The fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989 and the subsequent collapse of communism in Eastern Europe was a moment of jubilation for many Americans.
It might even mark the “end of history,” political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously said in 1989, because it potentially signified “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
After a long global struggle between communism and Western liberal democracy, the forces of the free market, democracy, the rule of law, and global recognition of human rights triumphed. At least, they’d triumphed in “the realm of ideas or consciousness,” if not in the material world yet, Fukuyama wrote in his famous essay. “But there are powerful reasons for believing that it is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run.”
We’re still waiting to see that victory in the long run. And in fact, liberal democracy is significantly more imperiled today than it was in 1989 or 1991.
In the early 1990s, Russia was a fledgling democracy, but today, it’s an authoritarian regime. In the early 1990s, China appeared to be opening itself up to free-market influences. Today it’s a more powerful, more oppressive totalitarian government than it ever has been. And in liberal democracies around the world, plenty of politicians and voters are outright skeptical of this form of government’s ability to deliver for them.
Ian Shapiro’s After the Fall, which traces international democracies from the “fall” of the Berlin wall to the present, analyzes why the expected global democratic triumph after the Cold War failed to materialize.
Shapiro, a professor of political science and global affairs at Yale University, argues that the United States made at least five disastrous decisions between 1993 and 2020 that undermined the international liberal democratic order.
In the 1990s, under President Bill Clinton, the United States marginalized Russia by expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to include newly democratized East European states (a move that Russia considered threatening) while refusing Russian president Boris Yeltsin’s entreaties to send significant amounts of financial aid to Russia.
In the early 2000s, under President George W. Bush, the United States tried (and failed) to turn Afghanistan and Iraq into democracies, a disastrous venture that squandered the United States’ international standing, damaged America’s economy, and polarized US politics. Worse yet, Bush did this largely without the international coalition that his father, George H. W. Bush, had relied on when attacking Iraq in 1991. This unilateral action strained America’s alliance with countries such as France and Germany and weakened the liberal democratic international order.
Then, during President Barack Obama’s administration, the US government responded to the financial crisis of 2008 not with substantive aid to America’s working families but with bank bailouts that left the neoliberal economic regime intact—and thus failed to address the growing wealth divide that was polarizing American voters.
Also, during Obama’s administration, America used NATO troops to attack Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. This direct attack on a head of state was a violation of the purpose of NATO, Shapiro argues, and it undermined the liberal democratic order and set a dangerous precedent for American unilateral actions against other heads of state. Such actions should be taken only with the authority of the United Nations, Shapiro believes, or should not be done at all.
Finally, during President Donald Trump’s first term (and again in his second), the United States exchanged a free-trade policy for a new policy of high tariffs, a move that plunged the world into trade wars and destroyed the international free market that had sustained the liberal democratic order.
These five policies may seem on the surface to be completely unrelated, but Shapiro’s critique of them stems from the same premise: An international liberal democratic order depends on goodwill among nations, widespread prosperity, and an equitable distribution of wealth.
Because liberal democracy includes a respect for the rule of law and minority rights—and because a liberal democratic international order includes respect for international institutions and free trade between nations—it will not appeal to people who distrust others. And when people are starving, their distrust for others increases.
Working-class people in the United States now generally view both politics and international trade as a zero-sum game, Shapiro argues. Someone else’s gain is their loss. But the global free trade order that an American-led Western world implemented at the end of World War II, and that the United States then expanded to Eastern Europe after the end of the Cold War, was based on the assumption that free trade and international cooperation can be positive-sum games in which cooperation and free commerce benefit everyone.
Shapiro views the presidential election of 2024 as a contest between two competing visions of the world: a Democratic vision (championed by Kamala Harris) that saw international relations as a positive-sum game and a Republican vision (championed by Trump) that viewed everything as a zero-sum game.
From the 1940s until the early 21st century, presidents from both parties generally believed international trade would benefit everyone. But many younger voters and members of the working class are likely to believe intuitively in a zero-sum-game framework not only for trade but also for international relations in general, because in their own experience, they have had to struggle to make ends meet and they’re not very optimistic about the future.
Their only hope, they think, is to stop others from depriving them of their scarce, hard-earned economic opportunities—to hit China with heavy tariffs and build a wall to keep immigrants from Mexico from entering the country. Positive-sum-game thinkers, meanwhile, can easily imagine a world in which both China and the United States can benefit from free trade and in which both immigrants and native-born workers can benefit from more liberal immigration policies.
The way to keep people from drifting into zero-sum-game thinking is to make sure they have sufficient economic opportunities to believe in liberal democracy, Shapiro thinks.
Each of the allegedly disastrous presidential policies he criticizes suffered from the same ignorance of this basic issue. Clinton was very much a positive-sum-game thinker who believed in international liberal democracy, but in Shapiro’s view, he foolishly failed to realize that the Russians would never embrace this vision if they did not have a lot more economic resources, which the United States did not give them.
George W. Bush believed in international democracy, but he failed to realize that neither Afghanistan nor Iraq had anywhere close to the per capita income required to sustain a liberal democracy, and as a result, in both countries, a US-led attempt to establish democracy quickly broke down into tribal or ethnoreligious conflict. US policymakers may have been positive-sum-game thinkers, but most Afghans and Iraqis were not.
Obama was also a positive-sum-game thinker, but his failure to rehabilitate the American economy along lines that would benefit the working class meant that a new generation of working-class voters grew up deeply distrustful of existing American institutions. And when they voted in 2024, they voted for the champion of zero-sum thinking.
Trump, to a greater degree than any other modern American president, is a zero-sum-game thinker who appeals to voters who think the same way.
If we want to stop the sort of anti–free trade, anti-immigration policies that Trump and other far-right politicians in other countries want to implement, we have to give people enough economic hope to deter them from zero-sum-game thinking.
Shapiro is a liberal, not a Marxist. He’s not advocating forcible redistribution of wealth. But he is advocating political institutions that ensure everyone will have an equal opportunity to pursue their economic potential, on the grounds that when that doesn’t happen, liberal democracy breaks down and people embrace authoritarianism that appeals to those who believe that the world is a zero-sum game.
Shapiro believes we can actually quantify the minimum per capita GDP required to create a sustainable liberal democracy. It’s currently $18,200, he thinks, which is almost exactly where Turkey is right now, but above the per capita GDP of Russia, China, or Iran. (By comparison, the per capita GDP of the United States is currently approximately $90,000).
At first glance, this seems to make sense. Most of the countries that advocates of liberal democracy consider to be model nations, such as Canada, Sweden, Norway, Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, have high per capita GDP. And most of the countries that are authoritarian, with illiberal, regimes have much lower per capita GDP.
But there are some notable exceptions. Singapore, which is sometimes labeled an “illiberal democracy” because of its authoritarian policies, has a higher per capita GDP than the United States or most countries in Western Europe, including Denmark, Sweden, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Qatar, which does not even pretend to be a democracy, has a higher per capita GDP than Australia or Canada.
And India, which proudly asserts its status as a democracy even if it does engage in some repression of religious liberty, has a per capita GDP that is less than a third of the minimum level Shapiro thinks is necessary to sustain a liberal democracy. This means that, according to Shapiro’s reasoning, one might expect it to be as autocratic as Russia, China, or Iran, all of which have a higher per capita GDP than India’s.
While per capita GDP does correlate with a country’s likelihood of sustaining liberal democratic values to a certain extent, the anomalies suggest that perhaps something else is also at work.
Shapiro says almost nothing about religious values in his book. But Harvard history professor James T. Kloppenberg concluded from his comparative international study of global democracies that the preservation of democracy depends primarily on social values. For a democracy to sustain itself, voters have to be willing to accept outcomes that are not in their own short-term self-interests and to desire the legal protection of other groups. This happened in the United States and some other parts of the Atlantic world because of a culturally pervasive Judeo-Christian ethic of “selfless love for all humans because all are created in God’s image,” Kloppenberg argues, which means that liberal democracy in the United States might owe more to religion than to economics.
But even if Shapiro leaves religious and cultural values out of his analysis and focuses more narrowly on economics, a Christian can still apply his insights about zero-sum versus positive-sum thinking in ways that might be useful in the church. A lot of Christians (especially, but not exclusively, those from the working class) have absorbed the zero-sum thinking of the larger culture. They do so because they think it’s the only realistic description of the way life works. Supporters of liberal democracy are weak and unrealistic, they think; what we need is a “strong man” in the White House who can pressure other countries to give us what we deserve.
This sort of thinking was anathema to the liberal Protestants who created the American-led global democratic order in the 1940s, but it’s pervasive among working-class Americans today.
Pastors who understand the gospel can give their congregants a better story than this, and a better story than even Shapiro envisions. Shapiro, using a secular framework, thinks we can counter zero-sum thinking and save liberal democracy only by giving the economically marginalized greater economic opportunity.
But Christians are equipped with another tool: the promises of God. Regardless of what policies are adopted at the national or international level, and regardless of whether the world becomes more illiberal, pastors can counter zero-sum thinking in their own congregations with the truth that God’s promises can empower us to be radically generous and show love toward others without fear.
If we want to preserve democracy, we have to find ways to lift up our neighbors, whether by giving them greater economic opportunity (as Shapiro argues) or voting against our short-term self-interest to protect their rights (as Kloppenberg emphasizes). A Christian ethic of love for neighbors equips us to do this, even in an era in which liberal democracy is eroding.
Daniel K. Williams is an associate professor of history at Ashland University and the author of books including The Search for a Rational Faith, a history of apologetics in America.
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