Vladimir Putin is perhaps first among the anti-democratic strongmen that have emerged to soil the world. At the recent G20 summit he couldn’t resist taking a shot at liberal democracy, suggesting that it is becoming obsolete. The fact is that while the system he so loved, and faithfully served—Soviet Communism—lies
Continue readingTag: liberal democracy
The Disaffected Lib: What Then Must We Do? Canada’s Place Alongside the United States in Turbulent Times.
Do you ever wonder how close the United States may be to abandoning democracy? Do you ever wonder what that might mean for Canada? Are you familiar with the word, “anschluss”? Even The Economist recently rated the US as a “flawed democracy.” That might have been overly generous. A paper released
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Liberal Democracy Cannot Survive Undefended.
Since the advent of the neoliberal era, the reign of Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney, liberal democracy has been left to its own devices. The warning sign, the red flag, was the extinction of any meaningful vestige of progressivism from the body politic. The last defender of liberal democracy we knew
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Taking Democracy for Granted. We’re Probably On This Road Too.
Andrew Sullivan has a thought-provoking essay in New York Magazine about how we’re killing off liberal democracy and not just in Poland or Hungary or the United States either. This elite condescension toward challenges to their power stems, philosopher John Gray recently argued, from a fundamental and demonstrably false assumption that
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: An Excellent Introduction to Neoliberalism. It’s Essential to Grasp How Its Adherents in Our Political Caste Undermine Democracy.
A lot of us see neoliberalism, manifested in the rise of market power and the spread of globalism, as a plague on society. It is a plague on democratic society. That purpose was forged almost a century ago in Austria as it emerged from the ashes of WWI. With the end
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Fareed Zakaria’s Eulogy for Liberal Democracy In America
Fareed Zakaria takes to the pages of the Washington Post to lament the passing of liberal democracy – and liberty – in his adopted homeland, the United States. Two decades ago, I wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs that described an unusual and worrying trend: the rise of illiberal democracy.
Continue reading