Frank Augstein/AP Photo
A protester holds a sign showing then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson as he stands in front of the entrance to Downing Street in London, April 13, 2022.
LJUBLJANA, SLOVENIA – The death of Silvio Berlusconi and the further disgrace of Boris Johnson provide a good moment to consider what seems to be a terminal crisis of Western democracy. How can citizens vote for such clowns, opportunists, and incompetents? Not to mention Donald Trump.
I am writing this piece from Ljubljana, which is a fitting place for such musings. Had it not been for the fact that my wife is attending a conference here, I would never have thought to visit the capital of Slovenia. But this lovely city of 300,000, long part of the Austrian Empire, and after 1920 the most prosperous regional center in newly created Yugoslavia, is at the crossroads of failed European experiments in democracy. Today, it is one of the few European democracies that is succeeding.
Slovenia has a population of just 2.1 million. For many centuries, it was ruled by someone else, but held onto its language and culture. It’s the same story with the other small nations that were once part of Yugoslavia, notably Croatia and Serbia.
This part of the world has suffered from war after war, most recently the Bosnian War of 1992-1995, which killed over 100,000 people, mostly civilians. Strolling around Ljubljana, or the nearby Croatian towns that we visited, war seems inconceivable, just as the mayhem inflicted on a modern city like Kyiv seems inconceivable. But politics failed to prevent either, as nationalism and militarism crowded out common goals and common sense.
Since 1991, for the first time in its more than 1,000-year history, Slovenia is self-governing. It is also one of the most egalitarian nations in the EU, a legacy of the Yugoslavia era, which was far from all bad. The socialized health care system is one of the world’s most comprehensive. Education is universal and free, from pre-K through graduate school. The minimum wage is 800 euros a month, and basic social aid for the unemployed pays 450 euros. Homelessness is almost nonexistent.
Ljubljana is also Europe’s greenest capital. Cars are banned in the center city. Trucks can make deliveries a few preset hours a week. The city’s popular mayor was elected and re-elected on a green platform.
This is not a rich country. Per capita GDP is nominally about half that of the U.S. But on the basis of purchasing power, it is close to 80 percent. And since Slovenia is so much more equal—its Gini coefficient is 23.1 compared to 41.1 in the U.S.—living standards for the average person are higher than in the United States.
Because basic social services and social norms are so well established, there is not all that much difference between the governing center-right coalition and the opposition center-left. And given the horrible recent memory of the Bosnian War (which Slovenia mostly avoided) and the basically prosperous reality of daily life, nationalism has been dampened way down.
People here seem to want what people everywhere want: a decent standard of living, rewarding work, the ability to have an affordable place to live and perhaps raise a family, and time to enjoy leisure. After World War II, that sort of life was available to most ordinary people, in both Europe and America, though with a big asterisk for American racism. Center-right and center-left accepted the same basic social compact. After the memory of the 1930s and the hideous war years, there was little ultranationalism.
When ordinary life is going to hell, and democracy fails to improve conditions, charismatic rogues have a certain appeal.
In most of the West, this stunning achievement has gotten away from us. And after at least three decades of declining living standards and declining security for ordinary people combined with rapacious, raw capitalism producing wealth concentrations unknown since the Gilded Age, people are not sure who to blame or who to admire, or for what.
This brings me back to Berlusconi, Johnson, and Trump. When ordinary life is going to hell, and democracy fails to improve conditions, charismatic rogues have a certain appeal. If they break the rules, so much the better, since the rules don’t serve regular people. If they are billionaires and entertaining clowns, that only adds to their allure. For every person who looks at Trump or Berlusconi and concludes, what a fraud, there is another who concludes, I’d like to be him.
This climate also feeds ultranationalism because frustration breeds irrationality and a scapegoating of the Other. Somehow, it’s easier to blame immigrants or African Americans or queer people than to blame billionaires.
Nearly everywhere in the West, mainstream parties have failed to navigate these differences and improve lives for ordinary people. Mainstream leaders also have themselves to blame for indulging the filthy rich and giving in to corruption.
Slovenia was once ruled from Vienna, where the emperor in the latter half of the 19th century was Franz Joseph. The Austrian and Prussian empires were gradually evolving in the direction of constitutional monarchies, with basic civic rights. There was no ethnic cleansing. In many ways, Franz Joseph was a more benign autocrat than Berlusconi or Trump.
You can imagine a counterfactual rendition of Western history, in which the monarchs of the late 19th century gradually cede more power to parliamentary democracy and to minorities seeking regional autonomy. Maybe Bosnian nationalist Gavrilo Princip’s bullet misfires and Archduke Ferdinand is not assassinated at Sarajevo in 1914. Or maybe the leaders of France, Britain, and Germany come to their senses and back off what each thought would be a short and decisive victory. Then World War I never happens, and thus World War II never happens. Germany takes its place as the continent’s leading economy, as it is now, maybe half a century sooner and without the interlude of Hitler. Democracy is strengthened. And maybe the New Deal becomes so thoroughly entrenched that the raw capitalism of the filthy rich never again dominates.
But none of that came to pass, and here we are.
And because the reign of capital proved so powerful, it also took half a century too long for the West’s leaders to take climate change seriously. The result will be more dislocation and lost income for ordinary citizens and even more appeal for demagogues.
We ask a lot of democracy. We ask it not only to reflect people’s preferences and defend liberties, but to competently manage our system of government and to broker differences. We ask it to be reasonably free of corruption lest it lose legitimacy. We ask it to produce outcomes that feel broadly fair. Democracy has broken down in every respect.
The fascist theorist Carl Schmitt, Hitler’s favorite philosopher, argued that liberal democracy was doomed. It could not solve basic problems. With the victory of the democracies over the Axis powers in 1945, Schmitt’s theories looked ridiculous, as well as vicious.
I’d still like to believe that Schmitt got it wrong. I am by nature an optimist. I look at history and see moments when things were not supposed to work out, but somehow they did. Like Britain’s unlikely survival in 1940, or Lincoln’s improbable ascendancy to the presidency, or Roosevelt turning out to be more of a radical than anticipated. Or even the surprising achievements of Joe Biden.
But inspiring leadership is all too scarce today. And for democracy to survive and enjoy a resurgence of public confidence, literally everything will have to break right—and in bigger countries than Slovenia.
