Julia R. Cartwright is a senior research fellow in law and economics at the American Institute for Economic Research.
On June 16, 1989, a bearded 26-year-old stood before a quarter million Hungarians in Budapest and demanded that Soviet troops leave his country. His fearless call for free elections helped bring down communism in Hungary. The young firebrand was Viktor Orban.
Twenty-five years later, he proudly announced he was building an “illiberal state.” What happened in between is a microcosm of what has happened to liberal democracy itself.
That story gives Daron Acemoglu’s new book “What Happened to Liberal Democracy?” its urgency. The MIT economist and Nobel laureate best known for his 2012 title “Why Nations Fail” has written the most ambitious entry yet in the crowded liberalism-in-crisis genre. Where others blame social media, demagogues or racism, he makes a much more incriminating argument: Liberalism is dying primarily of self-inflicted wounds. And unlike most diagnosticians, he offers an alternative: what he calls “working-class liberalism.”
His story begins with the bargain by which postwar liberal democracy earned mass loyalty: It delivered widespread prosperity, functioning public services and genuine political voice for citizens. For three decades, it succeeded spectacularly, as wages more than doubled, hospitals and highways spread, and workers without college degrees entered the middle class. To illustrate, Acemoglu tells the story of Mershell C. Graham, the son of formerly enslaved people whose Ford factory job launched his granddaughter Pearl Cleage to life as a playwright.
Then the bargain began to collapse. Acemoglu charges liberalism with two sins. First, the “sin of omission”: When automation, globalization and deindustrialization severed wages from productivity after 1980, liberal elites failed to respond. Median wage growth collapsed from 2.5 percent a year to 0.45 percent; the jobs anchoring Rust Belt towns vanished; and heroin moved in. A canyon opened between the college-educated and everyone else — a divide Acemoglu traces back to Vietnam draft deferments — and the classes stopped mixing in neighborhoods, in marriages or at the airport bar.
Second, Acemoglu names the “sin of commission”: Elites walked away from liberalism’s core commitments. In recent decades, they diverged from the working class on immigration and the identity issues that make up the culture wars. When the working class objected, elites reached for what Acemoglu bluntly calls “social engineering”: compulsory diversity trainings, ideological litmus tests, language policing. He places these efforts in a lineage of thought policing that includes the Islamic ulema and Maoist China. Social media manufactured outrage and supercharged the cycle of provocation and counterprovocation.
As of 2023, only about a quarter of Americans strongly trusted the president or the Supreme Court, and only 8 percent said the same of Congress. Asked to describe American politics in one word, respondents reached for “corrupt,” “divisive” and “chaos.” In the 1990s, about half of Americans held a mix of left and right views; today the parties barely share a planet, and majorities in both oppose meeting halfway.
Yet just when despair seems warranted, Acemoglu plants his flag: “Liberalism is worth saving and remaking.” For a man who won the Nobel Prize by showing that institutions are the wellspring of prosperity, a nation losing faith in its institutions is a challenge he is compelled to answer.
Acemoglu’s remade liberalism rests on four premises. First, fallibility: No belief is beyond question, which makes humility a necessity rather than simply a virtue. Humanity, after all, was once quite sure the Earth was flat. Second, learning in community: Humans acquire knowledge from others, not through solitary discovery, which makes community the infrastructure of liberalism. Third, gentle epistemic improvement: With open debate, better ideas slowly win out. Fourth, collective knowledge: Pooled and shared, knowledge is how societies get healthier, richer and freer.
From these premises flows a program. Because human beings are fallible, no elite should impose values from above — hence broad buy-in over top-down policy. Because people learn in community, individual rights must be fused with communal life rather than set against it. And because collective knowledge is what makes societies richer, Acemoglu makes the case for centering shared prosperity and redirecting technology, especially artificial intelligence, to serve workers rather than sideline them.
Not every argument is equally strong. Still, “What Happened to Liberal Democracy?” is a book for these times, when many Americans sense that the nation is at an inflection point. Acemoglu’s answer is neither despair nor nostalgia. It is a rallying cry to return to liberal democracy, the system that turns individual freedom into prosperity for all. Right, left or center, the tasks laid out are for everyone: Invest in your community, demand institutions that answer to their citizens and defend the freedoms of people you disagree with.
Orban’s arc, after all, was a verdict on what liberalism became once it held power and stopped listening to the people. Acemoglu has written the most rigorous account yet of how that happened. He ends it with a call to action: The defense of liberty and the integrity of liberal institutions depend on everyone. The future success of any liberal nation hinges on whether its citizens will answer the call.
The post Is liberal democracy dead? Here’s a new answer. appeared first on Washington Post.
