A new narrative is taking hold among the West’s ruling elites in politics and the media. The argument is that Western liberal democracies face an existential threat from foreign autocracies and dictatorships, most of all Moscow’s propagandist cyber-campaign and electoral interference as part of the Kremlin’s hybrid war. Key to this is the claim that social media manipulation swung the result of narrow votes in favour of Brexit and Donald Trump. This seems to be illustrated by Cambridge Analytica, which allegedly bought access to personal data on Facebook in order to micro-target swing voters and those it might have considered to be ‘easily persuadable people’. Unable to comprehend the political insurgency that is sweeping through the West, many politicians and pundits appear to believe that millions of their fellow citizens voted against the ruling establishment because Russian bots and data-powered political ads manipulated them.¹ This narrative forgets that our age of anger has its origins in the moral bankruptcy afflicting Western capitalism and the failure of liberal democratic systems to deal with the popular backlash against rapid cultural change. Elites left, right and centre are struggling to grasp why a popular majority rejects the status quo.

Many of those who consider the upheaval shaking Western liberal democracies as fundamentally homegrown tend to view it in primarily economic terms. Once confined to the political fringe, far-left and radical-right insurgents are apparently in the ascendancy because of mounting rage against an establishment that has failed to address the main economic problems, including financial disruption, exorbitant executive pay, youth unemployment and growing regional inequalities. Emblematic of this is all the talk about those ‘left behind’ by globalisation and about the retreat of liberalism.² 2016 was the year when the ghosts of capitalism came back to haunt the elites. For the first time since the Great Depression and the post-war settlement, Brexit and Trump gave the economic losers a political victory over the winners. The popular revolt against the establishment is only beginning, but it has already buried once and for all the idea that Western liberal democracy ushered in the ‘end of history’ – the conceit that the West’s brand of democratic capitalism is the only valid model because it combines political freedom with economic opportunity and social cohesion.

However, it was not just their marginalisation in the economy that voters resented. The fact that they voted against their economic self-interest suggests that their revulsion was to do with the denigration of their values and identities by the members of the professional political class. Hillary Clinton’s dismissal of half of Trump voters – many former Democrat supporters – as a ‘basket of deplorables’ exemplifies the contempt in which liberal elites hold those for whom global free trade, mass immigration and the priority of minority values over declining majorities and their ways of life mean greater economic hardship and unnerving cultural compromises.³ The elites used to say ‘it’s the economy, stupid’, but now cultural loss appears to trump economic pain.

Liberal democracy is in question because, so far, it has not coped with the economic injustice and divisions in society that threaten the social contract between the people and their representatives. The depth of divisions has been laid bare in recent referendums and elections, as countries are split between young and old, between the metropolis and the provinces, between cities, small towns and the countryside, and between those who are university educated and those who are not. These divisions can be mapped on to the electoral divide of Remain/Brexit, Clinton/Trump and Macron/Le Pen. The old opposition of left/right seems increasingly obsolete, its dominance in contemporary politics superseded by a new narrative of a clash between liberal-cosmopolitan ‘people from nowhere’ and conservative-communitarian ‘people from somewhere’.⁴

Yet this narrative risks substituting one binary world for another – one in which the main fault lines are cultural and generational, encapsulated by the networked metropolitan youth versus the old ‘left behind’. Categories of this sort fail to capture the complex composition of urban and suburban communities as well as the dynamics of inequality within them. Simplistic stories about a bright cosmopolitan future or a backlash against globalisation do little to integrate culture and age with class, geography and the economy. We are witnessing the failure of dualistic thinking, and this will not be resolved by substituting one binary for another.

Nor does it help to add the prefix ‘post’. Post-capitalism or post-liberalism accord too much importance to that which they aim at overcoming, and they fail to name alternatives anchored in reality. This flaw was always present in post-modernism and cognate concepts, which were mostly intensifications of certain Enlightenment strands in modernity, such as the cult of the individual, the sovereign will (individual or collective) and the power of techno-science to liberate us not simply from the trap of capitalist markets but also from any limits of nature or history.⁵ These and other assumptions are disintegrating in the form of the destruction of the person by individualism, the submission to technology and the erosion of society by online friendships and virtual community that are abstracted from real relationships.

Underpinning this disintegration are the forces of dispossession unleashed by liberalism, which include capitalism, statism and globalisation. All of them involve a shift from the self-government of citizens towards the administration of things and the governance by numbers.⁶ Both people and nature are reduced to commodities circulating in an unmediated space based on an oscillation between the individual who is disembedded from history, institutions and relationships, on the one hand, and the collective grounded in a positivist legal system, on the other. This liberal order is inherently unstable because liberalism erodes the very foundations on which it rests.⁷ It brings about economic injustice and divisions in society that are threatening the social contract between the people and their representatives, which is the bedrock of the liberal tradition. The liberal elites fail to understand that the anti-establishment insurgents are a consequence, not the cause, of the failure of liberalism.

Liberalism is a slippery term with many meanings. In this book I argue that the liberalism which has failed is not the whole liberal tradition but, rather, a contemporary radicalisation of specific ideals, in particular (1) freedom without social solidarity (going back to John Locke and Immanuel Kant); (2) the primacy of the individual underwritten by the collective power of the state over civic associations (going back to Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau); and (3) faith in a better future underpinned by a secular metaphysics of progress (going back to Auguste Comte and J. S. Mill).⁸ Three notable exceptions are the constitutionalist liberalism of Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville, the social liberalism of Benjamin Constant and François Guizot, and the new liberalism of T. H. Green, L. T. Hobhouse and J. A. Hobson, with its emphasis on the conditions of individual flourishing sustained by networks of mutual assistance.⁹

By contrast with these three strands, contemporary liberals defend a negative conception of freedom as absence of constraints on individual choice (except the law and private conscience). The liberal accentuation of ‘negative’ freedom rather than substantive shared ends informs ideals such as emancipation, self-expression and choice. Contemporary liberals also advance an economic and social individualism that is promoted by government and the law. This liberal priority of the individual over groups has led to the preference for state and market mechanisms over the intermediary institutions of civil society. Moreover, contemporary liberals have doubled down and embraced what John Gray calls hyper-liberalism.¹⁰ Far from defending tolerance and a richer conception of freedom, hyper-liberal politics seeks to overcome any attachment to national and group identity in favour of a borderless world without restrictions on personal choice. Gone is a commitment to critical debate about rival values and beliefs, combined with a concern for truth. Hyper-liberals at best are indifferent to facts that contradict their belief in progress and at worst engage in sophistry with virtuesignalling self-righteousness. They condemn patriotism as reactionary and national identity as a repressive construction while promoting a cosmopolitan vision that is remote from the everyday existence of most people.

Gray is right to suggest that hyper-liberalism is less a departure from the main liberal tradition than an intensification of liberalism as a secular religion. With a blind faith in progress and individual emancipation from all forms of shared belonging, liberalism at the hands of Mill, who was deeply influenced by the positivist philosophy of Comte,¹¹ became a new religion of humanity that ignores people’s yearning for security and meaning. Beyond Gray, I argue that liberalism cannot comprehend popular attachment to relationships embedded in civic institutions – from the local parish and town hall to the armed forces and parliament. It equates such sentiments with atavistic prejudice that must be swept away in the name of progress embodied in transnational state power and the expanding global market. Secular progressive liberalism flips over into large-scale social engineering to refashion society in its own image, combining free-market fundamentalism with social egalitarianism and individualised identity politics.

Under the influence of this creed, liberal democracy is increasingly illiberal and undemocratic.¹² Since antiquity, philosophers have cautioned against the slide of democracy into oligarchy, demagogy, anarchy and tyranny. Today this warning applies to liberalism and the dangers it poses to democratic rule. In the final instance, different liberal democratic models are self-eroding as they descend into oligarchical rule, demagogic manipulation, an anarchic fragmentation of society, and what Tocqueville called the ‘tyranny of voluntary servitude’ – a ‘kind of servitude, ordered, mild and peaceable . . ., a singular power, tutelary, all-encompassing’.¹³ Those demons of liberal democracy are perhaps irrepressible but they can be tamed. A genuine democracy tries to reconcile estranged interests in a negotiated settlement based on leadership and popular participation. This involves the forging of a common life around shared principles and practices that seek to balance freedom with fraternity, equality with reciprocity, and tradition with modernity.

The dignity of the person involves both liberty and fraternal relations of belonging to communities and civic institutions – such as schools, hospitals, railways, water companies, post offices and housing associations – that generate a sense of connection and loyalty. Where they serve people’s needs and interests, they are a good in their lives and a source of social bonds and collective action. Democracy requires a culture of shared norms that nurtures a shared sense of affection and attachment. Such norms include a balance of equality before the law with reciprocal obligation – duties we owe to ourselves and to others. In a democracy we have precious individual rights but also duties to care for others and for their well-being as well as to lead by example. Reciprocity is about relationships of give-and-receive, contribution and reward, on which democracy depends for trust and cooperation that cannot be mandated by law or instituted by economic contract alone.

A democratic politics also has to recognise that we are social beings who are partially constituted by an inheritance of language, relationships, place and belief, which needs to be conserved and renewed. By trying to hold the balance between tradition and modernity, democracy is as conservative as it is radical. These and other principles underpin common values of hard work, family, community, country and international solidarity. Such a democratic renewal requires a political debate shaped by a public philosophy – one that can address deeper divisions around questions of shared meaning and belonging. That is the central argument of this book.

Each chapter combines a critique of contemporary liberal democracy with ideas for democratic renewal. Chapter 1 shows how the tendency of the liberal establishment towards oligarchy and technocratic rule legitimates the invocation of the ‘will of the people’, which at the hands of the insurgents often becomes debased and descends into mob rule.¹⁴ Liberalism and populism polarise politics and undermine parliamentary democracy just when democracy needs a transcendent conversation about what people share as citizens – what binds them together as members of national and cultural communities. Chapter 2 argues that liberalism has become an engine of oligarchy instead of open markets, as exemplified by the monopoly power of tech giants and global finance. The alternative approach is not simply better regulation but a much more fundamental change of ownership and internal company ethos that gives workers power as part of an economic democracy we have never built.

Chapter 3 shows how contemporary liberalism is a catalyst for demagogy and employs similar manipulative methods to populism. Democratic renewal will have to include a politics committed to proper debate in search of substantive truths. Chapter 4 argues that liberalism’s erosion of social bonds and civic ties has led to the fragmentation of society and anarchy, which will require new forms of solidarity to balance individual freedoms and the promotion of reciprocity to mitigate selfish individualism. Chapter 5 suggests that the liberal drift towards oligarchy, demagogy and anarchy erodes the principles and practices of liberality – free speech, free inquiry, tolerance – on which a vibrant democracy depends. In this manner contemporary liberalism brings about Tocqueville’s tyranny of voluntary servitude. The alternative this book puts forward is a radical renewal of democracy anchored in people associating around shared interests and building intermediary institutions that provide agency and meaning.