A little late to the game, perhaps, but accurate nonetheless, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria noted over the weekend that progressive politicians are in retreat throughout the West. His comments came roughly two weeks before Donald Trump’s scheduled inauguration after an election campaign that he and his populist-right Republican Party handily won, despite expectations of a close election believed to slightly favour Kamala Harris and the Democrats. Instead, Americans turned out to repudiate what Zakaria rightly recognized as the arrogance and authoritarianism of the left.
“Almost everywhere you look, the left is in ruins,” Zakaria wrote in his Washington Post column and repeated on air. “The crisis of democratic government then, is actually a crisis of progressive government. People seem to feel that they have been taxed, regulated, bossed around and intimidated by left-of-center politicians for decades — but the results are bad and have been getting worse.”
Zakaria went on to contrast governance in his home state of New York, which has a population of roughly 20 million, with that in Florida, inhabited by about 23 million. Left-leaning “blue” New York has the highest tax burden of the 50 states, while conservative “red” Florida has the eleventh lowest. New York spends more than double what Florida does in its annual state budget with no better — often worse — outcomes. Importantly, he notes, “for years, New York has been losing people to states such as Florida” and people are generally fleeing blue states for red states.
That population flow is reinforcing the country’s political transformation. As Americans move, The New York Timesfound in an October study, they’re making conservative areas more conservative and liberal areas more liberal. “Across the country, the result is a widening gap between blue neighborhoods and red ones,” Ronda Kaysen and Ethan Singer of the Times reported. But with red states, the beneficiaries of population growth, Republican clout in Congress will likely increase when seats are reapportioned.
As Zakaria emphasizes, though, it’s not just the quality and expense of governance that drives repudiation of progressives; the arrogant bossiness of the left also alienates voters.
At The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait, a center-left writer who has been critical of cancel culture, censorship, and the general intolerance of the left, predicts optimistically that “the period of left-wing illiberalism that began about a decade ago seems to have drawn to a close.” He observes that “much of blue America is now experiencing a determined reaction against the excesses” of the left’s authoritarianism.
Chait attributes the surge in recent years of self-righteous progressive censoriousness in the U.S. to Trump’s rise, and its (he hopes) demise to Trump’s return on a wave of votes from across the economic and racial spectrum, including groups Democrats thought belonged to them. But we should also give a little credit to the COVID-19 pandemic, during which mostly left-of-center politicians throughout the western world embraced public-health policies as excuses for disrupting people’s lives in the most intrusive possible ways and muzzling those who dared to object.
“With COVID,” warned historian Muriel Blaive in a 2023 piece on “illiberal liberalism” for Central European University’s The Review of Democracy, the political left enhanced its political power through “authoritarian means: censorship, repression, and public shaming.” She observed that politicians — not exclusively, but largely, on the left — intruded into people’s lives with lockdowns and censored dissenting views in the name of suppressing “disinformation.”
The potential result, Blaive feared, was to create a situation in which “our only political choice is between an illiberal left and an illiberal right.”
Just a few months after that piece ran, elections for the European Parliament produced big gains for parties on the center-right to far-right. Whether the repudiation of the left was liberal, or just a different flavor of illiberalism, depended on the countries and parties in question; there are huge differences among the policies and ideologies favored by the winners, even if they’re grouped with one another in parliamentary alliances. But there’s no question that parties on the left were punished. That punishment extends to national elections.
“Of the 27 countries of the European Union, only a handful have left-of-center parties leading government coalitions,” CNN’s Fareed Zakaria observed. “Even in countries that have been able to stem the rise of right-wing populism, such as Poland, it is the center-right that is thriving, not the left.”
Next up, it appears, is Canada, where Justin Trudeau led a Liberal government as almost a parody of the most arrogant qualities of the left. Now, he’s on his way out and so, probably, is his party.
“Trudeau may think of himself as a liberal, and that might even be the name of his party, but his government actually epitomizes illiberal progressivism,” wrote Bari Weiss of The Free Press.
“Trudeau stuck to the kind of woke orthodoxy that voters all around the world never much liked to begin with, and turned deeply sour on after the pandemic,” Persuasion’s Quico Toro commented.
Zakaria, it’s worth pointing out, is an especially appropriate figure to comment on the fate of politicians who “taxed, regulated, bossed around and intimidated” their long-suffering subjects. More of a thinker than many of his talking-head colleagues, he wrote in his 2003 book, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, that “across the globe, democratically elected regimes, often ones that have been re-elected or reaffirmed through referenda, are routinely ignoring constitutional limits on their power and depriving their citizens of basic rights.”
The political leaders Zakaria criticized two decades ago — like Venezuela’s late Hugo Chavez — were different from those we see being turned out by voters today. But observing political and cultural trends around him, he warned that if politicians didn’t learn to more consistently restrain themselves within liberal norms, “democracy will become an empty shell, not simply inadequate but potentially dangerous, bringing with it the erosion of liberty.”
Voters in the United States, much of Europe, and (perhaps) Canada seem to have echoed Zakaria’s 2003 warnings about the illiberalism of elected leaders and turned against them in one country after another. What remains to be seen though, is whether their new choices govern more effectively and, most importantly, have greater respect for personal liberty and restraints on state power.
National Post