Aziz Huq Reviews Two Books Examining Those Who Feel Left Behind

The Feel of Feeling Left Behind

THE NOTION THAT liberal democracy is in bad shape is a rare breed of editorial page cliché: upon inspection, it turns out to be true. Global measures of democracy, like those produced by Freedom House, the Economist Intelligence Unit, and the Bertelsmann Stiftung, consistently show a downward trend beginning roughly at the beginning of the 2010s. Less clear, though, is why this decline has happened, and what, if anything, might break the fall.

Two recent books by the political journalist John B. Judis and economist Barry Eichengreen, both respected figures of the intellectual center-left, offer what are likely to become influential diagnoses and prescriptions.

A founding editor of magazines like Socialist Revolution and the East Bay Voice, Judis gravitated over time toward more establishment redoubts such as The New Republic and Talking Points Memo. He is often recalled as a co-author of the prematurely titled The Emerging Democratic Majority in 2002. But Judis’s subsequent frank and self-aware course-correction, in a 2015 essay entitled “The Emerging Republican Advantage,” is more probative of his impressive analytic pedigree.

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