Over the past few years, I have frequently been reminded of David Foster Wallace’s commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005. Wallace began with the story of two fish swimming together, when an older fish swims by and says “Morning boys, how’s the water?” After the old fish swims away, one says to the other, “What the hell is water?”



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Over the last year or two, there’s been a lot of discussion about what drove Trump voters and Brexit voters to the polls. There’s been concern as specific constitutional and political norms break down. But with so many people running from tweet-storm to tweet-storm, there has been comparatively less attention to what happened to the water – to the root causes of the global crisis of democracy.

Yascha Mounk’s extraordinary new book, The People versus Democracy, provides a clear, concise, persuasive, and insightful account of the conditions that made liberal democracy work – and how the breakdown in those conditions is the source of the current crisis of democracy around the world. He reveals the water in which liberal democracy has been swimming unthinkingly all these years.

The success and stability of liberal democracy, Mounk argues, was premised on three assumptions about social life. First, the citizenry had a relatively similar worldview because broadcast news, newspapers, radio, and the like were all one-to-many forms of communication in which gatekeepers ensured that news and information remained within the mainstream. This meant that even diverse communities were part of a shared conversation based on shared facts.

The second assumption was broadly-shared economic growth and relative economic equality. For most of the history of the world, there was basically no economic growth. Only since the dawn of the industrial revolution has growth skyrocketed, meaning that people could aspire to (and expect) higher living standards. And in the few decades after the second world war specifically, growth combined with low levels of economic inequality meaning that the rising tide actually did lift all boats.

We now swim in more dangerous waters, and we can no longer take the persistence of liberal democracy for granted.

The final assumption was social homogeneity. Eras of stable liberal democracies around the world, Mounk argues, have largely been characterized by relatively homogeneous populations. In Europe, for example, the rise of democracy and the breaking of empires – like the polyglot Austro-Hungarian empire – were inextricably tied to nationalism.

In the last generation, and in particular, in the last fifteen or so years, Mounk argues that all three assumptions have come under severe stress. Social media has turned any individual into a broadcaster, and allowed people to hear only the news, facts, and opinions they want to hear. This in turn has expanded the reach of radical and fringe ideas and conspiracy theories. Growth has been stagnant for the average worker for a generation, and people are anxious that their kids’ generation will make it financially. Finally, immigration has increased since the mid-twentieth century, sparking racial and cultural anxiety in locations that have seen particularly rapid increases in diversity.

The consequence, Mounk argues, is that liberal democracy is coming apart. On the one side, we see the rise of “illiberal democracies” – governments that claim to represent the “real” people of the nation, but have little regard for individual rights or constitutional norms. Many refer to these movements as populist. At the same time, others flirt with what Mounk calls “undemocratic liberalism,” a style of governance which preserves rights but at the expense of democratic engagement and accountability. Think of this as government by elite technocrats who have little faith in ordinary people.

What is so troubling is that these two responses might be mutually reinforcing. Mounk, a lecturer at Harvard University, doesn’t make much of this point, but it is worth resting on for a moment. When populists gain power, their opponents are likely to see the virtues of undemocratic liberalism. When undemocratic liberalism gains steam, many ordinary people will feel locked out and that public policies are unresponsive to their demands – pushing them to want to overthrow the elites. In the ensuing cycle, the loser is liberal democracy, which is assaulted for both its liberalism and its democracy.

One of the great strengths of Mounk’s book is that he eschews simple, singular explanations – and as a result, easy solutions. Mounk offers three directions to save liberal democracy from its enemies. The most worked out is an economic reform agenda to alleviate the unequal distribution of economic growth and mitigate the insecurity that stems from technology and globalization. The least worked out – perhaps because it is the most difficult – is an agenda to revive “civic faith,” our shared set of facts and information, trust in political institutions, and our sense of civic decency. This arena deserves more attention because it is unclear how to achieve policy changes of any kind in a polarized society that has few shared facts and whose civic muscles are atrophying.

The most interesting suggestion, however, might be Mounk’s call for imagining a new form of nationalism, which he calls “inclusive nationalism.” Instead of responding to the rise of nationalism with its polar opposite, utopian cosmopolitanism, Mounk says we need to “domesticate nationalism,” and he offer a vision for an integrated society in which nationalism unites people, rather than divides them.

All three parts of this agenda might seem uncomfortable to those who wish to continue politics as usual. Economic reforms threaten the most powerful people and interest groups in society. Restoring civic faith means breaking out of tribalism in society, politics, and education. Inclusive nationalism challenges the conventional rhetoric on both right and left. But we now swim in more dangerous waters, and we can no longer take the persistence of liberal democracy for granted.