Christina Morina (#6: Liberal Democracy and Capitalism)

(The New School / Bielefeld University)

How to move forward – Introduction to the final panel

Welcome everyone to the 6th and final panel of “Historians on Democracy” – a transatlantic conversation series on the past and present of democracy. Those of you who have participated in our previous panels know that up until now the focus was on understanding current developments, primarily in the US, but also in Germany, Europe and beyond, and to do so by reflecting on these developments in light of what we know about the emergence, stabilization and destruction of democracies in the past.

Today, again with a panel of five esteemed colleagues, we want to debate the relationship between liberal democracy and capitalism – in the past, present and future. Thus, we also want to look ahead.

Since we last met on June 3 to discuss “The Rule of Law”, the Trump administration has dramatically intensified its raids against specific groups of human beings – denouncing and dehumanizing noncitizen men, women and children as “illegal aliens” and “criminal monsters”. Trump has federalized the California National Guard to quell resistance against these raids; he has staged a MAGA rally in front of an audience of hand-picked soldiers at Fort Bragg; and he has forced a military parade on Washington, DC, to celebrate his birthday. His domestic authoritarianism has inspired the targeted killing of Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota, and his equally cruel and chaotic foreign policy has not stopped a single war but instead paves the way for new ones. The administration’s alleged fight against antisemitism is making Jews in the US and around the world less save and is threatening the autonomy and freedom of universities along with everything they stand for – not least the free exchange of ideas and knowledge, of scholars and students, US and international.

So even if there is again so much happening as we speak – and I am sure our panellists will respond as they see fit – we do want to focus today on the other side of the disaster, if you will: the history and future of liberalism and liberal democracy; the nexus between a liberal order and a capitalist economy; between the promise of political equality and the predicament of economic inequality. In other words, we will ponder the immaterial and material conditions under which democracies have thrived in the past two centuries – but which have also led, time and again, to moments of great disappointment, if not complete failure.

How these disappointments and failures have contributed to the rise of right-wing populism and neofascism in the 21st century, and whether liberals can reinvent themselves to defend their cause is an urgent and extremely complex matter up for debate. Not least, and here the transatlantic perspective will once again be useful, because the very terms liberal, liberalism and liberal democracy have traditionally meant very different things in different parts of the world. I am sure, our panel today will weigh in on this question, as well.

The fact that last Saturday, here in the US, up to six million people took to the streets under the unifying slogan “No kings!” – perhaps the most simplistic, but essential definition of liberalism – was heartening to see. But what does this mean? Are we back to square one in the story of liberalism? Or might the oddly premodern notion of “No Kings!” become the postmodern rallying cry for a 21^st century version of liberalism that can help us not only to defend democracy but to reinvent it?

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