“We live in an age of anxiety and time of stress,” Orson Welles tells the camera at the beginning of the 1972 documentary of Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s bestselling Future Shock. Smoking a cigar on a moving travelator at Heathrow Airport, Welles warns that despite “all our sophistication, we are in fact the victims of our own technological strengths”. Western society, the Tofflers argued, was struggling to deal with “too much change in too short a period of time”.
“In the half-decade between 1968 and 1974”, writes Simon Reid-Henry in his ambitious new history of the recent past, “an entire era – the postwar era – came to an end”. Mass protests rocked the system from Prague to Paris, and dictatorships fell in Lisbon, Madrid, and Athens. Demonstrators were shot by their own governments from Derry to Ohio, and the terrorism of the far-right and the far-left became a daily threat to urban life.
Unemployment, interest rates, debt, and inflation all soared out of control, as the “Golden Age” of growth was destroyed by what the US Council of Economic Advisers called “a Hydra-headed monster, growing two new heads each time one was cut off”. Angry “culture wars” erupted, immigration was curtailed and demonised, and a reactionary “silent majority” asserted itself.
As we look around at our own tumultuous times, it almost feels as if “the Western democracies have been brought back full circle to the 1970s”. But Reid-Henry argues that things are, of course, very different, and that the intervening 50 years saw “the last great struggle of the 20th century and the first great struggle of the 21st”: a battle between equality and liberty that has radically changed the form and meaning of democracy.
The upheavals of the early 1970s brought “regime change” to the West as the left struggled for answers, leaving an emergent pro-market ideology on the right to take its opportunity. The governments of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and others transformed state power to create nations of consumers, families, and investors, rather than communities and societies. “The private individual”, Reid-Henry writes, “now became the political unit”, a point seemingly emphasised by the fall of communism.
Yet that too had been sparked by the 1970s crisis, its economic effects adding yet more weight on to decaying repressive regimes that eventually collapsed in on themselves. Despite the diverse desires of the 1989 dissidents, the reunified Europe would be carried along by a wave of “market liberalism” that seemed to dominate the age. Reid-Henry explains this hegemony was partly because of “similarly motivated governments feeding from the same trough of ideas” – ideas backed by increasingly powerful corporate and financial lobbying – but also because of the convergence encouraged by the international institutions required to manage accelerating globalisation.
It was a myth that peace and prosperity had triumphed and that an “Empire of Democracy” was on the march, that history was reaching its end. “No one here and nothing here is normal!” wrote Zlata Filipovic (now a documentary filmmaker in Ireland) in her childhood diary from war-torn Sarajevo. Reid-Henry reveals how many threads run through the entire period, from the staple of anti-immigration politics to an always simmering angry nationalism provoked by the insecurities of interdependence.
The nuanced analysis, however, is at times overwhelmed by the book’s length: concision would have amplified the argument, as would a greater variety of voices amid the rigorous research (there are extensive endnotes but sadly no bibliography). Reid-Henry has previously written on the political roots of rising inequality, and he argues that during “the heights of the age of neoliberalism . . . freedom became a fetish and equality a relic of the past”. There is perhaps a lack of hard economic data, but Reid-Henry convincingly shows that the very nature of democracy and citizenship were being fundamentally altered by “institutional reconfigurations, political epiphanies and societal changes of heart”.
The ascendant “freedom” was full of contradictions. A “securitisation of everyday life” brought omnipresent surveillance and a retrenchment of public space. Increased technocracy and privatisation put much of public policy “out of reach of public scrutiny and control”. Greater executive power isolated voters and parliaments from big decisions, and the lies and mistakes of unpopular wars “for democracy” only furthered disillusionment.
Buoyant economies raised living standards, and funded the public investment of a new centre-left “Third Way”, even while welfare and labour reforms encouraged the growth of a new economic “precarity”. But the booms were built by mortgaging entire economies to a financial sector increasingly left to its own devices. “These rules are not needed today”, Bill Clinton’s administration had declared of the Depression-era financial regulations they dismantled.
The bubble burst in 2008, bringing “a near evisceration of capitalism as known and practised”. Yet the less-radical aftermath exposed the ways democracy had been transformed: technocrats took charge in much of the euro zone, diffuse public protest had limited electoral effect, and omnipresent austerity revealed that while governments had played a diminishing role in distributing the benefits of growth, they would be central in “distributing the costs of its decline”.
Social fractures widened as different groups and generations demanded others bear the load, while the left’s “identity politics” – the way disadvantaged groups had demanded greater rights and voice – found distorted echoes on an increasingly radical right offering ever-more exclusionary definitions of “us”. “The only important thing”, Donald Trump told a rally in 2016, “is the unification of the people; because the other people don’t mean anything”. Starved of solidarity, democracy seems to be fraying.
Reid-Henry’s thoughtful epilogue asks what might be the future for democracy. To avoid an age of extremes, he persuasively argues that we must move beyond the idea of popular sovereignty as merely the blunt majority will of a national electorate. He concludes with a vital observation. “If there is a crisis of democracy today”, Reid-Henry writes, it is the result of “what has been done and (not done) to its institutions and values over the past four decades”. Examining the history of our own time is crucial to understanding the challenges we face.
Dr Christopher Kissane is a historian and writer
