The Retreat of Western Liberalism

This is a difficult book to review because it has the ring of truth that most other authors either ignore or smother with self-serving propaganda to advance their political agendas. To write a proper review that conveys the entire message of this book, I would have to quote almost all of it. It was one of those rare books that I read slowly in order to absorb it thoroughly and spread out the enjoyment of reading it over many days.Edward Luce writes in a style you’d expect from a Globalist academic. However, he provides a deep and intellectually honest analysis of the broad spectrum of issues that have undermined globalism. He explores the root causes of our disappointing domestic and global economies, which are in turn unraveling the political and economic consensus for maintaining globalism.It’s a fun read because it relates the last thirty years of history through Mr. Luce’s eyes. He talks about how life is lived not just by elitists like himself, but with a keen insight into the “forgotten middle class” that voted the USA and UK in Populist directions in 2016. He has been in the right places to experience the highs and lows of recent history, starting with the victory of the West in the Cold War of 1989.=====The year was 1989. Having grown up under the Cold War’s nuclear shadow, the temptation to catch a glimpse of its physical demise was irresistible. Being students, we did not inform anyone of our absence. The instant we heard East Germany had opened Checkpoint Charlie, uniting Berlin, we were on our way. We were infected with optimism. As a student of Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University, I imagined that I possessed the key to the historic significance of the moment.Nearly three decades later, in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory, I found myself in Moscow….The worm had turned. America had just elected a president who was a big fan of walls and a big admirer of Vladimir Putin.=====Mr. Luce speaks not only for himself, but also for me. I, like millions of American Midwesterners, voted for Barack Obama in 2012, and Donald Trump in 2016. We flipped the states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, (and also Florida) from Blue to Red, thereby transferring 99 of the electoral votes that elected Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016.In the main, we the people of PA, OH, MI, WI, IA, and FL are not ideology-bound political partisans. We voted our states for Obama in 2012 because we thought he was a fair-minded President who was moving the economy forward. We voted for Trump in 2016 because we thought he was more competent on economic issues of restricting excessive immigration and reining in ‘free” trade than Ms. Clinton.Mr. Luce, being an academic economist of globalist bent, does not think much of Donald Trump. Nor does he make excuses for Ms. Clinton. “I have spent a fair amount of time interviewing leaders of ultra-nationalist movements, cult groups and fanatics of all kinds around the world. I have yet to come across a more airtight example of groupthink than Hillaryland.”His critique of Trump is that Trump appealed to the Populist, quasi-barbarian instincts of a disgruntled population. His critique of Ms. Clinton is that she tried to pretend that the disgruntled population did not exist. The same thing happened in Mr. Luce’s native Britain where the people booted the old order of Globalist Conservatives (roughly equivalent to our Republican Establishment) in the Brexit vote, but who are also unwilling to trust the left-of-center Labor Party to govern.So, what is it that has so many people riled up, and leads them to reject the nostrums of both political part establishments? Luce illuminates the points as to what motivated so many of people, including former Obama voters to switch to Trump:• By any numerical measure, humanity is becoming rapidly less poor. But between half and two-thirds of people in the West (USA and Western Europe) have been treading water – at best – for a generation. Tens of millions of Westerners will struggle to keep their heads above the surface over the coming decades.• The median income in 2007 was below what it was in 2002, at the start of the business cycle that lasted for most of George W. Bush’s presidency. What is good for Apple may not be good for America. [Apple] shuttered its last US production facility in 2004. The Bush expansion was the first on record where middle-class incomes were lower at the end of it than at the start. Today [after the Great Recession] the US median income is still below where it was at the beginning of this century. Clearly what the typical American understands by growth differs greatly from that of macroeconomists. GDP numbers insist we are doing well, at a time when half the country is suffering from personal recessions.• Between a quarter and a third of people in the West have negative or zero net wealth. They face penurious retirements.• The most crushing effect is stagnation. Many of the tools of modern life are increasingly priced beyond most people’s reach. In 1950 it took forty-five hours per month [to pay an average month’s rent]. Today it takes 101 hours. Much the same rising unaffordability applies to the cost of decent health insurance in America, and higher education.• When people lose faith in the future they are less likely to invest in the present. That sense of personal stagnation – and the gnawing fear you may even be sinking – casts an enervating pall over the human spirit. Ronald Reagan once said, ‘Progress is our most important product.’• In 2000, exactly a third of Americans described themselves as lower class, according to Gallup. By 2015 that number had risen to almost half…They express a feeling people have about being shut out from society. It is a very un-American state of mind.• Today’s equivalent [of upward mobility] is probably ‘get an engineering degree’, but it will not necessarily be as lucrative. A third of Americans who graduated in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths) are in jobs that do not require any such qualification. Up and down America there are programmers working as office temps and even fast-food servers. In 2006, Google bought YouTube for $ 1.65 billion. Such riches are little comfort to the thousands of engineers who cannot find work.• The next time an economist boasts about America’s low unemployment rate, remember that number means something very different from what it used to. This is not your parents’ economy [where everybody who wanted to work fulltime in their profession or trade had lifetime employment]. Almost half of Americans would be unable to pay a $ 400 medical emergency bill without going into debt.• The left urges incremental steps such as better worker training, smarter schools and infrastructure. These are worthy causes. But they are a bit like prescribing aspirin for cancer.• It should come as no surprise that democracies are now loath to ratify such [trade] agreements. Now Donald Trump has killed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the deal that was launched by George W. Bush and completed by Barack Obama. Trump is also picking apart the Clinton-era North American Free Trade Agreement and has buried hopes of a transatlantic agreement. Britain, meanwhile, is abandoning the European single market. The world’s elites have helped to provoke what they feared: a populist uprising against the world economy.=====That sums up the way the American and British middle classes feel. Most see a dim future of declining wages and more frequent layoffs. “Getting a degree in STEM” isn’t going to help most people, because A) They don’t have the smarts to be engineers and B) STEM people are getting laid off too, as are bankers and stockbrokers. The “Populist” minded voters see a grim present and a worse future. The only thing propping up the USA economy is zero interest rates and a $20 trillion debt that is scheduled to rise to $40 trillion in 15 years. At some point it will become unpayable, and the USA will convert into a poverty-stricken banana republic. Perhaps it will dissolve under the weight of a failed capitalist economy, the same as the Soviet Union dissolved under a failed communist economy.In some ways, the USA and UK are even more oppressive of their citizens than was the old USSR. Foreign-born immigrants into the USA and UK receive vast amounts of government welfare assistance plus “affirmative action” programs that bring them to the front of the queue of jobs and education. Citizens born in the USA and UK pay taxes their entire lives and then are rewarded with layoffs and foreclosures in their 50’s and 60’s when they are most in need of financial stability. It is no surprise that people in both countries despise the Globalists of both parties who sent their jobs overseas, told them to “go to he**” and then opened the borders to millions of foreigners who are cherished as if they were born superior to the legacy citizens of the country.The other group who lives off the fat of the land without working very hard to earn it are the Globalist Crony Fatcat Society of politicians and the corporate CEO’s who own them. Their goal is to beat American and UK citizens out of their jobs and replace them with foreigners who will vote against the citizens’ best interests.That’s a comprehensive litany of complaints against Globalization, but what is the solution?This is where Luce, like most every other author comes up short. His “solution” to the rollback of Globalism (which he equates with Liberal Democracy) is that we should be patient and allow democracy to fulfill its function of electing leaders who will move the USA, UK, and the world in the direction Mr. Luce desires. Indeed, this is precisely what happened with the election of Emmanuel Macron in France last month.I, like many Trump voters would prefer action to patience. Free Trade does not work in the best interests of the United States, and needs to be constrained. Why are we the ONLY country in the world that runs $750 billion trade deficits each year? Why do other countries protect their markets from made-in-USA products, while demanding that we open our market to imports of their products?Why do we permit American companies to lay off American workers and move their jobs to Mexico and China?Why do our Republican and Democratic party Establishment leaders believe that foreign-born immigrants are superior to born-in-the USA citizens?Why do they always describe American citizens as “fat, dumb, lazy, and mal-educated” while assuming that half-educated, bomb-throwing, and crime-prone foreigners are superior forms of humanity?I am married into an all-Hispanic immigrant family who arrived in the USA legally. Some waited 12 years in queue for their number to come up. I am not at all anti-immigrant. Nor am I anti-globalist, having made much of my career writing software to manage trade between the USA and {Canada, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America}. But I do want trade and immigration to be managed so as to work for the American people instead of being used to beat them out of their jobs, while possibly internationalizing the USA out of its identify as a sovereign nation.I am rating this book four stars because I don’t believe in a patient waiting of things to sort themselves, thereby avoiding our taking action to strike at the root causes of our economic malaise. We have been waiting long enough for things to “sort themselves out” and they have only gotten worse. Now is time for action. Trump was elected because he was the only leader of either party who promised to do it. Brexit happened in the UK because people saw no reasonable hope of their economic fortunes improving by remaining in the E.U.Mr. Luce and I disagree profoundly on our proposed solutions to the economic malaise. But I immensely enjoyed Mr. Luce’s book and his intellectual honesty in pointing out the economic distress of the middle class that is causing the retreat of Globalism and Liberal Democracy (which in his view are one and the same)He’s a very talented writer who tells the story of his personal journey into the center of the world’s great controversies. Whatever your political view, I believe you will take away the same feeling, as I did, that Mr. Luce is writing YOUR story as well as his own.

Edward Luce is the Washington correspondent for the Financial Times. This is a short book, about 55,000 words. Luce summarizes what is ailing the West, and makes a few suggestions for the future. He is much better at identifying problems than finding solutions. I have enjoyed two of Luce’s earlier works, but I was a bit disappointed with this one. The book’s title is a little misleading. He is not referring to liberalism in an American sense, but liberal democracy.In the first part of the book he covers a lot of familiar ground. China and India are on the rise. The West is in relative decline. The American model has been successful in that more people are being lifted out of poverty than at a faster rate than at any time in human history. However, the American world order is starting to unravel. Most countries see the benefits of capitalism but they don’t necessarily want democracy. Many countries appear happy with their authoritarian leaders. Trump seems to have acknowledged that this is the reality. Luce believes that the “reckless” foreign wars of George Bush have damaged America’s influence abroad, and its ability to promote democracy. China is not democratic yet it has the world’s largest economy in PPP terms. China is unlikely to want to inherit America’s global role. Luce predicts that the result is likely to be chaos. Luce provides a long rant about Donald Trump and he suggests that a war with China may come about because Trump is an idiot.Mark Mazower, a professor at Columbia University, wrote “Dark Continent” in 1999. He argued that the 20th century in Europe was a battle between three rival ideologies: communism, fascism, and liberal democracy. He concluded that most of Europe did not have much experience with democracy prior to 1945, so it was not inevitable that liberal democracy would win out. It was a consequence of who won WW2. He believed that Europeans could have lived happily under authoritarian leaders and that it was democracy which was an aberration. He seems to have be proved right in Russia, Turkey, Hungary and Poland. Luce suggests that authoritarianism may be about to become the global norm. However, we have been here before. In 1980, half of Europe and much of Asia was communist.Luce writes about the decline of the Western middle class. Sending jobs overseas has benefited China, Mexico and Poland but it has reduced the standard of living of ordinary people in the West. The wages of Americans have stagnated since the 1970s and they have less job security. In an interview, Luce claimed that in 2000, 30% of Americans categorized themselves as lower class, but by 2016 that had reached 49%. Social mobility is now lower in the U.S. than it is in the UK. He suggests that when people don’t share in economic growth or are excluded from the affluence around them, this can become dangerous for societies and usually produces instability.Luce recognizes that globalization has created problems for ordinary people, but he also maintains that globalization is inevitable and resistance is futile. He discusses Brexit and accepts that the EU is undemocratic. Some of what it proposes, like the European Arrest Warrant, is at odds with ancient British liberties. However, most Europeans don't seem to mind. He also observes that poorer people often value democracy more than the rich and the elite. The main objective of the EU is to create a federal super state, a United States of Europe, without the democratic checks and balances. Some of its proposals have proved disastrous, like the single currency. The EU currently has a population of 508 million and it wants to expand to include Ukraine, the Balkans and perhaps Turkey. EU citizens can live and work anywhere in Europe and that became an issue in Britain. Britons eventually discovered that they were supposed to regard national sovereignty as a thing of the past. Many Britons began to object and Brexit became an attractive option for the growing number who did not like what the EU was becoming. Leaving became the only option because Britain could not find allies who shared its concerns. Luce works for an editor at the Financial Times who is a well known EU supporter, so he probably has to be careful what he says, but he does point out some of the EU's flaws.Luce believes that the rich and the left are starting to become disenchanted with democracy. He describes the extraordinary inequality levels and views it as a new Gilded Age. With growing inequality, the rich start to get nervous and begin to fear the mob. One New York billionaire suggested to Luce that there should be competence tests for voters, only well-informed people should have the right to vote. The left has also begun to despise the working classes. If you read the commentators in London’s left of center Guardian, many seem to believe that ordinary people are not qualified to vote on issues like Brexit.The left in the U.S. and the UK have created rainbow coalitions which have left out the traditional white working classes. The left has been taken over by people from elite universities. They have little in common with the often socially conservative white working classes, whose views on immigration are often regarded as racist by liberals. Politicians like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair chose to abandon poor white people in the 1990s. Obama bailed out Wall Street but not the ordinary people who had their houses foreclosed. The Democrats now receive large donations from Wall Street and Silicon Valley, so their interests have changed.Luce has fun with Hillary's clueless election campaign. The Democrats believed that they had demographics on their side. They forgot that immigrants become like everybody else once they stay long enough. They can even morph into Republicans. Luce believes that by abandoning the politics of solidarity with the white working classes Democrats have shot themselves in the foot. Poor whites have turned to people like Trump because he is the only person who will listen to them. Luce does not see Trump or populist nationalists in Europe, like Marine Le Pen, as the causes of today’s crisis in democratic liberalism but rather as symptoms. Luce does not believe that Trump and Brexit are one-offs, they represent dissatisfaction with the status quo. He argues that Washington is out of touch, since 91% of D.C. voted for Hillary.What is to be done? Luce’s solutions are underwhelming. He calls for a Marshall Plan for the middle classes. This mostly involves retraining the people who lose their jobs because of globalization. He uses Denmark (population 6 million) as an example. He wants an increase in investment in education. He argues for a stronger safety net and universal health care. He complains about inequality but does not want to increase wealth distribution because that would be bad for growth. However, the thirty years after WW2 were great for America and its middle class. The top tax rate during the Eisenhower era was 91%, while the economy grew by 37% during the 1950s. If ordinary workers have more money to spend on goods and services that will generate economic growth, the very rich tend to stash their money offshore.Where the U.S. differs from Denmark is that it is big enough to change the rules of the game. It can make things happen rather than just react, like Denmark. These days, getting agreement on what needs to be done is a serious issue. Luce wants to look at gerrymandering because he argues that House representatives choose their voters. However, not enough people in the major parties seems to care enough about the white working class to resolve their problems. The growth of AI and the rise of the robots are likely to make things worse. He mentions that over 50% of current jobs can soon be done by machines. If we want to avoid becoming a feudal society, we need to first admit we have a problem.

This book should be sub-titled "A collection of error-laden random thoughts that has never been near a competent editor". The author fails to present any consistent argument or present evidence to support his innumerable assertions. Most infuriatingly, and from first page to last, the author never makes clear the relationship between "elites" who are global super-rich (billionaires) and "elites" who are culturally dominant metropoles (of unspecified economic power). He never even makes clear which he is referring to at any one point, and can slip from one to the other in a single paragraph. Long digressions into areas of life and national political history that are not mentioned once anywhere else in the book (eg gay people, France); and extraordinarily serious errors of historical knowledge (eg the description of economic life in the US in 1870) culminate in a sudden, unprepared and farsical predictive scenario of an almost-war between Trump's US and China, with a settlement brokered by Putin; followed by a list of necessary changes to political systems and policies (simultaneously in unspecified countries) -- the practicalities of political reform never having been once touched on once in the preceding rants and rambles. The author's knowledge of political geography is as distorted as any offered by Donald Trump - London and Chicago are not the dystopian villains of his fantasy, and their role in national and regional economic, social and political development has had many phases, including several when they were just as problematic as the author imagines them to be now. He does not trouble to look at the actual results that gave Trump the presidency (namely, the operation of one of the Founding Fathers' most important original structural anti-democratic -- to be accurate republican) federal checks, the Electoral College. Surely the "elites" of the C18 and C21 would scratch their heads at its role in electing the candidate with millions fewer votes! Nor does he bother to examine the difference between a referendum and elections, and the catastrophic failure to establish proper safeguards against massive change on a paper-thin majority (the cause of the car-crash Brexit we are experiencing). How inconvenient for the author - the easy generalisations fall the minute they are actually examined properly. Instead, we just get crass and unsupportable assertions about demographic/economic/cultural groups - the "non-elites" who perform a one-man show of quick change explanations. The tiny set of secondary works which the author cites are largely polemical, and his own claims to personal knowledge rest on periods at a newspaper's foreign desk, mostly in countries little mentioned in the book; and a short spell early in his life as a EU intern (which he clearly thinks qualifies him to pronounce on every aspect of the EU's structure and development). Not a single mention of the Euro, or of Greece, Turkey, Catalonia, or Angela Merkel. Worthless!

An entertaining book that makes you feel slightly more enlightened after finishing. It's an easy read, and feels exactly like a long Financial Times article (unsurprisingly).However there is too much speculation and opinion which takes the place of any real insight beyond what one comes across in the broadsheets. I found myself agreeing with or acknowledging the validity of the author's opinions but was frustrated that these were seldom backed up by hard fact.The author also touches upon some contrarian opinions e.g. autocracy having worked somewhat in certain countries but does not expound on this besides simple observation. I had the feeling that not much research had gone into this book.Was OK, would not recommend if you already read mainstream broadsheets and journals with a sceptical eye.

This is a book that every politician should read. It gives a clear and detailed explanation of the decline of the liberal democratic model we take for granted. According to Luce liberal democracy can only thrive if the economy is expanding but comes under threat when hope of a better future disappears. Luce's comments are especially relevant to America where politicians are still trying to come to terms with the Trump presidency. Depressingly, Luce tells us that there is no guarantee that 'normal' politics will return after a brief Trump interlude. Though the US is selected for special comment, his thesis includes the UK and other Western democracies where a large part of the electorate has felt excluded and has therefore opted out of politics in recent years, In the UK they saw both major parties as essentially the same - neither speaking for them. In the US this resulted in a Trump presidency and in the UK has given a boost to Corbyn's prospects.The economic stagnation and loss of jobs has been the result of the rise of third world economies, especially China, and the globalisation of business. Luce paints a depressing picture of the problems this is creating for Western economies. As I say, essential reading, not just for politicians.

This is a brilliant assessment of where we are now post-election in the US and where we could be going in the foreseeable future. The author is surprisingly specific in his predictions and will almost certainly not be right in everything. However the lucid arguments he advances for how we ended up in such a mess are convincing (and relatively unrelated to Trump himself). It is uncomfortable but it should really be essential reading for jolting us out of the extraordinary apathy which seems to be leading us to a 1930's style meltdown and the complete failure of our elites.

The cost of inequality is populist movements, as a cornerstone Luce get this spot on. I would have liked to given five stars. I just find Luce did not know his audience, the book is academic in parts. And then... well not in others. It's all most as if Luce did not know what he was trying to say.Don't get me wrong it's a good read, and Luce should know I quoted this book in my last essay. Perhaps each section of the the book should have been done as a journal entry.As I said read the book. It is informative. Has a lot of good points and is well researched.Personally it starts off really well, jumps about a little and concludes as if Luce has no claim. Which of course is "the retreat of western liberalism"