The Populist Challenge to Liberal Democracy
William A. Galston
Journal of Democracy, Volume 29, Number 2, April 2018, pp. 5-19 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
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The Populist Challenge to
Liberal Democracy
William A. Galston
William A. Galston is the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in Governance Studies
at the Brookings Institution and College Park Professor at the University
of Maryland. From 1993 to 1995, he was deputy assistant to
President Bill Clinton for domestic policy. His new book Anti-Pluralism:
The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy was published by Yale
University Press in March 2018.
For those who believe in liberal democracy, it is sobering to review
the events of the past quarter-century. Twenty-five years ago,
liberal democracy was on the march. The Berlin Wall had fallen;
the Soviet Union had collapsed; new democracies were emerging
throughout Europe, and Russia seemed to be in transition as well.
South Africa’s apartheid regime was tottering. Even though China’s
government had brutally repressed a democracy movement, it was
possible to believe that a more educated and prosperous Chinese
middle class would eventually (and irresistibly) demand democratic
reforms. Liberal democracy had triumphed, it seemed, not only in
practice but also in principle. It was the only legitimate form of
government. There was no alternative.
Today, the global scene is very different. Liberal democracy faces
multiple external challenges—from ethnonational autocracies, from regimes
claiming to be based on God’s word rather than the will of the
people, from the success of strong-handed meritocracy in places such as
Singapore, and, not least, from the astonishing economic accomplishments
of China’s market-Leninist system.
But there is also an internal challenge to liberal democracy—a challenge
from populists who seek to drive a wedge between democracy and
liberalism. Liberal norms and policies, they claim, weaken democracy
and harm the people. Thus, liberal institutions that prevent the people
from acting democratically in their own interest should be set aside. It is
this challenge on which I wish to focus.
Journal of Democracy Volume 29, Number 2 April 2018
© 2018 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press
6 Journal of Democracy
The Seymour Martin Lipset Lecture on
Democracy in the World
William A. Galston delivered the fourteenth annual Seymour Martin
Lipset Lecture on Democracy in the World on 29 November 2017 at
the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C., and on 18 January 2018 at
the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. The title
of his lecture was “The Populist Challenge to Liberal Democracy.”
Seymour Martin Lipset, who passed away at the end of 2006, was one
of the most influential social scientists and scholars of democracy of the
past half-century. A frequent contributor to the Journal of Democracy and
a founding member of its Editorial Board, Lipset taught at Columbia, the
University of California–Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford, and George Mason
University. He was the author of numerous important books, including
Political Man, The First New Nation, The Politics of Unreason, and
American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword. He was the only person
ever to have served as president of both the American Political Science
Association (1979–80) and the American Sociological Association
(1992–93).
Lipset’s work covered a wide range of topics: the social conditions
of democracy, including economic development and political culture;
the origins of socialism, fascism, revolution, protest, prejudice, and extremism;
class conflict, structure, and mobility; social cleavages, party
systems, and voter alignments; and public opinion and public confidence
in institutions. Lipset was a pioneer in the study of comparative
politics, and no comparison featured as prominently in his work as that
between the two great democracies of North America. Thanks to his insightful
analysis of Canada in comparison with the United States, most
fully elaborated in Continental Divide (1990), he has been dubbed the
“Tocqueville of Canada.”
The Lipset Lecture is cosponsored by the National Endowment
for Democracy and the Munk School, with financial support this year
from Johns Hopkins University Press, the Schar School of Policy and
Government at George Mason University, the Canadian Embassy in
Washington, and the Canadian Donner Foundation. To view videos of
the Lipset Lecture from this and past years, please visit www.ned.org/
events/seymour-martin-lipset-lecture-series.
Across Europe and North America, long-established political arrangements
are facing a revolt. Its milestones have included the Brexit
vote; the 2016 U.S. election; the doubling of support for France’s
National Front; the rise of the antiestablishment Five Star Movement
in Italy; the entrance of the far-right Alternative for Germany into the
Bundestag; moves by traditional right-leaning parties toward the poli-
7William A. Galston
cies of the far-right in order to secure victories in the March 2017 Dutch
and October 2017 Austrian parliamentary elections; the outright victory
of the populist ANO party in the Czech Republic’s October 2017 parliamentary
elections; and most troubling, the entrenchment in Hungary of
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s self-styled “illiberal democracy,” which
seems to be emerging as a template for Poland’s governing Law and Justice
party and—some scholars believe—for insurgent parties in Western
Europe as well. This revolt threatens the assumptions that shaped
liberal democracy’s forward march in the 1990s and that continue to
guide mainstream politicians and policy makers of the center-left and
center-right.
When I began writing about this emerging revolt a few years ago, I
believed that economics lay at its core. Contemporary liberal democracy,
I argued, rested on a tacit compact between peoples on the one hand
and elected representatives together with unelected experts on the other.
The people would defer to elites as long as they delivered sustained
prosperity and steadily improving living standards. But if elites stopped
managing the economy effectively, all bets were off.
This compact began to weaken with growing competition from developing
nations, which put pressure on policies designed to protect the
citizens of advanced democracies against labor-market risks. The erosion
of the manufacturing sector and the urbanization of opportunity—
the shift of economic dynamism away from smaller communities and
rural areas toward a handful of metropolitan centers—destabilized geographic
regions and political structures. Inequality rose. A globalized
economy, it turned out, served the interests of most people in developing
countries and elites in advanced countries—but not the interests of
the working and middle classes in the developed economies, which had
done so well in the three decades after World War II.
Against this backdrop, the Great Recession that began in late 2007
represented a colossal failure of economic stewardship, and political
leaders’ inability to restore vigorous growth compounded the felony.
As economies struggled and unemployment persisted, the groups and
regions that failed to rebound lost confidence in mainstream parties and
established institutions, fueling the populist upsurge that has upended
U.S. politics, threatens the European Union, and endangers liberal governance
itself in several of the newer democracies.
In recent years, however, I have come to believe that this is only a
portion of the truth. A structural explanation that places economics at
the base and treats other issues as derivative distorts a more complex
reality.
The United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union all
failed to deal with waves of immigration in ways that commanded public
support. Not only did immigrants compete with longtime inhabitants
for jobs and social services, they were also seen as threatening estab-
8 Journal of Democracy
lished cultural norms and public safety. Postelection analyses show that
concerns about immigration largely drove the Brexit referendum, the
2016 U.S. presidential election, and the gains of far-right parties across
Europe.
In government, the media, and major metropolitan areas, technological
change has spurred the growth and consolidation of an education-based
meritocracy, giving rise to new class divisions. For citizens
with less formal education, particularly those in rural areas and smaller
towns, the dominance of this new elite has led to feelings of marginalization.
Too often, individuals who have prospered in this meritocracy
are seen as harboring a sense of superiority to their fellow citizens. Denying
the equal dignity and worth of others is self-defeating: Insult does
even more than injury to fuel resentment, one of the most dangerous of
all political passions.
With these developments, divisions among citizens based on geography,
formal-education levels, and value systems are growing
sharper. Supporters of dynamism and diversity increasingly clash with
proponents of stability and homogeneity, beneficiaries of technological
change with those harmed by the resulting economic shifts. As the
British analyst David Goodhart vividly puts it, democratic citizenries
are being divided into “Anywheres” (individuals whose identities are
professional and who can use their skills in many places, at home and
abroad) and “Somewheres” (individuals whose identities are tightly
bound to particular places).1
A college degree, it turns out, not only
expands economic opportunities but also reshapes an individual’s entire
outlook.
As I wrote in these pages in April 2017, “elites’ preference for open
societies is running up against growing public demands for . . . economic,
cultural, and political closure.”2
All too often, liberal democracy
is conflated with the spread of a cultural liberalism at odds with custom
and religion. The combination of economic dislocation, demographic
change, and challenges to traditional values has left many less educated
citizens feeling that their lives are outside their control. The national and
international governing institutions they thought would step in to help
seemed frozen or indifferent. In the United States, partisan polarization
gridlocked the system, preventing progress on critical issues. In Europe,
the opposite phenomenon—a duopoly of the center-left and center-right
that kept important issues off the public agenda—had much the same
effect.
In light of this apparent inability to address mounting problems, governments
across the West face growing public ire. Many citizens, their
confidence in the future shaken, long instead for an imagined past that
insurgent politicians have promised to restore. As popular demand for
strong leaders grows, rising political actors are beginning to question
key liberal-democratic principles such as the rule of law, freedom of the
9William A. Galston
press, and minority rights. The door seems to be opening for a return to
forms of authoritarianism written off by many as relics of the past.
What Is Liberal Democracy?
To clarify what these developments may mean for liberal democracy,
it is helpful to distinguish among four concepts—the republican principle,
democracy, constitutionalism, and liberalism.
By the republican principle I mean popular sovereignty. The people,
this principle holds, are the sole source of legitimacy, and only they
can rightly authorize forms of government. This idea is at the heart of
the most American of all documents, the Declaration of Independence,
which famously asserts, “Governments are instituted among men, deriving
their just powers from the consent of the governed.”3
Consistent
with the Declaration, James Madison wrote: “We may define a republic
to be . . . a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly
from the great body of the people.”4
Democracy, at the most basic level, requires both the equality of all
citizens and broadly inclusive citizenship. A society in which all citizens
are equal but only 10 percent of all adults are citizens would not,
today, count as a democracy. Together with equal and inclusive citizenship,
the other key pillar of democratic governance is majority rule.
This means, first, that public decisions are made by popular majorities
of citizens whose votes all count equally; and second, that democratic
decision making extends to a maximally wide range of public matters.
Majoritarianism is limited only by the imperative of preserving the liberties
and powers—freedom of speech, assembly, and the press, among
others—that citizens need to influence public decisions.
In this conception of democracy unmodified by any adjective, there
is nothing essentially undemocratic about majoritarian decisions that
systematically disadvantage specific individuals and groups or invade
privacy rights. If it wishes, a democratic public may embrace the maxim
that it is better for ten guilty individuals to go free than for one innocent
individual to be found guilty—but it is no less democratic if it adopts the
opposite view. Nor is it undemocratic per se to conduct judicial proceedings
in the same manner as legislative affairs. The Athenian assembly
that condemned Socrates may have been wrong, but it was fully demo-
cratic.
The third concept, constitutionalism, denotes a basic, enduring structure
of formal institutional power, typically but not always codified in
writing. This codified structure is “basic” in that it provides the basis
for the conduct of public life. And it is “enduring” because it typically
includes some mechanism that makes it harder to change the structure
itself than to amend or reverse decisions made within it.
In addition to organizing power, constitutions also establish boundar-
10 Journal of Democracy
ies for the institutions that wield it. These limits can be horizontal, like
the familiar “separation of powers” and “checks and balances.” They
can also be vertical: Through federalism, public power is divided among
different levels of jurisdiction (national, regional, and so forth). These
limits need not constrain public power in the aggregate. If the national
government has limited police powers but subordinate jurisdictions are
free to regulate what the national government may not, then in principle
there is nothing beyond government’s reach. This is why the decision
to limit public power in all its aspects marks the line between constitutionalism
in general and the specific type of constitutionalism we call
liberal.
This bring us to the fourth and final concept: liberalism. Benjamin
Constant famously distinguished between the “liberty of the ancients”
and the “liberty of the moderns.” For the ancients, liberty entailed “active
participation in collective power”—that is, in direct self-government.
The sheer size of modern political communities, however, makes
this impossible, even for those communities founded on republican principles.
One might conclude, then, that the liberty of the moderns consists
in the selection of representatives through free and fair elections
in which all may participate on equal terms. But this is only part of the
story. In fact, Constant presents the “peaceful enjoyment of individual
independence” as the modern alternative to direct participation in gov-
ernment.5
The exclusion of most citizens, most of the time, from direct
self-government opens up a large sphere of nonpolitical life—economic,
social, cultural, and religious—that citizens expect to conduct on their
own terms.
We have now reached the core idea of liberalism: recognizing and
protecting a sphere beyond the rightful reach of government in which
individuals can enjoy independence and privacy. In this spirit, the U.S.
Declaration of Independence not only invokes but also limits the republican
principle. If all human beings are endowed with “certain unalienable
rights” that governments do not create and individuals may
not surrender, then the republican principle can authorize only forms
of government that uphold these rights. Governments, the Declaration
reminds us, are created to “to secure these rights,” not to redefine or
abridge them.
We can now venture a more precise characterization of liberal democracy.
This type of political order rests on the republican principle,
takes constitutional form, and incorporates the civic egalitarianism
and majoritarian principles of democracy. At the same time, it accepts
and enforces the liberal principle that the legitimate scope of public
power is limited, which entails some constraints on or divergences
from majoritarian decision making. A liberal order can use devices
such as supermajority requirements or even unanimity rules to limit
the majority’s power, or it can deploy constitutional courts insulated
11William A. Galston
from direct public pressure to police the perimeter beyond which even
supermajorities may not go.
How Does Populism Challenge Liberal Democracy?
These distinctions also shed light on the populist challenge to liberal
democracy. Populism is not merely, as some observers have suggested,
an emotion-laden expression of disappointment over frustrated economic
expectations, resentment against rigged rules and special interests,
and fear of threats to physical and cultural security. Even if it lacks the
kind of formal theoretical underpinnings or canonical texts that defined
the great “isms” of the twentieth century, populism nonetheless has a
coherent structure.
Of our four key concepts, populism accepts the principles of popular
sovereignty and democracy, understood in straightforward fashion as
the exercise of majoritarian power. It is skeptical, however, about constitutionalism,
insofar as formal, bounded institutions and procedures
impede majorities from working their will. It takes an even dimmer view
of liberal protections for individuals and minority groups.
It might seem, then, that the aim of contemporary populism is what
many scholars and at least one national leader (Orbán) call “illiberal
democracy”—a governing system capable of translating popular preferences
into public policy without the impediments that have prevented
liberal democracies from responding effectively to urgent problems.
From this perspective, populism is a threat not to democracy per se but
rather to the dominant liberal variant of democracy.
Indeed, some observers contend that populism, so understood, is not
without merit: It represents “an illiberal democratic response to undemocratic
liberalism,”6
and thus is less an attack on democracy than a corrective
to a deficit thereof. These observers argue that elites, by taking
important issues such as economic, monetary, and regulatory policies
off the public agenda and assigning them to institutions insulated from
public scrutiny and influence, have invited precisely the popular revolt
that now threatens to overwhelm them.
But to stop here would be to leave half the story untold—the more
important half, in my view. Because populism embraces the republican
principle of popular sovereignty, it faces the question inherent in this
principle: Who are the people? When we say “we,” what do we mean?
This may sound like an abstract theoretical question. It is anything
but.
Today, “we the people” is understood to mean all citizens, regardless
of religion, manners and customs, and length of citizenship. The
people is an ensemble of individuals who enjoy a common civic status.
During the founding period of the United States, however, a thicker understanding
prevailed. In Federalist 2 John Jay wrote, “Providence has
12 Journal of Democracy
been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a
people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language,
professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government,
very similar in their manners and customs.”7
We may wonder
where this left African Americans, not to mention Catholics and those
for whom German was the language of daily life. How, if at all, did
Jay’s understanding of the American people differ from the understanding
of peoplehood in today’s Hungarian constitution, whose preamble
“recognise[s] the role of Christianity in preserving nationhood,” praises
“our king Saint Stephen” for making Hungary “a part of Christian
Europe,” and speaks of “promoting and safeguarding our heritage, our
unique language, [and] Hungarian culture”?8
Historically, right-leaning populists have emphasized shared ethnicity
and common descent, while left-leaning populists have often defined
the people in class terms, excluding those with wealth and power. Recently,
a third definition has entered public debate—the people as opposed
to cultural elites. In its U.S. version, this definition sets “real
people” who eat hamburgers, listen to country and western music, and
watch Duck Dynasty against “globalist” snobs who do whatever PBS,
NPR, and the New York Times deem refined.
When populists distinguish between the “people” and the “elite,”
they depict each of these groups as homogeneous. The people have one
set of interests and values, the elite has another, and these two sets are
not only different but fundamentally opposed. The divisions are moral
as well as empirical. Populism understands the elite as hopelessly corrupt,
the people as uniformly virtuous—meaning that there is no reason
why the people should not govern themselves and their society without
institutional restraints. And populist leaders claim that they alone represent
the people, the only legitimate force in society.
This approach raises some obvious difficulties. First, it is divisive by
definition. In the context of popular sovereignty, splitting a country’s
population into the people and the others implies that some parts of the
population, because they are not really part of the people, do not deserve
to share in self-government. Individuals outside the charmed circle of
the people may therefore be excluded from equal citizenship, violating
the principle of inclusion that is essential to democracy.
Second, the populist definition of the people is inherently counterfactual.
According to Jan-Werner Müller, a leading scholar of populism,
populists “speak and act as if the people could develop a singular judgment,
a singular will, and hence a singular, unambiguous mandate.”9
But
of course they cannot. In circumstances of even partial liberty, different
social groups will have different interests, values, and origins. Plurality,
not homogeneity, characterizes most peoples, most of the time.
Populism is the enemy of pluralism, and thus of modern democracy.
Imposing the assumption of uniformity on the reality of diversity not
13William A. Galston
only distorts the facts but also elevates the characteristics of some social
groups over those of others. To the extent that this occurs, populism becomes
a threat to democracy, which, as Müller puts it, “requires pluralism
and the recognition that we need to find fair terms of living together
as free, equal, but also irreducibly diverse citizens.”10
Whatever may
have been possible in classical republics, no form of identity politics can
serve as the basis for modern democracy, which stands or falls with the
protection of pluralism.
Equally counterfactual is the proposition that the people are uniformly
virtuous. They are not, of course. Political movements based on this
premise inevitably come to grief, but not before disappointment gives
way to a violent search for hidden enemies. Populist leaders attack “enemies
of the people” in moralistic terms, as corrupt, self-seeking, and
given to conspiracies against ordinary citizens, often in collaboration
with foreigners. Populism requires constant combat against these enemies
and the forces they represent.
In this way, presuming the people’s monopoly on virtue undermines
democratic practice. Decision making in circumstances of diversity typically
requires compromise. If one group or party believes that the other
embodies evil, however, its members are likely to scorn compromises as
dishonorable concessions to the forces of darkness. In short, populism
plunges democratic societies into an endless series of moralized zerosum
conflicts; it threatens the rights of minorities; and it enables overbearing
leaders to dismantle the checkpoints on the road to autocracy.
How Serious Is the Threat?
On the one hand, this is no time for complacency. Liberal democracy
faces clear and present dangers. On the other hand, I must underscore a
less fashionable point: This is no time for panic either. The best stance
is reality-based concern, as detached from fear and foreboding as we
can manage.
History offers a valuable corrective to myopia. A recent study of
politics in the wake of financial crises over the past 140 years finds a
consistent pattern: Majority parties shrink; far-right parties gain ground;
polarization and fragmentation intensify; uncertainty rises; and governing
becomes more difficult.11
Economic historians tell us that the effects
of financial crises, unlike cyclical recessions, typically take a decade or
more to abate. It was not until this year that middle-class families in the
United States regained the level of income they enjoyed prior to the onset
of the Great Recession in late 2007. They have not yet regained the
wealth they lost during this period. The lag in Europe is worse.
We may also gain perspective, and a measure of comfort, from a
cross-national survey released just a couple of months ago. Although
there is widespread discontent with how democratic institutions are per-
14 Journal of Democracy
forming in the European and North American countries included in the
survey, median support for representative democracy across these countries
stands at 80 percent. By contrast, only 13 percent support a system
in which a strong leader can make decisions without interference from
the legislature or the courts. Even fewer support military government.
That said, while publics are not turning their back on representative
democracy, they are willing to consider other forms of decision making.
Seventy percent favor referendums in which citizens vote directly
on major national issues, and 43 percent believe that allowing experts
to make decisions about what is best for their countries makes sense.12
Over the past year, I have been part of a bipartisan Voter Study Group
that has been working to understand not only the 2016 presidential election,
but also Americans’ views of their democratic system. The news is
mostly good. Among respondents, 78 percent believe that democracy is
preferable to any other form of government, while 83 percent think it is
very important to live in a democratic system. Nonetheless, 23 percent
are open to a strong leader who does not have to bother with Congress
and elections, and 18 percent would countenance military rule. Openness
to undemocratic alternatives was most pronounced among voters
who combine economic liberalism and cultural conservatism—the policy
profile most characteristic of U.S. populists. It was also evident among
voters who favor one primary culture over cultural diversity, believe that
European heritage is important to being an American, and harbor highly
negative views of Muslims. Nearly half the voters who supported Barack
Obama in 2012 but switched to Donald Trump in 2016 favored a strong,
unencumbered leader and declined to endorse democracy as the best form
of government.13
It is not clear that these findings represent a break with the past.
Overall support for a leader who can act unchecked by Congress and the
courts is no higher than it was two decades ago. Readers familiar with
Seymour Martin Lipset’s scholarship will recall similar themes in his
1970 text The Politics of Unreason and in the work he did on workingclass
authoritarianism in the 1950s.14
Nonetheless, there are grounds for
concern, not least because our system allows aroused political minorities
to exercise disproportionate influence.
In practice, not every manifestation of populism threatens liberal
democracy. While the Brexit vote, as a policy decision made by referendum,
raised some issues in terms of parliamentary sovereignty,
its outcome ultimately pivoted on policy concerns. In systems where
liberal-democratic institutions are strong, disputes about trade, immigration,
and even national sovereignty can still take place. In the long
run, the effort to place such issues beyond the pale of political contestation
will do more to weaken liberal democracy than robust debate
ever could.
But sometimes the populist challenge does directly threaten liberal
15William A. Galston
democracy. Left unchecked, moves to undermine freedom of the press,
weaken constitutional courts, concentrate power in the hands of the executive,
and marginalize groups of citizens based on ethnicity, religion,
or national origin will undermine liberal democracy from within. Hungarian
leader Viktor Orbán is frank about his antipathy to liberalism.
The country that gave birth to the Solidarity movement is following his
lead. We dare not ignore these developments, which may well be harbingers
of worse to come. As Abraham Lincoln once said as the clouds
of crisis darkened, “If we could first know where we are and whither we
are tending, we could better judge what to do and how to do it.”15
What Is to Be Done?
In the space remaining, I can only gesture toward the elements of a
liberal-democratic response to the populist challenge.16
1) The defenders of liberal democracy must focus relentlessly on
identifying and countering threats to liberal institutions. An independent
judiciary, freedom of the press, the rule of law, and protected space
for civil associations (secular and religious) represent the first line of
defense against illiberalism, and they must be safeguarded. At the same
time, political reforms are needed to restore the ability of liberal-democratic
institutions to act effectively. Gridlock frustrates ordinary citizens
and makes them more open to leaders who are willing to break the rules
in order to get things done.
2) We should distinguish between policy disputes and regime-level
threats. Populist parties often espouse measures, such as trade protectionism
and withdrawal from international institutions, that challenge
established arrangements but not liberal democracy itself. In a similar
vein, it is essential to distinguish between the liberal element of liberal
democracy and what is often called cultural liberalism. Liberal democrats
can adopt diverse views on issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage,
local traditions, and religion while remaining true to their political
creed.
3) Liberal democrats must make their peace with national sovereignty.
Political leaders can assert the right of their nations to put their interests
first without threatening liberal-democratic institutions and norms.
Again, this is a policy dispute within liberal democracy, not about liberal
democracy. The defenders of liberal democracy should likewise
acknowledge that control of borders is an attribute of national sovereignty,
and that liberal democrats can have a wide range of views on the
appropriate number and type of immigrants to admit. In recent decades,
as public concerns about population flows across national borders have
intensified throughout the West, this issue has done more than any other
to weaken support for liberal-democratic norms and institutions.
To some extent this trend reflects anxiety about economic displace-
16 Journal of Democracy
ment; the “Polish plumber” became a trope in the Brexit debate. Worries
about the increased demand for social services, too, have played a
part. But darker fears are also at work. The threat of Islamist terrorism
has made Western populations less willing to absorb new immigrants
or even refugees from Muslim-majority countries. Citizens increasingly
fear that Islam and liberal democracy are incompatible and that a clash
of civilizations is inevitable. National identity is taking on increasing
prominence in politics, and those who believe that liberal democracy
draws strength from diversity have been thrown on the defensive.
Large population flows, finally, have triggered concerns about the
loss of national sovereignty. During the 2016 Brexit referendum, the
EU’s unwillingness to compromise on the question of movement across
its member nations’ borders made it far more difficult for Britain’s “Remain”
forces to prevail. In the United States, Donald Trump’s famous
promise to build a “big, beautiful wall” along the Mexican border became
a powerful symbol of sovereignty regained.
But the concern extends beyond illegal immigration. Since the passage
in 1965 of reforms that liberalized U.S. immigration policy following
four decades of restrictive legislation, the country’s demographics
have been transformed. In 2015, first-generation immigrants made up
14 percent of the population, just shy of the peak slightly over a century
earlier.17
It should not be surprising that this latest cycle of immigration,
like its early twentieth-century precursor, has evoked support for more
restrictive policies among many U.S. citizens—this time including descendants
of the previous wave’s immigrants.
One may speculate that any country (even a self-styled nation of immigrants)
has a finite capacity to absorb new arrivals, and that bumping
up against this limit triggers a reaction that detractors condemn as nativist.
But denouncing citizens concerned about immigration as ignorant
and bigoted does nothing either to address the issue in substance or to
lower the political temperature. As Jeff Colgan and Robert Keohane
put it, “It is not bigotry to calibrate immigration levels to the ability of
immigrants to assimilate and to society’s ability to adjust.”18
No issue
has done more to spark the rise of contemporary populism, and finding
a sustainable compromise would drain much of the bile from today’s
liberal-democratic politics.
4) It is time to abandon a myopic focus on economic aggregates and
work instead toward inclusive growth—that is, the kind of economic policies
that improve well-being across all demographic lines, including those
of class and geography. As recent decades have shown, no mechanism
automatically translates economic growth into broadly shared prosperity.
Allowing the well-off strata of society to commandeer the lion’s share of
gains is a formula for endless conflict. So, too, is allowing the concentration
of economic growth and dynamism in fewer and fewer places.
The second half of the 1990s was the last time that the incomes of
17William A. Galston
all economic groups from top to bottom progressed together at roughly
the same rate. It is no coincidence that during this period the labor market
reached and then sustained full employment, improving workers’
bargaining power and bringing previously neglected individuals back
into the workforce. That history suggests that full employment should
be a focus of economic policy. This is a moral as well as an economic
imperative. In modern societies, work provides more than a livelihood;
it gives our lives structure and purpose, and is a key source of selfconfidence
and social respect. It promotes stable families and healthy
communities and strengthens the bonds of trust between individuals
and their governing institutions. Conversely, we know all too well the
consequences of long-term unemployment: diminished self-respect, increased
strife within families, epidemics of substance abuse, blighted
neighborhoods, and a corrosive sense of helplessness.
The challenge is not only work for all, but also reasonable compensation.
In the long run, workers cannot spend more than they are paid. As
wage growth slowed in recent decades, middle-class families kept up their
living standards via women’s entry into the workforce and by taking on
additional debt, in part drawn from the equity they had accumulated from
rising home prices. When the housing bubble burst, these families suffered
an economic shock that drove many into bankruptcy. The recovery since
the end of the Great Recession has been the weakest of the entire postwar
period largely because household and family incomes have remained flat.
Only wage increases can generate more vigorous growth, and if market
mechanisms fail to produce higher wages, public policy should step in.
The principle of inclusive growth applies across lines of geography as
well as class. Throughout the market democracies of the West, remote
and less densely populated regions are losing ground to metropolitan centers.
Agricultural areas can still do well when prices are high, but the
light industries that once thrived in smaller communities have weakened
in the face of competitive pressure. More than that, it appears that the
modern knowledge-based economy thrives on the density and diversity
found in larger cities, where concentrated professional networks spur innovation.
For this reason, public policy cannot fully eliminate the ruralurban
gap. But by investing in transportation infrastructure that enables
people who work in cities to live further from their places of employment,
governments can help small towns participate in the fruits of metropolitan
growth. Information technology can also be an asset: Expanding internet
access today, like rural electrification during the New Deal, could help to
bring isolated communities into the national economy and society.
Agency Within History
Liberals are anti-tribal, cherishing particular identities while subordinating
them to broader conceptions of civic and even human solidar-
18 Journal of Democracy
ity. But citizens often crave more unity and solidarity than liberal life
typically offers, and community can be a satisfying alternative to the
burdens of individual responsibility. Preferring those who are most like
us goes with the grain of our sentiments more than does a wider, more
abstract concept of equal citizenship or humanity. So does the tendency
to impute good motives to our friends and malign intent to our foes.
Antipathy has its satisfactions, and conflict, like love, can make us feel
more fully alive.
The appeal of populism—with its embrace of tribalism, its Manichean
outlook, and the constant conflict it entails—is deeply rooted in
the enduring incompleteness of life in liberal societies. This vulnerability
helps explain why, in just twenty-five years, the partisans of liberal
democracy have moved from triumphalism to near despair. But neither
sentiment is warranted. Liberal democracy is not the end of history;
nothing is. Everything human beings make is subject to erosion and contingency.
Liberal democracy is fragile, constantly threatened, always in
need of repair.
But liberal democracy is also strong, because, to a greater extent than
any other political form, it harbors the power of self-correction. Not
only do liberal-democratic institutions protect citizens against tyrannical
concentrations of power, they also provide mechanisms for channelling
the public’s grievances and unmet needs into effective reforms. To
be sure, the power of self-correction is not always enough to prevent
liberal democracies from crumbling. As we learned in the 1920s and
1930s, the combination of public stress and strong undemocratic movements
can be irresistible, especially in newer democracies. But the oftheard
analogy between those decades and our current situation obscures
more than it reveals. Today’s economic ills pale in comparison to the
Great Depression of the 1930s, and today’s autocratic regimes lack the
ideological attraction that fascism and communism held at their peak.
Still, there is no cause—and no excuse—for complacency. The current
ills of liberal democracy are deep and pervasive. Surmounting them
will require intellectual clarity and political leaders who are willing to
take risks to serve the long-term interests of their countries. Human
choice, not historical inevitability, will determine liberal democracy’s
fate.
For now, democratic publics want policy changes that give them hope
for a better future. Left unmet, their demands could evolve into pressure
for regime change. The partisans of liberal democracy must do all they
can to prevent this from happening.
NOTES
1. David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of
Politics (London: Hurst, 2017).
19William A. Galston
2. William A. Galston, “The 2016 U.S. Election: The Populist Moment,” Journal of
Democracy 28 (April 2017): 23.
3. “Declaration of Independence: A Transcription,” www.archives.gov/founding-docs/
declaration-transcript.
4. James Madison, “The Federalist Papers: No. 39,” http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_
century/fed39.asp.
5. Benjamin Constant, “The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation and Their Relation to
European Civilization,” in Benjamin Constant: Political Writings, trans. and ed. Biancamaria
Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 102.
6. Cas Mudde, “The Problem with Populism,” The Guardian, 17 February 2015, www.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/17/problem-populism-syriza-podemos-dark-
side-europe.
7. John Jay, “The Federalist Papers: No. 2,” http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/
fed02.asp.
8. “The Fundamental Law of Hungary,” 25 April 2011, www.kormany.hu/
download/e/02/00000/The%20New%20Fundamental%20Law%20of%20Hungary.pdf.
9. Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2016), 77.
10. Müller, What Is Populism? 3.
11. Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick, and Christoph Trebesch, “Going to Extremes:
Politics After Financial Crises, 1870–2014,” European Economic Review 88 (September
2016): 227–60.
12. Richard Wike et al., “Globally, Broad Support for Representative and Direct Democracy,”
16 October 2017, www.pewglobal.org/2017/10/16/globally-broad-support-for-
representative-and-direct-democracy.
13. Lee Drutman, Larry Diamond, and Joe Goldman, “Understanding American Authoritarians
and Anti-Democrats,” Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, forthcoming.
14. Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, The Politics of Unreason: Right Wing Extremism
in America, 1790–1970 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970); Lipset, “Democracy
and Working-Class Authoritarianism,” American Sociological Review 24 (August 1959):
482–501.
15. “Lincoln’s ‘House Divided’ Speech,” 16 June 1858, www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/
part4/4h2934t.html.
16. More extensive recommendations, particularly on matters of U.S. economic and
immigration policy, can be found in Galston, Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal
Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).
17. Gustavo López and Jynnah Radford, “Facts on U.S. Immigrants, 2015,” 3 May
2017, www.pewhispanic.org/2017/05/03/facts-on-u-s-immigrants/#fb-key-charts-first-
second-gen.
18. Jeff D. Colgan and Robert O. Keohane, “The Liberal Order Is Rigged: Fix It Now
or Watch It Wither,” Foreign Affairs 96 (May–June 2017): 44.