How Politicians Broke Our World: Ian Shapiro on Raising Ourselves Up After the Fall

“The current crisis was far from inevitable. Politicians made consistently bad choices. In doing so, they fostered a crisis of confidence in political institutions, empowered anti-system candidates, and produced a new Cold War as dangerous as the last.” — Ian Shapiro

The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 was a moment of extraordinary euphoria. Fukuyama even described it as the end of history. But what seems to have really fallen in November ’89 was the vitality of democracy. Almost forty years later, we have Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, and, perhaps most worrying of all, Keir Starmer. Callous and inept politicians are breaking our democratic world. Our job is to put it back together.

That’s the thesis of a new book by Ian Shapiro — Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale. In After the Fall, Shapiro argues that it’s politicians who have created today’s crisis of democracy. His pivotal moment is 2008 rather than 1989. The global financial crisis was the inflection point — the moment at which the corruption of the neoliberal order became self-evident, when elites bailed out the banks and we see the birth of left and right wing illiberal populism.

The roots go back before 2008. Clinton’s greatest failure, Shapiro argues, was not NAFTA or welfare reform. It was Russia. Yeltsin wanted to join NATO. Even Putin, in his early years in power, acknowledged that Russia considered itself European. George Kennan, Brent Scowcroft and Richard Nixon warned that expanding NATO eastward would create a new enemy. Clinton ignored them all. So history repeated itself in the form of Versailles rather than the Marshall Plan.

So how to raise ourselves up after this fall? What road to take? Maps, Shapiro suggests, aren’t always helpful. The New Deal had no GPS algorithm. FDR invented it on the fly. What democratic governments need now, he insists, is massive investment in physical, technological, and labor market infrastructure. Charismatic leaders matter. But the ideas matter more. We need politicians who take risks. Otherwise we’ll be saddled with Keir Starmer and our current crisis of extraordinary dysphoria.

Five Takeaways

•       2008, Not 1989, Was the Inflection Point: The fall of the Wall in 1989 produced euphoria. The real break came nineteen years later. The 2008 financial crisis exposed the neoliberal model, undermined the supremacy of the US-led world system, and — crucially — left behind a large population that would subsequently be mobilizable by political entrepreneurs. Elites bailed out the banks and returned to business as usual. They didn’t realize that business as usual was over. From 2008 you can draw a straight line to 2016, to Brexit, to Trump, to every anti-system surge that followed.

•       We Repeated the Mistake of Versailles: After World War II, the Marshall Plan invested in the defeated powers — Germany, Japan — and folded them into the new security and economic architecture. After World War I, Versailles punished Germany, and Keynes predicted the results. After the Cold War, the victorious West chose Versailles over Marshall. Yeltsin wanted to join NATO and the EU. Even early Putin said Russia considered itself European. Kennan, Scowcroft, Nixon all warned that expanding NATO eastward would create a new enemy. Clinton ignored them. We created the enemy we warned ourselves about.

•       Politicians Broke the World — Not Capitalism, Not Culture: Shapiro’s subtitle is precise. The crisis of democracy was not caused by inevitable economic forces or cultural shifts. It was caused by