Liberalism, More or Less

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has played out like a terribly grim but, so far at least, profoundly ennobling laboratory experiment in the relative virtues of autocracy and liberal democracy. Yet evidence that a (more or less) liberal democracy can defeat or withstand an autocracy even in war—the one sphere that so obviously favors the latter—hasn’t meaningfully diminished the forces that have undermined liberalism in the West and around the world.

Indeed, the sharp division between Western democracies that regard the invasion as an intolerable violation of moral principle and non-Western and barely liberal ones, such as India and South Africa, that have treated it as geopolitics as usual only reinforces the idea that liberal democracy occupies a diminishing space in the world.

It is possible that liberal democracy was a historically contingent experiment that depended on underlying conditions that no longer obtain. In his 2018 book,  , Yascha Mounk describes those limiting conditions as broadly shared prosperity, relative demographic homogeneity, and sources of information that encompass the whole population. That