Liberal democracy has seen better days

I am just old enough to remember the Soviet Union. Not the daily fear of nuclear war or the parades in Red Square or the premier with the crimson birthmark who promised glasnost and perestroika—this is not the U.S.S.R. I remember. I remember the Soviet Union as an oblong blob of pink that spread across the northern half of a globe in my first-grade classroom, a vast country that no longer was.

There was a time when American intellectuals looked at the Soviet Union and saw the future. Well into the 1950s, the U.S.S.R. was notching impressive gains in space and posting GDP growth rates of six percent a year. When Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev famously exclaimed "We will bury you!" to a Western audience, he wasn't threatening to entomb millions of Americans and Europeans in a nuclear war. Instead, he was proclaiming the superiority of the Soviet system over the American system, of "scientific socialism" and the "dictatorship of the proletariat" over free enterprise and representative government. The Soviets believed History was on their side.

History showed otherwise. The Soviet experiment demonstrated over the decades that it wasn't anything new at all. It was an old story of empire and tyranny that the denizens of the Soviet Union eventually saw through. The gulag, the lines for bread and toilet paper, the decade-long misadventure in Afghanistan—all of these actions spoke louder than the rhetoric of uplift and equality.

Naturally, growing up with the pink-splotched globe, that relic of an age when America had some real competition, I thought that the hard work of History had already been done. We had more or less perfected liberal democracy, our greatest rival was no more, and the rest of the world would gaze upon our success and be dazzled into imitating our ways. Back then, I was convinced the future belonged to America. Today, I am not so sure.

To be clear, I am not the only one who has doubts about America these days. Bashar al-Assad doubted our resolve to punish the use of chemical weapons when he unleashed Sarin gas on hundreds in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta in August 2013. Vladimir Putin doubted our commitment to international norms when, in annexing Crimea in February 2014, he became the first strongman to take a European state's territory by force since Hitler annexed the Sudetenland. Kim Jong-un doubted our commitment to nuclear nonproliferation when he ordered his country's fifth nuclear test in September 2016.

My most unsettling doubts, however, are not related to the ongoing collapse of the liberal international order the United States engineered in the aftermath of World War II and reinforced after the collapse of the Soviet Union. I am more concerned about what is going on within our country than what is taking place beyond our shores. The Pax Americana could be revived, or at least extended, in the face of an emerging multipolar world, were the Americana not more fragile than the Pax. That is to say, we can hear the most ominous bells tolling from our own land, not echoing from some distant place where America's name is supposed to mean something.

The clearest indication that something is rotten in the state of American democracy is that we Americans have twice elected president charismatic men who brand themselves as "outsiders." Barack Obama and Donald Trump both campaigned as uniquely capable men who could rise above the brokenness of Washington and finally make our government work for the people again. Both couched their appeal in Messianic terms; Obama rhapsodized that his clenching the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination would go down in history as "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal," while Trump declared at the Republican National Convention in July 2016, "Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it." And so a nation founded, in John Adams' memorable phrase, as "a government of laws and not of men," came to place its faith in men and not in laws.

Although the growth in executive power under Barack Obama’s presidency and Donald Trump’s threat to “open up” libel laws should worry lovers of liberal democracy, their greatest sins are of omission, not commission. Outsider politicians correctly identify that something wrong with the system, but rarely do they actually tackle the causes of institutional decay. Obama has said that one of his biggest regrets is that he failed to fundamentally transform Washington; other priorities, like health care reform, crowded out institutional changes. It is possible that Trump may take real steps to “drain the swamp,” but he too has other priorities.