Insights
Fragility often remains invisible until systems fail. Explore the alarming cost of ignoring hidden weaknesses in societies, institutions, economies, and environments, and why resilience requires recognizing vulnerability before crisis strikes.
For most of the second half of the twentieth century, the dominant assumption in Western political thought was that liberal democracy was not merely one form of government among others but the natural destination of modernising societies — the end point toward which history, once unblocked, would tend.
The assumption had a philosophical pedigree stretching from Kant’s perpetual peace through Hegel’s end of history to Francis Fukuyama’s celebrated and frequently misread 1989 essay, which argued that the collapse of Soviet communism represented not merely the defeat of a rival system but the exhaustion of ideological alternatives to liberal democratic capitalism.
The assumption was wrong — not because liberal democracy is not valuable but because its value does not guarantee its durability, and the conditions that produced its mid-twentieth century expansion were more specific, more contingent, and more fragile than the triumphalist narrative acknowledged.
The political scientist Larry Diamond coined the phrase democratic recession to describe the pattern that became unmistakable after roughly 2006: a sustained global decline in the quality and quantity of democratic governance, accompanied by the rise of what scholars have variously called competitive authoritarianism, illiberal democracy, and elected autocracy.
What distinguished this new form of democratic erosion from the military coups and outright dictatorships of the mid-twentieth century was precisely its electoral character. The leaders who dismantled democratic norms in Hungary, Turkey, India, Brazil, the Philippines, and — in a more contested form — the United States, did so not by suspending elections but by winning them, and then using the legitimacy conferred by electoral victory to weaken the institutions designed to constrain majoritarian power: independent judiciaries, free press, electoral commissions, civil society organisations, and constitutional limits on executive authority.
Machiavelli, who understood power more honestly than most of the theorists who came after him, would not have been surprised. His central insight — that political orders are maintained not by their formal legitimacy but by the capacity and will of those who hold power to defend them — implies that institutions are only as strong as the coalition of interests committed to preserving them. Liberal democratic institutions were built, in the mid-twentieth century, by political elites who had lived through the consequences of their absence.
The generation that designed the postwar institutional order — the architects of the UN, the Bretton Woods system, the European project, the constitutional settlements of decolonising states — were motivated by a specific historical memory of what happened when democratic norms were abandoned. As that generation receded and its memory faded, the institutional architecture it built was increasingly maintained by habit and inertia rather than by active commitment — which is to say, it was maintained right up until the moment it was not.
The sociologist Max Weber’s distinction between the three types of legitimate authority — traditional, charismatic, and rational-legal — illuminates a structural vulnerability that democratic theorists have been slow to acknowledge. Rational-legal authority, on which liberal democracy depends, is inherently abstract: it vests power not in persons but in offices, not in leaders but in procedures.
Its legitimacy is therefore always somewhat cold — dependent on a population’s willingness to subordinate their immediate preferences to impersonal rules and processes whose benefits are diffuse and whose costs are sometimes concentrated and immediate. Charismatic authority, by contrast, is warm, personal, and direct.
It offers not procedural fairness but the intuition of being represented by someone who shares your identity and your grievances. In conditions of economic anxiety, cultural displacement, and institutional distrust, the warmth of the charismatic leader consistently outcompetes the coldness of procedural democracy — not because people stop valuing democracy in the abstract but because they stop experiencing democratic institutions as serving them in the concrete.
Hannah Arendt, writing in the shadow of totalitarianism, identified a deeper vulnerability: the loneliness of the modern individual, cut loose from traditional communities and intermediate institutions, is precisely the social condition in which totalitarian and authoritarian movements find their recruits.
The person who belongs nowhere — who has no local community, no occupational identity, no religious or civic membership that gives them a place in a shared world — is susceptible not because they are irrational but because the movement offers them what modernity has taken away: a sense of belonging, a defined enemy, and a story in which they are not a passive victim of impersonal forces but an active participant in a collective project. The authoritarian turn of the twenty-first century is, in part, a symptom of the social atomisation that market liberalism itself produced.
The political theorist Steven Levitsky has argued, with Juan Linz before him, that democracies rarely die at the hands of soldiers. They die at the hands of elected leaders — and they die slowly, through the incremental degradation of the norms and institutions that give elections their meaning. The warning signs are not dramatic.
They are the appointment of loyalists to independent agencies, the delegitimisation of opposition as treasonous rather than merely wrong, the use of legal mechanisms to harass critics, and the gradual normalisation of behaviour that would previously have been disqualifying. By the time the degradation becomes visible to the median voter, much of the structural damage has already been done.
The deepest question raised by the current period is therefore not whether liberal democracy is worth defending — it clearly is — but whether the conditions that made it possible in the twentieth century can be recreated in the twenty-first, and whether its defenders understand those conditions clearly enough to do so.
