called rules-based order was degraded not just by the fecklessness or cynicism of U.S. presidents but also by its own ideological stagnation—as demonstrated in all manner of scandals and outrages, but perhaps best demonstrated in January by the failures of the United Nations and humanitarian NGOs to condemn the massacre of Iranian protesters by the Islamic dictatorship. In spite of their original values of humanitarianism and neutrality, these organizations have been morally debased from within, using the language of human rights and international justice yet deploying it on behalf of autocracies and against the liberal democracies that created them. They need to be reformed, or they will become impotent. And we may all live to greatly miss Western humbug in the decades ahead. Meanwhile, the very vocabulary of humanitarianism and antiracism has become so selectively applied or debased as to be meaningless. We need to develop a new vocabulary….

Identities are evolving too; younger generations may no longer embrace the nation as their prime identity. Comfort Democracies face a crisis that is a symptom of success: their grants of entitlements, of free education and social liberties, and luxurious lifestyles, all unequaled in human history, have empowered highly educated activist cadres of the young who exploit those values and rights while rejecting the legitimacy of democratic states that some even regard as historic criminal conspiracies fit only for destruction. Such movements as we see today may play out, and others will arise. Active citizenship can defeat intolerant ideologies in debate and at the ballot box. But in turbulent times, small, impassioned groups can capture or paralyze states, as has happened often in history. In what I call the war democracies—Taiwan, Israel, Ukraine—the stakes are so clear and society is so awakened that this is not a problem. But one wonders if young citizens of any of the comfort democracies—especially the fuddled legacy powers such as Britain and France—would now be willing to give their lives in conscript armies to defend supposed national interests, and if human-rights activists would actually allow a struggle such as the Second World War to be fought today at all.

His conclusion:

Just because we are the smartest ape ever created, just because we have solved many problems so far, does not mean we will solve everything. Human history is like one of those investment-warning clauses: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Yet the harshness of humanity has been constantly rescued by our capacity to create and love. The family is the center of both. Our limitless ability to destroy is matched only by our ingenious ability to recover.

The article was adapted from The World: A Family History, now out in paperback.