Coke or Pepsi? Dan Kitwood/Pool/AFP via Getty.
AMERICADEMOCRACYDIVERSEEUROPEAN UNIONFRANCIS FUKUYAMAPOLITICSTHE WEST
Thomas Fazi
JULY 21, 2025 10 MINS
From a stumbling economy to soaring crime, France has plenty of problems. But, judging by recent events, the government seems to have another threat in mind: social media. Earlier this month, prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into Elon Musk’s X, alleging foreign interference through algorithm manipulation, while also condemning the platform for spreading “hateful” content. This followed a police raid on the headquarters of the National Rally, France’s leading opposition party, after the launch of yet another dubious investigation into campaign financing.
The Fifth Republic is far from alone here. For Western democracy is under threat — not from “foreign adversaries”, or “far-Right populists”, but from its own elites. Whether in Britain, Germany or Ireland, censorship has become routine across Europe and beyond, even as dissent is increasingly criminalised and legal systems are weaponised to suppress opposition. In recent months, these trends have escalated into direct assaults on the basic institutions of democratic governance. In Romania, to give one example, an entire election was annulled because it delivered the wrong outcome, while other countries contemplate similar measures too.
In theory, all this is being carried out in the name of defending democracy. In truth, the purpose is clear: to help ruling elites maintain their grip on power in the face of a historic collapse of legitimacy. Whether they will succeed in doing so remains to be seen. What is clear, though, is that the stakes are enormous. If elites manage to entrench their control through increasingly authoritarian means, the West will enter a new era of managed democracy — or democracy in name only. If they fail, and in the absence of a coherent alternative, the resulting vacuum may give way to deepening instability, social unrest and systemic crisis. Either way, the outlook for the future of Western democracy is grim.
Critics have been raising alarms about this elite-driven democratic backsliding for years. As far back as 2000, political scientist Colin Crouch coined the term “post-democracy” to describe the fact that, even though Western societies boasted the trappings of freedom, they had increasingly become a meaningless facade. Elections, Crouch argued, had become tightly managed spectacles, orchestrated by professional persuaders who operated within a shared neoliberal consensus — pro-market, pro-business, pro-globalisation — and offered voters little choice on fundamental political or economic questions. Citizens, for their part, played a passive role, helpless in the face of political and corporate power. Politics, Crouch said, was “slipping back into the control of privileged elites in the manner characteristic of pre-democratic times”.
Crouch was writing at the peak of what Francis Fukuyama famously called the end of history. In the political scientist’s telling, the Cold War’s end, and the global triumph of Western liberal democracy, marked the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution”. Subsequent upheavals — especially following the 2007-8 financial crisis — shattered any illusion of history’s halt. Yet Fukuyama’s core argument wasn’t so much that the clock of history had stopped spinning, but that, from then on, there would be no essential challenge to liberal democracy and market capitalism, deemed the pinnacle of social evolution.
For a while, Fukuyama’s prediction proved correct. The historical defeat of socialism shrank the ideological space in the West, foreclosing any fundamental challenge to capitalism and enabling the emergence of a technocratic, depoliticised governance model underpinned by the “TINA” (There Is No Alternative) consensus around neoliberalism — centred on individual responsibility, market hegemony and globalisation. Left-wing protests, whether against globalisation or the Iraq War, failed to transition into formal politics. On the contrary, much of the post-Cold War Left, having abandoned class conflict for liberal-cosmopolitan identity politics, became a legitimising force for an aggressive “progressive neoliberalism” — a fusion of pseudo-progressivism and neoliberal economic policies.
Geopolitically, meanwhile, US “hyperpower” status allowed it to aggressively assert global hegemony, creating a unipolar “new world order”. This was underpinned by structural economic shifts within the West: the decline of traditional manufacturing, and the Fordist-Keynesian social contract, replaced by services, labour dispersion, precarity and fragmentation. Most Western countries saw manufacturing employment decline by a third-to-half in absolute numbers. This pulverised the working class as a unified political subject — along the way wrecking trade unions and other material symbols of postwar mass politics.
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This historical trend was exacerbated by policies deliberately aimed at reducing labour’s bargaining power (anti-union laws, labour market flexibilisation), and promoting privatised consumerism and apathy. Meanwhile, decision-making processes were increasingly insulated from democratic pressures, chiefly through the surrendering of national prerogatives to supranational institutions and super-state bureaucracies such as the European Union. This strategy of depoliticising democracy birthed what some have called “post-politics”: a regime where political spectacle thrives, but where systemic alternatives to the neoliberal status quo are not just repressed but foreclosed. The American journalist Thomas Friedman aptly described the post-political neoliberal regime as one where “policy choices get reduced to Pepsi or Coke” — minor variations within an unchallenged framework.
The concept of post-politics inevitably intersects with that of democracy. A minimalist view of democracy, focused only on rules and elections, suggests it survived the “end of history”, as formal institutions persisted and in some cases expanded (such as in former communist states). Yet substantive democracy — meaning citizens’ ability to actively shape government policy and the political agenda — has eroded dramatically. With no systemic alternative, politics and substantive democracy withered, resulting in declining voter turnout. One might say that the defining characteristic of post-democracy is that, despite the existence of elections, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. Instead, power and influence are concentrated in the hands of a small subset of society.
Of course, since authors like Crouch first diagnosed this hollowing out of democracy from within, things have become exponentially worse, especially in the wake of the financial crisis. The post-democratic politics of the neoliberal era were actually intensified during the 2010s, becoming increasingly repressive and authoritarian. In the EU, under the pretext of responding to the financial and euro crises, the bloc’s supranational institutions (notably the ECB and European Commission) dramatically expanded their powers, imposing budgetary rules and structural reforms on member states without democratic oversight.
Beyond these institutional shifts, meanwhile, unelected elites increasingly interfered in the democratic processes of member states. The ECB’s “monetary coup” against Berlusconi in 2011, where the central bank effectively forced the prime minister to leave office by making his ouster the precondition for further support for Italian bonds and banks, is one good example here. The financial blackmail of Greece’s Tsipras government is another. Taken together, anyway, these events led some observers to suggest that the EU was becoming a “post-democratic prototype” — one fiercely opposed to national sovereignty and democracy both.
The scorched earth left behind by the financial crisis, and the elite-imposed austerity that followed, fuelled in the mid-2010s our century’s first major anti-establishment uprisings: Brexit, Trump, the Yellow Vests and growing anti-EU sentiment across Europe. This mass awakening seemingly marked the “end of the end of history”, a widespread rejection of the post-Cold War neoliberal order. Even so, these challenges ultimately failed — absorbed or neutralised by the establishment through repression and ideological counter-offensives.
In this sense, the pandemic, beyond its epidemiological nature, can be interpreted as a “deep structural event” that accelerated this authoritarian centralisation of power. Governments inflated the danger of the virus to sweep aside democratic procedures, militarise societies, crack down on liberties and implement unprecedented measures of social control — in the process “freezing” democratic politics and sapping whatever energy was left from the populist movements of the late 2010s.
Similar authoritarian dynamics resurged with the Russia-Ukraine conflict, with the media-political establishment smearing, censoring and even punishing voices critical to Western hawkishness. Just over a month ago, the EU, in a shocking and utterly unprecedented decision, sanctioned three EU citizens — banning them from travelling through the EU and freezing their bank accounts — for allegedly engaging in “pro-Russian propaganda”.
At the same time, new populist threats to the established order have emerged, predominantly from the Right. But so far, these too have failed to disrupt the status quo, partly because the West’s increasingly unpopular and delegitimised elites have turned to ever more brazen forms of repression to influence electoral outcomes and suppress these challenges. The Romanian case marked a fateful escalation: elites, backed by Nato and the EU, overturned a presidential election result, barring the populist candidate via unsubstantiated claims of Russian interference.
These events signal a disturbing trend: elites no longer limit themselves to “managing” electoral outcomes through “soft” or covert means — media manipulation, censorship, lawfare, economic pressure and intelligence operations. Rather, they are increasingly willing to discard the formal structures of democracy altogether. In retrospect, the “post-democratic” era of technocratic managerialism described by Crouch appears positively benign by comparison. All this repression is carried out in the name of defending democracy from so-called internal threats (populists) and external ones (foreign adversaries). Yet it is becoming increasingly clear that its true aim is shoring up elite power.
Most anti-establishment analyses of the current “crisis of democracy”, however, rest on flawed assumptions: that the current phase deviates from a historical norm; that postwar social-democratic capitalism was truly democratic; and that a return to it is possible. These assumptions crumble under scrutiny.
Western liberal democracy, even minimally defined as representative government based on universal suffrage, is a very recent phenomenon. Full male suffrage emerged in a limited number of countries only between the middle of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Women’s suffrage generally came after the Second World War. Effective voting rights for racial minorities, such as African Americans, arrived decades later. In short, democracy as universal adult suffrage, regardless of wealth, property, race or class, has existed for mere decades. Previously, it was the exclusive domain of propertied elites, or else based on sex or skin colour.
“Western liberal democracy is a very recent phenomenon.”
Besides, as noted above, democracy is about something far more substantial than the mere act of voting. If it means anything, it must surely allow citizens to influence the state’s direction and shape the political agenda on fundamental issues — whether immigration, foreign policy, or the overall trajectory of social and economic policy. It’s hard to claim Western democracy is thriving on those terms. Yet that still leaves one more question: if “real democracy” is now dead, was it ever alive at all?
For a relatively short period — roughly between the Forties and the Seventies — we did witness a form of democracy that was decidedly more substantive than what exists today. Over these decades, often described as the “golden age” of capitalism, the working classes were integrated into the West’s political systems for the first time in history. This allowed them to gain a significant influence over the political agenda, leading to a substantial expansion of social, economic and political rights, in a context of growing politicisation of the masses. The contrast to the post-political period is very stark indeed.
All the same, it’d be wrong to idealise the mid-century West. Even then, democracy in its substantive sense remained heavily constrained. Though the ruling classes were forced — under pressure from popular movements, the Cold War, and the threat of social unrest — to extend voting rights and acknowledge a range of political and social rights, they did not do so willingly. On the contrary, they were often driven by the fear that the masses could pose a real threat to the established social order — that workers might use democracy to overturn existing power relations.
As a result, alongside economic concessions, Western elites also constrained democratic participation in various ways. Modern constitutional systems — including nascent supranational ones like the European Court of Justice, established in 1952 — explicitly limited popular sovereignty. Elected governments were prevented from enacting certain economic or social policies, or even challenging existing international alliances. All the while, power shifted. Parliaments got weaker, and technocrats and judges grew more powerful, each in their way proving capable of overriding national laws. This was often justified as a way of protecting democracy from what elites feared could be the irrational or destabilising demands of the masses — a longstanding argument in liberal political thought that equates too much popular participation with the risk of populism, mob rule or economic irresponsibility.
In some countries, the concept of “militant democracy” became a further means to limit the popular will. In Germany, for example, it legitimised the banning of political parties, most notably the country’s Communist Party. State authorities, supported by media and institutional elites, systematically repressed demands for deeper democratisation, whether via police force, media delegitimisation or institutional restructuring. Meanwhile, Western “permanent states” — the military, intelligence and security apparatuses — exercised considerable influence behind the scenes, generally under the direction of the US. That infamously included terrorist acts aimed at curbing the power of Left parties and movements, for example through Gladio. In short, from the very beginning of modern liberal democracy, the ruling classes actively worked to contain democracy within the boundaries of what they deemed acceptable politics.
All the same, for a while, the organised power of the masses was indeed able to constrain, to a greater degree than ever before, the power of capital. As noted, however, this brief period of relative substantive democracy depended on a unique confluence of factors. As these conditions crumbled from the mid-Seventies, the marriage between capitalism and democracy dissolved.
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The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the symbolic end of this era. In the decades since, we have witnessed a steady erosion of democratic norms — a process that has accelerated dramatically in recent years. Relevant, here, is Carl Schmitt’s “state of exception”, whereby constitutional safeguards are suspended to impose decisions unachievable via normal democratic channels. Yet as the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben emphasised over 20 years ago, the state of exception has now become a permanent condition in Western states.
This, of course, is a paradox: if it is permanent, then, by definition, it is no longer a state of exception. It becomes the rule. But is this permanent state of exception unique to the “post-democratic” era? An analysis of the postwar era suggests not. Rather, it is a fundamental characteristic of the state itself, even in its liberal-democratic guise. This challenges common conceptions of the state: across the Western world, we are accustomed to identifying the state with the executive and with parliament, assuming that these institutions act in accordance with constitutions and the rule of law.
But this is a misunderstanding: the state doesn’t coincide with the institutions of representative democracy. Rather, the two belong to entirely distinct spheres of politics. On the one hand, there is the politics of the state. On the other, there is what we might call popular politics, embodying popular sovereignty and typified by political parties, trade unions, social movements and civil society. The state operates with a significant degree of autonomy from the latter, meaning it is not only largely independent of civil society, but also of parliaments and even governments themselves.
In theory, after all, state bureaucracies act as neutral executors of government policy. In reality, they often act independently of, or even in opposition to, elected parliaments and governments, particularly when it comes to protecting institutional continuity, legal norms or elite interests. Supreme and constitutional courts, for example, frequently rule against government policies — especially when it comes to controversial issues like immigration. The way in which the Bank of England derailed Liz Truss’s infamous mini-budget is another example here. This phenomenon is obviously much more pronounced when national governments are subordinated to supranational institutions, as in the European Union. And then, of course, you have the military and intelligence bureaucracies, which today arguably exercise more influence than ever before (see, for instance, the Russiagate hoax).
The state thus emerges as a social organism endowed with its own internal logic and continuity, capable of pursuing goals and directions often independent of those declared or pursued by the political leadership of the day. This has always been true — even if, depending on the relative balance of class forces within society, the state may at times be forced to make concessions to the forces of popular politics. In other words, then, today’s crisis doesn’t represent democracy’s sudden collapse, but instead the unveiling of how power truly works. The contemporary crisis of Western democracy exposes the limits of formal democratic institutions, bringing the logic of state power into blindingly sharp relief.
The future, unfortunately, seems bleak. The conditions enabling the brief period of substantive democracy are gone, and unlikely to return soon. In a real sense, substantive democracy is dead. Even so, the unravelling geopolitical order underpinning Western dominance — challenged by the emergence of a multipolar order underpinned by the rise of powers like China — marks a profound political and economic shift. The erosion of Western hegemony is weakening its elites, whose dominance has long relied on both internal suppression and power projection abroad. Declining influence overseas exacerbates domestic discontent, especially when fuelled by rising and systemic inequality.
This unravelling exposes the structural weaknesses of the Western system. Without the geopolitical stability and economic dominance that once masked its internal contradictions, elites are growing more vulnerable. Crucially, this decline also paves the way for a potential new order — not just a geopolitical reconfiguration, but a potential reimagining of political and economic systems. As Western elites grapple with their waning power, there are vast opportunities for alternative visions of governance and democracy.
What lies ahead is not merely a question of whether democracy can be “restored”, but whether a new political project can emerge to replace the exhausted model of elite-managed liberalism. The old order is collapsing, but the new has yet to be born. In this vacuum, anything can happen.
Thomas Fazi is an UnHerd columnist and translator. His latest book is The Covid Consensus, co-authored with Toby Green.
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