Liberal democracy as the synthesis
The Vanguard of Illiberalism Buckles
With the dawn of a new decade, it appeared that the sun of the liberal democratic order was finally setting, and the phoenix of populism was rising. Then came 2022.
The failure of the Freedom Convoy
It began in Canada, with the Freedom Convoy protests in early February. What was supposed to be a revolutionary moment of protest of Justin Trudeau, the Federal Liberal Party, and their approach to COVID-19 restrictions turned instead into a widely condemned, reckless, unnecessarily disruptive, and at times dangerous protest movement. Public opinion polling demonstrated strong opposition to the convoy’s methods and laundering of far right messages from what was initially designed to be a protest of vaccine mandates for cross-border travelling truckers.
The successful defence of Ukraine and repudiation of Russian fascism
Then, in late February, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, sparking a coordinated, determined, and piercing response from the West. Governments across Europe, North America, and their closest allies in South America, Africa, and East Asia passed sweeping economic sanctions packages. This was followed by a coordinated private sector response that effectively closed Russia off from Western capital, business, trade, transport networks, and sources of media. The Western governments then proceeded to arm the Ukrainian Defence Forces to a degree considered unfathomable before the invasion. They poured billions of dollars into economic aid, weapons, armaments, and conducting large scale intelligence operations to assist the defence efforts. Despite opposition from isolationist far right and far left voices, the support for Ukraine’s defence was met with popular support in the West. The strong man, authoritarian politics of Vladmir Putin, drawing on ethnonationalist and imperial ideas baked into its former-Soviet leadership, was considered a foil to the liberal democratic nations in the West. Yet nearly a year in, the Russian economy has been in freefall, its currency artificially kept afloat with unsustainable monetary policies. Its trading partners were restricted to a handful of countries. Its demand for its oil and natural gas resources were on the decline as Europe transitions to new suppliers in the United States, Middle East, Africa, and Scandinavia. Ukraine has also inflicted heavy casualties on a demoralized Russian army, which, when announcing partial mobilization, saw approximately 700 thousand age-eligible men flee to neighbouring countries. Ukraine has made significant gains, retaking Kherson, Kharkiv, and Izum. And all signs point to Ukraine making even greater gains with the spring approaching, especially in the southern frontier. Most importantly, support for NATO, the EU, the UN, and the West more generally had reached levels not seen since the 1990s. The United States had once again reasserted itself as the leader of the liberal democratic order, after four years of receding influence under President Donald Trump.
Public health pragmatism prevails over paranoia
In the spring, the harsh, untargeted, and often unnecessary COVID-19 measures imposed by Western nations were supported by far-left voices in media, bureaucracy, non-profit organizations, opposition parties, and academia. Consequently, they expended whatever political capital it gained in the first year of the pandemic. Western nations across the world finally ended the ineffective lockdowns, arbitrary distancing requirements, and empirically dubious masking requirements. The far left tendency for totalizing control of the population on the back of a global emergency had finally received a whole hearted repudiation from moderates and, of course, conservatives, despite continued calls for more measures even after a worldwide vaccination campaign. A more measured, sober view of the medical data, in conjunction with pragmatic proportionality analyses of the harms of COVID-19 restrictions on civil liberties, economic health, and social cohesion, prevailed over more rigid and uncompromising calls for continued, unending restrictions.
The fragility of communism with Chinese characteristics
In the fall, after nearly two years of a “zero-COVID” strategy adopted by the Chinese government, the public’s patience was finally exhausted. The strategy played out amidst a pattern of outbreaks among the population which would result in widespread, strict lockdowns in major city centres without any longer term vision. The Chinese government’s COVID-19 measures, which included a comprehensive, highly invasive, and technologically driven surveillance strategy, had led to a complete curtailment of civil liberties. Restrictions were placed on movement, operation of businesses, usage of social media, and privacy, in pursuit of an impossible goal: Zero COVID-19 infections in the country. This approach was partially a consequence of the inefficacy of Chinese produced vaccines, and the CCP’s unwillingness to procure vaccines from Western companies. In response to the never-ending cycles of lockdowns, seventeen Chinese cities, including the capital Beijing, experienced protests at a scale not seen since the now famous Tiananmen Square Protests in 1989. The Chinese government initially attempted to suppress the demonstrations, but in a seldom seen expression of responsiveness to civil protest, the CCP lifted most of their restrictions in early December. This is on top of several failures in the state’s interventionism in the free market. This included causing instability for tech giants Alibaba and Tencent, mandating farmers to plant crops that are revenue-negative, and an overdependence on real estate development for economic growth that has failed to generate demand.
The waning authority of the clerics
In the middle of September, a young Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, made the courageous choice to remove her hijab in contravention of Iranian religious law. The Islamic Republic of Iran’s Morality Police arrested Mahsa, brought her into their custody, and murdered her. Her death sparked a massive uprising in the country, as thousands of protestors marched in the streets demanding justice for Mahsa and an end to the morality laws, specifically those targeting women. As the Iranian government, ruled by an authoritarian theocratic regime led by the Guardian Council and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, led a violent crackdown of the protests, the movement only grew. By December, protests had engulfed cities across the country and the world. As of the writing of this article, they continue on despite communication blackouts, executions, and the use of poison gas to quell protests. The demands of the protestors have expanded to a complete upheaval of the Iranian Government and a full on rejection of the theocratic system of government put in place nearly thirty-five years ago during the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
The re-emergence of moderates
Throughout the entire year, several significant players hosted elections that yielded similar results: popular support for moderates and institutionalized political actors. In the United States, President Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump was a hint of a shift in US politics away from the grand promises of populism towards the stability and security of moderate politics. However, in the aftermath of the 2020 election, the MAGA movement remained alive, attempting to storm the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. The US midterm elections in November 2022 was the real test of the MAGA movement’s lasting appeal. The Democratic Party nominated a wave of moderates for Senate in Nevada, Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, beating Republican candidates in red-leaning states who received Trump’s endorsement. This allowed the Democrats to hold on to the Senate and, more stunningly, remain only ten seats away from control of the House of Representatives in an electoral map highly favourable to the GOP. Democrats also made significant gains in State legislatures and Governorships. The results were an undeniable indictment of the MAGA movement, signaling the American public’s exhaustion with right-wing populism. Equally important, the results also were an indictment of left-wing populism, with the lion’s share of the electoral success stemming from the moderate wing of the party under a moderate President. The victory of moderates was not restricted to the US but was repeated in France, Brazil, the Philippines, and Peru.
Liberal Democracy as the Synthesis
The common thread running through each of the aforesaid examples is the exposure of the underlying fragility of possible alternatives to the liberal democratic order: communism, fascism, theocracy, authoritarian populism, and libertarian populism. The connective tissue binding the failures of each alternative is their inability to provide one of liberal democracy’s many core tenets. More than thirty years ago, Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, among other things, took on Marx’s famous dialectical proposition: liberal democracy, and the capitalist market economy central to its functioning, would be met with the antithesis of a proletariat revolution frustrated with its excesses. Marx argued that this clash would lead to the emergence of a Marxist society—the synthesis—which would be the true end point of history. This is where communal societies in collective ownership of property and the means of production would spread across all civilizations. Yet, history so far has shown that the synthesis remains liberal democracy, reconfigured and recalibrated to meet progressions in civil rights, social welfare mechanisms, globalization, and the digital age (the true forms of antithesis). Despite the numerous challenges liberal democracy has faced, now faces, and will continue to face in the future, it is clear from the past few centuries of experience that it will always endure. This remains despite when its foundations were shaken by imperialism, communism, fascism, and populism. The past year has been the strongest support for this proposition that I have ever witnessed in my quarter century of life. People around the world are yearning for freedom of expression, democratic rule, the separation of powers, secularism, pragmatism, moderation, free market economics, and a shared international political lingua franca. While the arc of history is longer than any of us can fathom, and liberal democracy is a project that will continue to experience further iterations and augmentations in pursuit of a “more perfect union,” it will always bend towards the values that humanity most cherishes. These are also those which the system of liberal democracy gives best expression to: freedom, equality, independence, justice, and peace. History then, until proven otherwise, remains at its end.