What Happened to Liberal Democracy?: Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity

Written by one of the leading economists of our time, this book illustrates what I see as a profound decline in contemporary liberal thought. Its central contradiction is particularly striking: Acemoglu begins by defining liberalism as a procedure for testing competing ideas through public debate, rejecting indoctrination and the imposition of doctrine. Yet he ends by advocating that American schoolchildren be taught love for their country while being shielded from the contradictions of American history. A philosophy founded on open inquiry thus concludes with a defense of patriotic indoctrination. The book's economic analysis suffers from a similar limitation. Unable or unwilling to engage with Marxist approaches to understanding capitalism, Acemoglu develops increasingly elaborate explanations for the system's obvious failures, without fundamentally questioning its underlying structure. Like pre-Copernican astronomers who complicated their models to preserve an Earth-centered universe, he attempts to explain capitalism's contradictions without changing his analytical framework. His political response is equally problematic. Like many centrist and moderate European parties confronting the rise of the right, he appears to suggest that liberals should accommodate racist and homophobic attitudes among sections of the working class. This overlooks how capital itself can exploit racial and cultural divisions to undermine working-class solidarity. Conceding to reactionary ideas is not the same as addressing their material and political causes. The book's strongest elements are its conventional left-wing economic proposals: greater redistribution, stronger social safety nets, expanded support for workers, and tax reforms that would favor investment in labor over capital. Yet these measures remain insufficiently ambitious. Acemoglu does not explain how they could be implemented within a fundamentally transformed economic system, particularly one shaped by artificial intelligence. His dismissal of artificial general intelligence as impossible or unattainable is especially unconvincing. Whether AGI will be developed remains uncertain, but dismissing the possibility avoids the more important question: who will control the productive technologies of the future? Any serious vision of an AI-driven economy must address democratic control over the means of production, an issue the book largely leaves unexplored. The implied political strategy seems to involve sacrificing the interests of immigrants and LGBTQ people to regain working-class support. Yet Europe's experience suggests that imitating the rhetoric of the far right is unlikely to provide a compelling alternative to it. Liberalism cannot successfully defend itself by abandoning its principles while offering only a diluted version of its opponents' politics.

pp pp PO I'm