Cracks In The Liberal Order

Cracks In The Liberal Order

By Ross Douthat
Adbusters.org
June 16, 2016

In the twenty-five years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the
architecture of liberal modernity has looked relatively stable.

Not flawless or wonderful or ideal, to be sure; not free
of discontents and decadence.

But it’s been hard to imagine the basic liberal democratic capitalist
order cracking up, let alone envision what might take its place.

Through the dot-com bust, 9/11, the Iraq war, and the financial
crisis, it was striking how consensus held, how elites kept
circulating, how quickly populist movements collapsed or were
co-opted, how Washington and Brussels consolidated power even
when their projects failed.

No new ideological movement, whether radical or reactionary,
emerged to offer the alternative to liberalism that fascism and
Marxism and throne-and-altar traditionalism once supplied.

And no external adversary, whether Putinist or Islamist or Chinese,
seemed to offer a better way than ours.

Here in the dying days of 2016, though, something seems to have
shifted.

For the first time in a generation, the theme of this year was the
liberal order’s vulnerability, not its resilience.

2015 was a memento mori moment for our institutions — a year of
cracks in the system, of crumbling firewalls, of reminders that all
orders pass away.

http://www.adbusters.org/article/cracks-in-the-liberal-order