...[an] insightful and harrowing new book ... this volume sometimes tries to cover too much in too little space, but it’s timely and informed, providing an important overview of the dynamics in an increasingly interconnected and fragmented planet ... Luce’s conclusions are pessimistic but not entirely devoid of hope. 'The West’s crisis is real, structural and likely to persist,' he writes. 'Nothing is inevitable. Some of what ails the West is within our power to fix.' Doing so means rejecting complacency about democracy and our system’s resilience, and 'understanding exactly how we got here.' Luce’s book is one good place to start.
Hardly a revelation, Mr. Luce’s book is instead a compendium of telling anecdotes that enrich our understanding of a long-term trend. In this sense, Mr. Luce offers a useful wake-up call to elites, urging them to focus on the very real struggles of America’s besieged middle class before we all lose the freedom and democracy we cherish. If he doesn’t have all the answers, at least he’s asking the right questions in this concise, accessible and valuable work.
The Retreat of Western Liberalism is really an extended essay, and it meanders a bit without getting too absorbed by any one issue. Luce writes in fluid prose, moving from a telling statistic to a striking quotation. Throughout, one is struck by his command of the material and the acuity of his prose — he is unsparing in his condemnation of the elites who didn’t see this coming, too absorbed in their own bubble, too confident of their smart strategies ... The West faces many problems, and Luce outlines them vividly. But it has enormous reserves of wealth, talent and energy with which to solve them. Luce adumbrates some solutions himself, in a thin last chapter, and they are familiar variants of the center-left agenda— smarter redistribution, better retraining, etc. The important point, however, is that good policies do work. Instead of viewing the entire West as being overwhelmed by a tsunami of right-wing populism, we might step back and study countries separately.
Mr Luce is a shrewd observer...He believes in liberal democracy and cares about its future. Despite its title, The Retreat of Western Liberalism is not bleak or elegiac. Mr Luce is not suggesting that liberalism is done for. He says sensibly that liberal democracy cannot be shored up without a 'clear-eyed grasp of what has gone wrong.' A more analytical book might have spelled out further what exactly liberal democracy is, how to tell when it is going right and how it differs from capitalist competitors across the globe. At rapid pace and with telling statistics, Mr Luce nevertheless gives a knowledgeable tour through the unmapped terrain in which Western politicians and governments must now operate.
Luce is better on diagnosis than on cure. His solutions are sketchily outlined and squeezed into the last few pages of his book. But he is right to emphasise the importance of a radical skills programme for the left behind ... As the FT’s Washington columnist, Luce is at his best writing about America, on which his knowledge is voluminous. He is, I fear, gullible about China’s supposed economic miracle. One can never trust the statistics of a dictatorship. In the 1960s, some believed that America was in danger of being overtaken economically by the Soviet Union ... His writing has a vigour and sweep all too absent in the deadly prose of social scientists; and he has identified a fundamental question facing democracies, even if he has not given more than hints on how it is to be answered.
Luce’s argument, though meritorious, lacks much rhetorical fire; in the hands of a Francis Fukuyama or Jacques Barzun on the right or a Christopher Lasch or Bernard-Henri Lévy on the left, it might have been more memorably delivered and with more prescription to leaven the description. Still, there are some nicely pithy moments ... Learned and well-considered, but if indeed Western liberal values are in danger of extinction, readers may seek more urgency.
Luce’s historical analysis is on point and he seems to understand the current situation as well as one could hope. One difficulty lies, however, is trying to predict the future in an era defined by a figure as mercurial as the 45th president. The main points are still relevant, even if some of the particulars will be dated before the book hits the shelves.
