At this point, Americans shouldn’t need reminding that the institutions of so-called liberal democracy are in profound crisis, and that the crisis is getting worse rather than better. But if anybody out there still thinks the problem is just the Bad Orange Man, or that it’s confined to Kamala Harris’ campaign failures or the Democratic Party’s excessive wokeness, the collapse of “centrist” governments in Germany and France, within a month of the U.S. presidential election, offers plenty of evidence to the contrary.
Circumstances in those countries are different, to be sure — both from each other and from the U.S. — and in both cases the political, social and cultural problems have been brewing for years and can’t simply be chalked down to “oh no, rising authoritarianism.” (Which in any case is a symptom of dysfunction, not a cause.) Nor are those isolated instances, although when you’re talking about three of the largest Western-style democracies in the world, it should be obvious that the contagion is general.
