Two pandemics are sweeping the planet, and so far nobody has found a cure for either. There’s Covid-19 and there’s a global democracy blight causing political life in many countries to become more polarized and less democratic.
Unlike Covid, the democracy dysfunction has been building for some time. In a depressingly large number of countries, both identity politics and ideological competition have become more polarized even as the strength of democratic institutions has declined.
Echoing—unconsciously for the most part—criticisms both fascist and communist intellectuals made of classical liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s, many voices on the left and the right blame the democratic recession on the consequences of what they call the “neoliberal” policies widely adopted after the end of the Cold War.
Read the full article in the