A second element that has led to the death of the current liberal democracy formula is the gripping of collective bargaining mechanisms on economic and social rights - the deliberative element added to traditional liberal democracy after the Second World War.
These collective bargaining mechanisms were created during industrial capitalism and have worked very well (or at least reasonably well) throughout this type of capitalism. Compared to the present, societies then were much simpler. It was relatively easy to organise industrial workers into trade unions, industrial bosses into employers' organisations, and put the two groups at the same table.
But with the shift from industrial to service capitalism, things changed dramatically. The post-industrial, service-centred society is much more complex and fluid than the industrial one. Unlike industry, services (which now attract the bulk of the workforce in developed societies) are much more fragmented and diversified. You can't organise service workers in the same way you could organise industrial workers. Similarly, the eventual organisation of service employers has become very complicated.
As a result, collective bargaining has become virtually impossible (or at least extremely difficult to achieve), so part of the safety net it provided under industrial capitalism has evaporated.
And people left with no safety net and less political power than before can easily be captured by anti-democratic leaders posing as anti-system politicians.
Finally, the third element that has led to the death of the most recent formula of liberal democracy is precisely the unprecedented complexity of post-industrial societies, a complexity that has become even more pronounced with the shift to a knowledge-based economy.
Since Kant and the Scottish Enlightenment, the fundamental assumption of all liberal thinkers has been that you cannot have a liberal society unless all its members share the same frame of reference. This is why the main institutions of the liberal order have been the university, the parliament and the press. The university was the place where the frame of reference was thought out, the parliament - the place where the various practical aspects of the frame of reference were negotiated, and the press - the instrument through which all this reached the general public, so that people knew how to coordinate themselves in public.
In other words, liberal thinkers believed that in order to have a functioning liberal order, all members of society, regardless of their differences, must have a common identity. This common identity was created through the invention of the nation - and, in a more specifically liberal sense, the civic nation. The integration of as many people as possible into the predefined frame of reference led to the continuous transformation of liberal democracy, to the point where, by the end of the industrial era (i.e., for the sake of simplicity, by 1970), (almost) all citizens of a democratic state had come to be included in the frame of reference and endowed with the civil, political, economic and social rights specific to a liberal order.
However, with the transition to the post-industrial world, societies began to become much more complex, so that cultural rights (mainly centred on individual and group identity) began to be added.
But identities are, by their very nature, fluid (over a lifetime I can successively give myself several identities), complex (each individual and each group is, in reality, the sum of several identities, not the expression of a single identity) and dissociative ('I' is not 'you' and 'we' is not 'you'). So the focus on identity has gradually led to the erosion of the common frame of reference - to the point where today people live in 'tribes' (or 'bubbles') rather than 'nations'.
On the one hand, this has meant that some identities have lost the privileges they previously had: men versus women, adults versus children, heterosexuals versus LGBT people, natives versus newcomers, and so on.
On the other hand, each such "bubble" or "tribe" has come to have its own frame of reference. Sociologists continue to ask people in their research whether their voice matters. But for the respondent, the meaning of this question has changed dramatically. Where once it meant "are you included in the common frame of reference?", today it means "is your view of the world and life considered as legitimate as others?".
Some say that today we live in the post-truth era. More accurate, I think, is to say that each type of identity claims equal legitimacy. And this means that we no longer live in a world with a common, predefined frame of reference, but one with multiple and ever-changing frames of reference - to the point where members of one "tribe" find they have nothing in common with members of another "tribe". The modern idea of the nation, including that of the civic nation, has dissolved into a multitude of more precarious and mutually incompatible identities.
I'm not saying that's right or wrong. I'm just saying that this is what the world we live in today looks like. This world, in which some identities are losing their privilege and others still feel oppressed or ignored (and therefore not entitled to equal legitimacy), is one in which illiberal currents are free to flourish.
So we have a perfect storm: citizens with limited sovereignty (with no real right to make political decisions on certain issues), made precarious by the loss of effectiveness of collective bargaining mechanisms, and with fluid identities (some losing their privileges, others remaining ignored or oppressed) can no longer sustain the liberal order as we knew it.
In other words, liberal democracy - as we knew it - is dead. But another kind of liberal democracy will take its place, because liberal democracy is constantly reinventing itself as society changes. What the new type - which will put an end to the current authoritarian, sovereignist and illiberal resurgence - will look like, we will discuss on another occasion.
In other words, liberal democracy - as we knew it - is dead. But another kind of liberal democracy will take its place, because liberal democracy is constantly reinventing itself as society changes. What the new type - which will put an end to the current authoritarian, sovereignist and illiberal resurgence - will look like, we will discuss on another occasion.
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