Many citizens in the replica democracies of the East began to feel that their own cultural and religious traditions were being disparaged by an obligatory conversion to foreign attitudes, values and institutions, including secularism and multiculturalism. A public embittered by the West’s treatment of its Eastern neighbors as second-class Europeans began rallying to populist demagogues who posed as defenders of authentic national identities. Their signature slogan was: “We don’t want to be copies! We want to be ourselves!” Resentment against democratization as imitation has proved particularly toxic in Central and Eastern Europe where democratization coincided with the process of European integration, which in practice meant that voters could vote political parties in and out of power but that laws and policies never changed since they were set in Brussels.

Third, the three-decade Age of Imitation that began in 1989 inflicted serious damage on liberal democracy in the West by putting to sleep the self-critical faculties of its leading politicians and political commentators. Busy trying to democratize others, Western policy elites became complacent toward the failures and deficiencies of free-market democracy in their own societies. This uncritical idealization of the state of democracy at home was the direct result of the West’s preoccupation with democratizing others. It is not by accident that the National Endowment for Democracy, a symbol of America’s commitment to democracy worldwide, has no mandate to work on problems within the United States. (Though this is also the reason it still enjoys bipartisan support.) This failure to look inward made efforts to export American-style democracy into an easy target for charges of hypocrisy.

The West’s one-sided focus on the struggle for democracy abroad made Western advisers shy away from discussing the ongoing struggle for power within democracies themselves. Liberals who overemphasized individual rights and voluntary market exchange, spoke about “power” only when discussing authoritarianism, genocide or corruption. Otherwise, their message has seemed to be that, if the government does not abuse its authority, the asymmetry of power relations characteristic of every society is of negligible importance.

Taking hold in the two-decade heyday of liberal hegemony following 1989, this sanitized image of liberal democracy has become the favorite straw man of illiberal politicians today, including the president of the United States. It explains why they repeatedly insist that all relations in society are power relations, that right doesn’t matter, that politics is a zero-sum game, that there are no impartial institutions and that fraud is just a clever way to win elections. This cynical perspective, which has now gained a receptive audience worldwide, represents a backlash against the excessive promises made by liberals after 1989. “Democracy promoters” insisted, unrealistically, that politics and economics, with a little good will, could easily become a win-win game, that periodic elections guarantee that citizens will control politicians, and that impartial institutions could overcome the unfairness associated with asymmetries of power in society. The ease with which these illusions were dashed was another factor opening the door for the steamrollering of illiberal forces to political power.

Western-style democratic capitalism has many well-known virtues. But having been put on a pedestal for post-Communist countries to admire and emulate, it lost all critical distance to itself, dismissing sensible warnings, for instance, about the downsides of military interventionism abroad and economic deregulation at home. By defining democracy as the ideal state of society and the only possible path to prosperity, the post-1989 consensus paradoxically undercut the most basic advantage of democratic governments. Democracies are not and cannot be “satisfaction machines.” They do not produce good governance the way a baker turns out doughnuts. What democracies offer dissatisfied citizens is the right to do something about their dissatisfaction. That is why a chastened democracy, having recovered from its unrealistic and self-defeating aspirations to global hegemony, remains the political idea most at home in the current age of dissatisfaction.

Ivan Krastev is a contributing opinion writer, the chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. Stephen Holmes is a professor of law at New York University. They are the authors of “The Light That Failed: A Reckoning.”

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