Liberal democracy is a Western affair, not a global one. It was born and evolved in the West during the late modern era, grounded in cultural, economic, and social preconditions that cannot be reproduced elsewhere. Its export has often been an element of neocolonial ambition. The world knows well how to distinguish good governance from oppression, order from violent chaos, yet it neither thinks nor organizes itself democratically. Nor does it admire the democratic West or aspire to emulate it—except in the production of goods and services. Today, liberal democracy concerns scarcely one-eighth of the world’s population. Europe, the West (which are not the same thing, or at least have not always been), and democracy have long since been provincialized. The West is the rest.
The ongoing dismantling of what was once called the liberal world order bears out this premise. That expression contained both a universalism—legal and economic, grounded in the ideology of human rights and the free market—and a particularism: the Anglo-Saxon, and above all American, dominance that this order sustained from the end of the Cold War onward (and, in financial and monetary terms, since 1945). Today, an international political pluralism is reasserting itself, with Russia and China—together with India, Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia—challenging American power and the United States’ long-standing hegemonic reach. Though the BRICS have yet to take on a fully defined geopolitical or geoeconomic form, they nonetheless threaten the old order in practice. Friction and slippage between old and new spheres of influence, renewed tensions along maritime routes and supply chains, and the ruthless competition for technological supremacy are shaping an international landscape in motion—unsettled, convulsed, in crisis, and, in some cases, at war.
External insecurity now seeps into the very fabric of Western democracies, compounding the insecurity generated by the neoliberal economic paradigm—crippled for nearly two decades (since the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007) yet still lacking an alternative. This paradigm was born in opposition to the quasi-Keynesian model of Bretton Woods, to the social-democratic compromise between capital and labor sustained by politics, and to the idea that the economy should not wield unlimited power within society. It replaced the fight against unemployment with the fight against inflation. The result has been a profound imbalance in favor of profits and to the detriment of wages; the weakening of intermediary bodies such as parties and trade unions, as the social bonds once created by work have been fragmented and made precarious; a deepening inequality not only of wealth, but also of knowledge and power; and a weakening of democratic institutions—above all parliaments—and of the welfare state itself, all in the name of the market’s autonomy from politics.
From this has followed a grassroots delegitimization of democratic institutions, which have proven patently incapable of protecting citizens from the harshest effects of turbo-capitalism. In response, a wave of hyper-political protest movements—populisms—has sought to restore power to politics, yet these too ultimately surrender to market logic, crippled by theoretical and programmatic weakness. In any case, societies are splintering along this path into opposing tribes, waging largely symbolic—though often virulent—cultural civil wars between woke positions and those of the right.
Driven by these processes and by the power of capitalism reinforced by electronic technology, highly efficient yet deeply pacifying, offering economic powers and an increasingly authoritarian politics an immense capacity for control—democracy is mutating into post-democracy: an oligarchic regime barely disguised, preserving only the hollowed-out façade of democratic institutions. And when politics lately seems to have regained space and power, it does so only in authoritarian form, through the empowerment of executive elites who relate directly to the people in plebiscitary fashion, while spaces for protest and dissent are steadily eroded in the name of ever-new emergencies—from COVID to the threats of war. Neoliberalism in crisis, subordinate populisms, fragmented and formless societies, perpetual emergencies, new authoritarianisms, and a digitalized society and state in which the subject is no longer the controller but the controlled: this is the true face of Western post-democracies—or more precisely, of new oligarchies.
It is evident that this is a system built on contradictions: a democracy without a people; an individualism that produces individuals at the mercy of every power and every emotion; a security regime that renders everyone insecure. Liberal democracy is weakened, disfigured, delegitimized: liberalism, having turned into economic liberalism, has all but overwhelmed it through the very contradictions it nourished—contradictions the left failed to see or chose to underestimate, having in effect embraced the paradigm of what should have been its adversary.
Domestic and international processes now converge to create conditions hostile to democracy, to mediation, and even to genuine political conflict grounded in real ideas and interests rather than in symbols or emotions. Above all, in post-democracy the faith that politics can alter the existing state of affairs has withered away. The world now appears—as Mrs. Thatcher famously put it—“without alternatives,” and is, for the most part, believed to be so.
Yet the prognosis for liberal democracy is not necessarily fatal, though it is certainly guarded. The differences between the world of the past—the era of the “Thirty Glorious Years”—and that of today are, of course, radical: transformations in the economic paradigm (from a quasi-Keynesian model to neoliberalism, or in Europe, to ordoliberalism); in the technological order (from a “civilization of machines” to a digital one); and in the international order (from bipolarism to globalization, and finally to geopolitical pluralism).
The result of these transformations is a world at war, a weakened West, and societies within it that are shapeless and divided. Yet beneath the prevailing social apathy and entropic drift, there are also spasms of protest, eruptions of dissent, and expressions of discontent—though these, however loudly proclaimed, tend either to dissipate quickly or to take on right-wing forms, given the historic capitulation of the left in recent decades.
It is clear that the transformations that have taken place cannot be undone; the film of history cannot be rewound. The effort of those old Catholic reactionaries who dreamed of undoing the Revolution has always been in vain. What can and must be attempted instead is a multilayered effort to restore political form to society: to lead it out of neoliberal atomization and to foster social, cultural, and economic groupings endowed with both durability and organizational coherence—with genuine political quality.
Such groupings must be supported by political parties far bolder and more deeply rooted than those of today—parties capable of gathering and amplifying the energies that now erupt from social contradictions but soon dissipate into inertia, distrust, or blind violence. Without this movement from below, there can be no hope of change. Yet for social protest to become truly productive, it requires not only practical organization but also theoretical labor: a work of understanding that makes sense of the logic of the contemporary world and integrates experience into knowledge. For there to be action, there must first be thought—an idea.
From this arises a series of imperatives: that a new alliance be forged between politics and culture—that politicians and intellectuals each take a step forward to meet one another, setting aside mutual suspicion, indifference, and impatience. In Italy, one opportunity for such an encounter—already lost, though others will surely come—should have been the uncompromising struggle against the reforms of the school and university systems: reforms that turn education into mere training, that value the acquisition of skills over the cultivation of critical maturity, that shift the center of gravity of education toward the private economic sphere, and that fuel the race toward online universities.
At the political level, it is clear that the imbalance of power between the executive and the legislature must be corrected, and that plebiscitary forms of legitimizing authority must give way to the restoration of a genuine parliamentary centrality—one that embodies the re-politicization of society from below.
Politics must also be capable of forging a new, non-subordinate pact with the economy along three main lines: the revival of economic policy—if not of democratic planning itself; the return of a mixed economy, meaning the systematic intervention of the public hand in production; and the restoration of a legal balance between labor and capital, with a reduction in the proliferation of contract types and a reform of the procurement system. All of this, in practice, entails abandoning the neoliberal paradigm and its ideological faith in the autonomy of the economy.
Naturally, for all this not to remain a pathetic book of dreams, a stabilization of the international situation is essential—and the less adventurous and bellicose the policies of democracies become, the more room there will be to renew and strengthen their institutions. Alongside this, there must also be a clear democratic will, both from below and among the elites. Yet this cannot be taken for granted: decline is real, and a reversal of course is merely possible—not even probable.
Still, it is worth the effort to imagine it and to prepare for it. For if it is true, as Paul Valéry once said, that civilizations are mortal, it is also true that ours—the long late-modern cycle opened by the French Revolution—should not yet be declared dead.
Cover photo: The empty Security Council Chamber is pictured at UN headquarters in New York City on December 20, 2023. A UN Security Council vote on a much-delayed resolution calling for a pause to the Israel-Hamas war was postponed again on Wednesday, the council’s presidency said, as members wrangled over wording. (Photo by Charly Triballeau / AFP)
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