Essentiality: 🌟🌟🌟
Accessibility: 🌟🌟
Quality: 🌟🌟🌟
Why have I awarded so few stars to a book I still recommend? Empire of Democracy is difficult to categorise, as both a specific case study of 46 years in mainly Western democracies, and a broad, multinational overview of Big Things That Shaped Our World. The “in-between” status presents two styles. One is hypermodern, deeply personal historiography and sociology, informing deeply about individual lives without a big historical narrative. The other is exactly that sort of old, narrative-dominated, big-picture history.
Central to the text’s content is the dawn of “neoliberalism” and the “Washington Consensus”. “Stagflation” in the 70s was a bad time - lots of unemployed people, lines to buy gas, prices soaring. Ronald Reagan best summarised the reaction leaders devised and publics latched onto: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” That pivot of perspective to neoliberalism led governments across the West, like our own Lange-led Labour government, to deconstruct themselves. Government programs corporatised. Tax cuts returned money to taxpayers. Globalisation - corporations, travel, tourism, trade, all connecting across the globe - reached new heights.
That was a simple retelling of the times. Empire of Democracy broadened my perspective so much more. The book asks questions beyond tax rates and regulations - though you’ll get plenty of that, too: where were the wages of workers going? How did our way of viewing the world, and our language for describing all this, change? How did politicians sell this new reality to people, and how did they make it work?
There are, of course, a thundering mass more of details than this. The story is not just economic. The political tale of French leaders swinging from socialism to capitalist conservatism and back without a trace of consistency. The cultural and quasi-military tale of Justin Trudeau’s father staring down Québécois separatists holding knives to throats. The comforting sight of New Zealand here and there in the book, and the uneasy, dawning sense that, whatever government we voted in, we just couldn’t outpace the trends of the times.
Now what? Twice now, over 46% of US voters voted for an awful candidate and a terrible person whose only merit was promising a change from globalisation. Over 51% of British voters voted to abandon the EU, which has stood for the twin pillars of globalisation and migration. And since publishing, COVID has done in the very idea of travel, trade, transaction between nations, between people, while governments open their checkbooks again for billions and trillions.
Empire of Democracy proves sometimes, history can’t be ignored or shrugged off. Unless we get wave after wave after wave of endless pandemic, we are going back to The Way Things Were after this pandemic, after Trump leaves the Oval Office, after the UK reaches the end of the EU deal mineshaft track and surges deep into the mines or plunges down into the chasms. We cannot fix it if we don’t even get how we got here.
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