Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy, by William A. Galston — Summary
Synopsis
Galston’s central thesis is that populism is not merely anti-democratic but fundamentally anti-pluralist: it divides society into a morally pure people and a corrupt elite, claims to embody a single authentic popular will, and treats the institutional restraints of liberal democracy — courts, rights, minority protections, free press — as illegitimate obstacles rather than essential safeguards. Because it denies the irreducible plurality of modern societies, populism threatens not only liberalism but democracy itself, which depends on recognizing all citizens as members of the demos.
The argument is built in three movements. The first is historical: Galston traces four postwar Western convergences — welfare-state consolidation, conservative retrenchment, the Third Way, and the populist revolt — showing that the crisis is not a national anomaly but a transatlantic pattern driven by deindustrialization, uneven globalization, the collapse of the center-left, and a new education-based meritocracy that generates both material inequality and status humiliation. The second movement is conceptual: he disaggregates liberal democracy into four components (popular sovereignty, democracy, constitutionalism, and liberalism) and shows that populism accepts the first two while attacking the latter two. The third movement is prescriptive and comparative: country chapters on Europe and the United States diagnose the specific mechanisms of erosion, while the final chapters argue that liberal democracy is structurally incomplete — it cannot fully satisfy human longings for solidarity, drama, and moral clarity — and that its survival requires not constitutional complacency but active renewal through inclusive growth, responsible nationalism, democratic leadership, and institutional reform.
For the vault, the book is the definitional treatment of the anti-pluralist logic that organizes several ongoing investigations. Galston’s insistence that economics alone cannot explain the populist surge — that status injury, cultural dispossession, and territorial abandonment are independent drivers — directly parallels the vault’s thesis about thymos and the limits of materialist explanations in Brazilian politics. His framework for understanding how elected leaders hollow out liberalism while retaining democratic forms is the template for analyzing Orbán, Erdogan, and Bolsonaro. And his final chapter on the incompleteness of liberal democracy — the argument that liberal regimes generate their own discontent because they cannot satisfy desires for belonging, intensity, and moral simplification — is the theoretical foundation for understanding why liberal democratic orders periodically face existential populist challenges from within.
Preface to the Paperback Edition
The preface updates the book’s central argument by showing that the populist surge did not recede after the first signs of centrist resistance in Europe. William A. Galston opens by noting that early hopes raised by Emmanuel Macron’s 2017 victory in France were quickly undercut by later developments across the continent. What seemed, for a brief moment, like the cresting of a populist wave turned out instead to be part of a deeper realignment. The preface is therefore not merely a scene-setting update; it is an argument that the crisis of liberal democracy had widened and hardened.
Galston then surveys the electoral evidence. He points to the rise or consolidation of the AfD in Germany, Andrej Babiš in the Czech Republic, the Freedom Party in Austria, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, the Sweden Democrats, and the League in Italy. He also brings in the Yellow Vest revolt in France to show that anti-establishment anger was not confined to formal party systems. The pattern is clear: populist forces were not isolated anomalies but components of a broader European transformation, one that was redrawing the political map.
A key part of that transformation, in Galston’s telling, was the collapse of the center-left. He describes the sharp weakening of social democratic parties in Germany, France, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Italy, and even Scandinavia. These were not routine electoral setbacks but structural losses that called into question the postwar settlement under which center-left and center-right parties alternated in government while sharing a basic commitment to liberal democracy. The decline of one side of that duopoly made populist advances easier and more consequential.
At the same time, center-right parties did not simply resist the populist challenge. Often, they adapted to it. Galston shows mainstream conservatives hardening their rhetoric and policies on immigration, integration, and national identity under pressure from more radical challengers. This matters because it suggests that populism changes politics not only when populists win power but also when established parties begin to imitate their themes. The effect is to normalize previously marginal positions and shift entire systems to the right.
The preface also stresses that the most dangerous developments were not ordinary policy disputes inside democracy but direct attacks on liberal-democratic institutions. Galston is careful to distinguish between controversial but legitimate democratic choices and genuinely illiberal moves. He argues, for example, that arguments over immigration or sovereignty belong within democratic contestation, but intimidation of the press, weakening of courts, attacks on civil society, and erosion of the rule of law cross a different line. Hungary and Poland become especially important because they demonstrate how elected leaders can hollow out liberalism while retaining democratic forms.
Galston next revisits the causes of populism. He grants that the earlier economic story had real explanatory power: deindustrialization, uneven globalization, the concentration of opportunity in metropolitan centers, and the failures exposed by the Great Recession all fed resentment. Regions left behind by recovery lost confidence in mainstream parties, and the resulting anger created fertile ground for insurgent movements. But Galston insists that economics alone cannot account for what happened.
He therefore broadens the diagnosis to include culture, identity, and sovereignty. Opposition to mass immigration, anxiety over cultural liberalization, fear of terrorism, and resentment toward distant supranational institutions all became central to the populist revolt. He emphasizes the rise of a new, education-based meritocracy concentrated in metropolitan centers, government, media, and expert institutions. Many citizens outside that world came to feel not only economically insecure but also morally looked down upon, politically ignored, and culturally displaced. Populists succeeded because they addressed all of those injuries at once.
From that diagnosis Galston derives a strategic program for defenders of liberal democracy. First, they must defend core liberal institutions without hesitation: independent courts, a free press, civil associations, minority protections, and the rule of law. Second, they must restore the capacity of democratic institutions to act effectively, because paralysis and evasion make voters more receptive to rule-breaking strongmen. Third, they must stop treating national sovereignty and border control as illegitimate concerns. Liberal democrats, he argues, can accept national self-preference and a range of views on immigration without abandoning liberal principles.
He illustrates this last point with Canada, which he presents as a model of managed immigration that combines openness with political legitimacy. More broadly, he argues for inclusive growth rather than complacent reliance on aggregate economic performance. That means policies aimed at geography as well as class: broadband expansion, capital for small business, better transport links, and more serious attention to regional divergence. In both Europe and the United States, he suggests, place-sensitive policy is necessary if liberal democracies want to reduce the resentment that fuels populism.
The preface ends on a note that is worried but not fatalistic. Galston rejects both the triumphalism of the post–Cold War era and the opposite temptation to panic. Long-established liberal democracies, he argues, remain resilient, while newer democracies are more fragile and more vulnerable to authoritarian drift. But resilience is not the same as self-preservation. Liberal democracy will survive only if its defenders abandon complacency, confront institutional decay, respond to public discontent, and produce the kind of farsighted leadership that has recently been in short supply.
Chapter 1 — Democratic Erosion and Political Convergence
Galston opens by rejecting the idea that the United States has followed a uniquely American political trajectory since World War II. His point is that the major shifts in American politics are best understood as part of broader Western democratic trends. Rather than standing apart from Europe, the United States has moved alongside it, participating in a series of postwar convergences that shaped the political mainstream on both sides of the Atlantic.
The first of those convergences was the postwar consolidation of the welfare state. In the decades after 1945, Western democracies built systems of social protection, social insurance, and public provision that enjoyed support across party lines. Galston stresses that this was not simply a left-wing project. In the United States, Republican administrations accepted and in some cases expanded the basic architecture of New Deal liberalism, while in Europe versions of social democracy became a durable organizing consensus.
That consensus began to fray in the 1970s, when worries about inflation, fiscal strain, and sluggish growth fostered doubts about the state’s capacity to satisfy expanding public demands. Galston uses the language of “democratic overload” to capture this moment. Citizens expected more from government than governments seemed able to finance or administer, and this sense of overload created space for an ideological and political reaction against the expanding postwar state.
The second major convergence, then, was conservative retrenchment. Leaders such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher did not abolish the welfare state, but they changed the terms of debate. They weakened confidence in government competence, gave new prestige to market mechanisms, and repositioned the center of gravity of democratic politics. Similar developments occurred elsewhere in Europe, as even nominally left-wing governments ended up adopting austerity, deregulation, or privatization when confronted by economic realities.
Galston then turns to the Third Way, the next convergence in the sequence. Reformist center-left leaders such as Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and Gerhard Schröder refashioned older social democratic parties into more market-friendly, modernized vehicles. The Third Way accepted globalization, fiscal discipline, and a significant role for markets while trying to preserve a commitment to fairness and social inclusion. For a time, it seemed to offer an updated formula capable of reconciling liberal democracy with the post-Cold War world.
That confidence was reinforced by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the wider triumph of the liberal democratic model. With communism discredited and global economic integration accelerating, the “Washington consensus” appeared not merely influential but canonical. Liberal democracy, open markets, and international institutions looked like the settled horizon of modern politics. Galston presents this as the high-water mark of elite confidence in the post-1989 order.
The Great Recession shattered that confidence. Governments across the West struggled to prevent collapse, restore growth, and distribute the costs of crisis. Even where recovery came, it was too slow, uneven, and socially narrow to repair the damage. Galston argues that this was the decisive break point that discredited established elites and opened the door to a fourth convergence: the populist revolt against the assumptions that had structured Western politics since the end of the Cold War.
For Galston, however, the revolt cannot be explained by the financial crisis alone. He insists on deeper structural causes: deindustrialization, the shift to knowledge-intensive economies, and the rise of an education-based meritocracy concentrated in metropolitan centers. These changes produced winners and losers, but also a moral hierarchy. Citizens without the credentials, mobility, and cultural fluency of the new elite increasingly felt not simply left behind but looked down upon. The resentment generated by this social reordering became a powerful fuel for populist politics.
This new conflict is not only economic. Galston emphasizes a widening set of social and cultural cleavages: between cities and rural areas, between the highly educated and the less educated, between those who celebrate diversity and those who experience it as disruption, between long-established national majorities and newer entrants into the polity. Immigration intensified these tensions, especially where citizens felt that the burdens of economic competition, cultural change, and public insecurity were being imposed without their consent.
The institutional consequences are serious. As governments appeared unable or unwilling to respond decisively to economic stagnation, illegal immigration, refugee flows, terrorism fears, and cultural fragmentation, many citizens became impatient with liberal constraints and more receptive to strong leaders. Galston is careful to distinguish strength from authoritarianism, but he argues that in periods of anxiety the demand for forceful action can easily slide into hostility toward the press, minority rights, judicial independence, and the rule of law.
He also notes that liberal democracy has not been entirely passive. France blocked Marine Le Pen from power, Britain’s politics remained competitive and unsettled after the Brexit vote, and the American system of separated powers imposed limits on an elected populist president. These are signs of resilience. But Galston’s judgment is unsparing: defenders of liberal democracy have won a reprieve, not a pardon. The underlying grievances remain, and if centrist governments fail to restore legitimacy through performance, more illiberal outcomes remain possible.
The chapter widens from national developments to a broader diagnosis of democratic erosion. Galston points to empirical evidence showing not only the slowing of democratization worldwide but the decline in democratic quality, including in established democracies. At the same time, authoritarian regimes—especially Russia and China, but also others—have become more assertive, more coordinated, and more willing to use money, influence operations, cyberattacks, and support for friendly regimes to weaken liberal democratic norms.
His final claim is that the crisis is rooted in the breakdown of the postwar bargain between citizens and elites. For decades, democratic governments delivered rising living standards, social protection, domestic order, and relative security; in exchange, citizens deferred to established leadership. That bargain no longer holds. Growth has slowed, its gains have been distributed unevenly, consensus politics has narrowed the visible range of alternatives, and nationalist reactions have returned. Galston ends by insisting that democracy historically flourished under an international canopy of support and incentives. If liberal democracies are to recover, they will need not only domestic renewal but also a reconstructed international environment strong enough to sustain self-government.
Chapter 2 — Liberal Democracy in Theory
The second chapter is conceptual rather than historical. Galston’s goal is to clarify what exactly is at stake when people say that liberal democracy is under pressure. He argues that the term is often used too loosely, and he therefore disaggregates it into four connected elements: the republican principle, democracy, constitutionalism, and liberalism. Only by separating these elements can we understand both how liberal democracy works and how it can decay.
He begins with the republican principle, which he defines as popular sovereignty: the people are the sole legitimate source of political authority. This principle does not in itself specify any single institutional form. A people may authorize many kinds of governments, not all of them democratic in the modern sense. That is why Galston treats popular sovereignty as prior to democracy. It establishes the source of legitimacy, not the detailed design of the regime.
This immediately raises the question of who “the people” are. Galston shows that the answer is neither simple nor politically innocent. Modern liberal democrats tend to treat the people as a civic whole composed of equal citizens, but historically political communities have often relied on thicker notions of peoplehood grounded in ancestry, religion, common culture, or common historical struggle. He uses examples from the Federalist Papers, Hungary, and Poland to show how constitutions can quietly encode exclusionary understandings of the nation even while speaking in the name of the people.
The chapter then broadens the field by insisting that popular sovereignty is not the only possible basis of legitimacy. Galston discusses charismatic or intuitive authorization, in which rulers claim a special bond with the people that supersedes formal consent; religious authorization, in which divine law outranks popular will; and meritocratic authorization, in which superior knowledge and competence are said to justify rule. His purpose is not to endorse these alternatives but to warn liberal democrats against assuming that their preferred grounding of authority is self-evident or historically inevitable.
Meritocracy receives especially careful treatment because it is not simply an external rival to liberal democracy. Modern states depend on expertise, and many important institutions, such as courts or central banks, require specialized knowledge. Galston therefore distinguishes between the legitimacy of expertise within a liberal democratic framework and the broader meritocratic claim that political power belongs to the most competent. Liberal democracy can incorporate expertise, but only if the people authorize the institutions that exercise it and retain the right to revise that authorization.
His discussion of Singapore sharpens this point. Singapore performs impressively on many measures that citizens care about: prosperity, effectiveness, order, low corruption, and public safety. Yet it scores much worse on democratic participation and civil liberties. Galston uses the case to challenge the assumption that modernization automatically yields liberal democracy. A regime can be effective, materially successful, and even broadly admired while remaining substantially authoritarian.
Galston then turns to democracy in the narrower sense, drawing on Robert Dahl’s influential account. Democracy requires political equality, broad inclusion in citizenship, and majority rule over a wide range of public matters. In this stripped-down meaning, democracy is mainly about who counts and how decisions are made. Galston is explicit that democracy so understood does not automatically protect privacy, minority rights, or procedural fairness in every domain. A democratic majority can make harsh, invasive, or unjust decisions and still remain democratic in the procedural sense.
That is why constitutionalism must be added. Constitutionalism refers to the basic and enduring structures that organize public power and make it more difficult to alter fundamental rules than ordinary policy choices. Constitutions establish institutions, allocate authority, state purposes, and impose limits. These limits can be horizontal, through separation of powers and checks and balances, or vertical, through federalism and divided jurisdiction. Constitutionalism, in other words, is about giving political life form and stability.
But constitutionalism alone is still not liberalism. Galston’s crucial distinction is that constitutional orders can structure power without setting principled limits on the overall scope of what government may do. Liberalism enters when a polity creates a protected sphere beyond the rightful reach of public authority. Drawing on Benjamin Constant’s contrast between the liberty of the ancients and that of the moderns, Galston defines liberal freedom as the peaceful enjoyment of individual independence in private, social, economic, cultural, and religious life.
This liberal idea modifies both democracy and constitutionalism. If individuals possess rights that governments do not create and may not rightly abridge, then majorities cannot be treated as omnipotent. Liberal democracy therefore combines popular authorization, democratic equality, and constitutional order with substantive limits on public power. It may use supermajority rules, judicial review, and other countermajoritarian devices not because it distrusts the people altogether but because it denies that majorities may rightfully decide everything.
Galston then identifies the main threats to liberal democracy in light of this framework. They include denial of popular sovereignty, exclusionary definitions of the people, claims to rule based on unique insight into popular will, substitution of religion or meritocracy for public authorization, extra-constitutional power grabs, unequal citizenship, weighted votes, disregard for limits on state power, and international arrangements that excessively constrain a sovereign people’s ability to govern itself. The list is useful because it shows that liberal democracy can be damaged from several directions at once.
Still, he refuses schematic rigidity. A constitution may invoke religion without becoming purely theocratic. Meritocratic institutions may be legitimate if publicly authorized. Even extra-constitutional action may sometimes be defensible in emergencies, as in Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, if the breach is genuinely aimed at preserving the constitutional order rather than destroying it. Galston’s point is that categories matter, but context and political judgment matter too.
The chapter closes by adding one more element that modern theory often leaves implicit: the dependence of liberal democracy on economic growth and broadly shared prosperity. Galston argues that market economies are not merely efficient tools but political supports. A confident middle class, upward mobility, and rising living standards help sustain moderation, tolerance, and democratic legitimacy. Stagnation, by contrast, turns politics into a zero-sum struggle and corrodes the generosity that liberal democracy needs. The defense of liberal democracy, therefore, cannot stop at constitutional design. It must also ask whether present-day societies can still deliver the material conditions under which liberal institutions remain believable.
Chapter 3 — The Populist Challenge
Galston begins the third chapter from the standpoint of political economy. Under ordinary conditions, liberal democracies distribute gains. That process is conflictual, but it still leaves room for bargaining and compromise. The mood changes when growth stalls and politics becomes a struggle over losses. In such settings, citizens are more sensitive to what they are losing than to what they might gain, and resentment becomes easier to mobilize. This is the emotional soil in which populism grows.
Economic stress alone, however, does not produce the full populist narrative. Galston argues that immigration, cultural change, and perceived external constraints intensify the sense of dispossession. When citizens believe that newcomers are competing unfairly for jobs, services, status, and recognition, and when governments seem passive in the face of these pressures, anger is redirected toward both domestic elites and international structures. Nationalism then appears as a promise of regained control.
The resulting politics is a politics of blame. Some citizens, usually those with more education and mobility, adapt successfully to globalization and diversity. Others experience the same developments as threat, decline, and humiliation. Populist leaders turn these perceptions into a moral drama: honest people have been betrayed by selfish elites, and ordinary citizens must reclaim their country. Galston presents this not as a passing irritation but as a deeply consequential reorganization of democratic conflict.
He also links the populist surge to the collapse of traditional party systems. As center-left and center-right parties failed to respond convincingly to stagnation and insecurity, extremists and anti-establishment forces gained ground. In France, for example, the old governing parties were displaced in the 2017 presidential contest. Galston does not romanticize the established parties, but he makes clear that the weakening of mainstream channels leaves democracies more vulnerable to demagogic mobilization.
The chapter briefly invokes the memory of the 1930s. Galston is careful not to claim that contemporary liberal democracies are on the verge of simply repeating fascism or totalitarianism. Today’s systems are stronger, and the Chinese model, while admired by some for its decisiveness, is not likely to become a fully persuasive ideological substitute in the West. The real danger comes instead from an indigenous Western phenomenon: populism.
Galston acknowledges that populism is often treated as a style, mood, or emotional posture rather than a full doctrine. There is truth in that view. Populists draw energy from anger, fear, resentment, and disappointment. But Galston insists that this is not enough. Even without canonical texts or a fully elaborated theory, populism has a coherent internal logic. It is built around a distinct set of claims about who the people are, who the enemy is, and what kind of authority is needed.
At the core of that logic is the opposition between a homogeneous, virtuous people and a corrupt elite. Populism moralizes political conflict. It does not merely say that elites are mistaken or self-interested; it says that they are fundamentally illegitimate. At the same time, it imagines the people as internally unified, possessing a single authentic will. From this follows the claim that institutions which obstruct that will—courts, checks and balances, minority protections, independent media, technocratic agencies—are suspect obstacles rather than essential safeguards.
Placed in the conceptual framework of the previous chapter, populism accepts popular sovereignty and a majoritarian idea of democracy, but it is skeptical of constitutionalism and openly hostile to liberal limits. This is why some thinkers describe it as “illiberal democracy.” Galston presents that argument fairly. If insulated institutions remove major questions from democratic control, then populism can look like a democratic correction against an overly technocratic or unresponsive liberal order.
But he then presses the harder question: who exactly are “the people” in populist discourse? Historically, the answer has varied. Right-wing populists often define the people in ethnic or national terms; left-wing populists may define them in class terms; contemporary culture-war populism may define them against cosmopolitan, educated, urban elites. Galston uses Donald Trump’s rhetoric as an example of how quickly this language divides the citizenry into the “real” people and the rest.
That move, he argues, is not a harmless simplification. It is exclusionary by design. Once some citizens are cast as outsiders, lesser members, or alien elements within the polity, equal citizenship is threatened. The very democratic principle of inclusion begins to erode. Populism therefore does not merely challenge liberalism; it can also undermine democracy in the stricter sense, because democracy depends on recognizing all citizens as members of the demos.
A second problem is that populism’s image of a unified people is fundamentally false. Modern societies are plural. They contain divergent interests, identities, values, and histories. For Galston, this plurality is not an unfortunate deviation from democracy but one of its basic conditions. Because no modern people speaks with one voice, democratic life requires fair terms of coexistence among free and equal yet irreducibly diverse citizens. Populism denies this pluralism and therefore distorts both social reality and democratic principle.
The myth of popular virtue compounds the problem. If the people are assumed to be morally pure while elites are treated as evil, then compromise becomes shameful and ordinary democratic bargaining becomes impossible. Politics turns into a struggle between innocence and corruption, not among competing but legitimate interests. Galston’s conclusion is that scholarly attempts to domesticate populism under the label of “illiberal democracy” miss the depth of the problem. Populism threatens liberalism, certainly, but because it is exclusionary and anti-pluralist, it can threaten democracy itself.
He ends by widening the frame again. Populism often includes a nationalist demand to restore sovereignty against foreign institutions and hostile external forces, whether the European Union, alliances, or global economic constraints. Yet the actual danger varies from case to case. Brexit was a populist revolt without amounting to a terminal assault on British liberal democracy. Hungary, by contrast, shows how populism can harden into attacks on courts and democratic norms. Poland raises similar worries, while the United States occupies an uncertain middle ground. The chapter therefore closes not with a final verdict but with a transition: to assess populism properly, theory must now give way to country-specific analysis.
Chapter Four. The European Project and Its Enemies
The fourth chapter begins by reconstructing the European project as a distinctly postwar answer to catastrophe. After the devastation of World War II, European elites tried to make renewed conflict materially and politically impossible by tying national economies together. Institutions such as the European Coal and Steel Community were not only economic devices; they were meant to be stepping stones toward a deeper political union, a Europe in which shared prosperity, peace, and supranational citizenship would gradually supersede older nationalist antagonisms. The euro, in this account, represented not merely a currency but a symbolic advance toward an “ever closer union,” a demonstration that political history could be redirected by technocratic institution-building.
But the chapter quickly shows that this elite-driven project never succeeded in generating a comparably deep emotional attachment among ordinary citizens. From the beginning, European integration rested on a weak social foundation. Referenda on the Maastricht Treaty were marked by narrow margins, low enthusiasm, and negotiated exemptions, all signs that many Europeans accepted integration reluctantly rather than embraced it. The European Union acquired legal authority and bureaucratic reach much faster than it acquired a widely shared popular identity. This gap between institutional depth and emotional legitimacy is the chapter’s central problem: Europe built structures before it built a people.
The eurozone crisis exposed that weakness with unusual force. When sovereign debt crises, bailouts, and austerity spread across the continent after 2009, many voters did not interpret the pain as an unfortunate side effect of a noble project. They saw it as proof that distant bureaucratic elites had designed an economic order that protected creditors more readily than citizens. That perception gave populist movements their opening. Galston surveys the continent to show that the resulting backlash was ideologically diverse but structurally similar: in the North, anti-immigrant parties fused welfare commitments with ethnic exclusion; in the South, anti-austerity movements attacked the political and financial establishment from the left; in the United Kingdom, Brexit translated Euroskepticism into a historic rupture; and even Germany saw the entry of an anti-immigration populist right into national politics.
A key insight of the chapter is that European populists gained traction not merely by proposing policies but by validating emotions that liberal elites often tried to delegitimize. Pope Francis’s appeal to solidarity and leadership untainted by emotional manipulation is presented as morally serious but politically inadequate. Populists have been more effective because they tell anxious citizens that their fear is reasonable. They interpret economic insecurity, terrorism, migration, and cultural dislocation not as isolated problems requiring technical management but as converging threats demanding protection. Liberal Europe asks citizens to trust institutions, compromise, and transnational cooperation; populists promise security, clarity, and a recoverable sense of collective belonging.
Galston is careful, however, not to collapse contemporary populism into classical fascism. These movements do not typically reject elections or the language of democracy. Their danger lies elsewhere. They speak in the name of democracy while hollowing out liberalism from within. In that sense they are anti-pluralist rather than simply anti-democratic. They claim that only one segment of society truly counts as “the people,” and they treat rivals, minorities, dissidents, judges, journalists, or NGOs as illegitimate obstacles rather than fellow participants in a shared political order. Populism therefore appears both as a reaction to real failures of elite governance and as a direct threat to the institutional norms—rights, diversity, compromise, and lawful restraint—on which liberal democracy depends.
Hungary and Poland serve as the chapter’s most developed examples of this pattern. Both countries, after 1989, seemed to confirm the triumph of liberal democracy: rapid transitions to markets and elections, integration into NATO and the EU, and impressive aggregate economic gains. Yet those gains were distributed unevenly. Inflation, wage pressure, rural stagnation, and structural unemployment left many citizens feeling that the celebrated post-communist success story had bypassed them. Galston insists that the populist turn in these countries cannot be understood simply by citing backwardness or democratic immaturity. It emerged in societies that had, by many conventional measures, succeeded. The resentment came not from total failure but from the experience of exclusion within success.
Fidesz in Hungary and Law and Justice in Poland converted that resentment into a broad political program combining economic intervention, cultural conservatism, and nationalist majoritarianism. They offered not only material redress but moral reordering. In both cases, Christian identity, traditional family norms, and suspicion of cosmopolitan liberalism became central to the populist appeal. Refugees and migrants were cast as threats at once fiscal, cultural, and civilizational. Europe appeared not as a shield but as an intrusive force weakening the nation’s cohesion. Galston shows that this blend of welfare protection, anti-immigration politics, and national rebirth gives populism unusual reach: it can speak to material grievances without reducing politics to economics.
The chapter then turns from rhetoric to institutional consequences. Once in power, the Hungarian and Polish populists did not merely criticize liberal institutions; they moved to subordinate them. Courts lost independence, media freedom narrowed, civil society organizations were stigmatized as foreign agents, and the opposition was treated as suspect or unpatriotic. Orbán’s language of an “illiberal state” crystallizes the logic: the nation is not a field of competing individuals and groups but a substantive moral community whose unity must be organized and defended. Under that conception, pluralism itself begins to look like weakness, and institutional checks become obstacles to the authentic will of the nation. The European Union, Galston argues, looked strikingly feeble in response.
France offers a different version of the same challenge. The National Front, especially under Marine Le Pen, demonstrates how far-right populism can be normalized by strategic repositioning. Galston traces the party’s move from a marginal formation associated with colonial nostalgia and anti-Semitic stigma to a broader populist vehicle capable of attracting workers, the economically insecure, and voters disgusted with the established parties. Its three main enemies are Islam, globalism, and the French political class. That formulation lets the party combine cultural alarm, economic protectionism, and anti-establishment rhetoric while presenting itself as pragmatic rather than ideological. By borrowing selectively from both left and right, Le Pen transforms dissatisfaction with stagnation and insecurity into a challenge to the entire postwar party system.
The chapter closes by returning to the question of political identity. The EU assumed that economic interdependence would eventually generate a European demos. It did not. Identification with Europe remains strongest among the young, educated, mobile, and economically secure, while those who are older, poorer, less educated, or more rooted in national life remain more skeptical. Drawing on the idea of the nation as an “imagined community,” Galston argues that nationalism retains a power that Europe’s supranational institutions never matched. His conclusion is not that populist nationalism is justified, but that abstract transnationalism is no answer. In fact, it can intensify backlash. The durable antidote to anti-pluralist populism, he argues, must include a decent and responsible nationalism—one able to honor belonging and sovereignty without collapsing into nativism, homogeneity, or the demonization of internal enemies.
Chapter Five. Is Democracy at Risk in the United States?
Galston opens the fifth chapter with the shock of Brexit, which he reads not as a purely British anomaly but as a warning about the United States. Watching the BBC on the night of the referendum, he recognized in Britain’s upheaval the same resentments, social divisions, and political failures that were then propelling Donald Trump. Brexit becomes a diagnostic case. By beginning there, Galston can isolate the social mechanisms of contemporary populism before turning to the American version. The point is not that Britain and the United States are identical, but that they are being driven by homologous pressures: educational polarization, territorial inequality, cultural anxiety, distrust of elites, and demands for sovereignty.
The British case is especially useful because research clarified what actually drove the Leave vote. Education, Galston emphasizes, was the strongest single predictor. Higher education not only expands opportunity; it also tends to cultivate openness to diversity, innovation, and internationalism. Less educated voters, by contrast, are more likely to feel that control over their lives is slipping away and to favor order, authority, and bounded communities. Other variables reinforced the pattern: age, income, region, and occupational location all mattered. Older, poorer voters in smaller towns, rural areas, and manufacturing zones were far more likely to support Leave. The vote thus tracked not only class in the narrow sense but broader forms of social location and worldview.
Just as important, Galston rejects any explanation that reduces Brexit to economics alone. Immigration and sovereignty were decisive because they condensed multiple anxieties into a single political demand. Rapid immigration was experienced not only as labor-market competition but also as cultural disruption and loss of political control. Social networks mattered too: people whose lives brought them into contact with those from different places were more likely to favor remaining in Europe, while socially enclosed communities leaned toward exit. Leave voters were also more pessimistic about the future and more nostalgic about the past. They believed the country had deteriorated, that their children would do worse, and that mainstream politicians neither listened to nor represented them. In that environment, international cooperation came to look like surrender.
When the argument moves to the United States, Galston insists that the American populist surge arose from a distinct domestic combination of economic, social, and political dysfunction. Economically, the central fact is stagnation. Median household income peaked in 1999 and, for years afterward, failed to show meaningful growth. This stagnation was historically unusual and politically corrosive. It also interacted with geography. Metropolitan regions, especially large urban centers, recovered and prospered much more effectively than small towns and rural areas. Manufacturing losses, the concentration of new jobs in big cities, and the effects of trade and Chinese import competition deepened the perception that national growth was bypassing much of the country. The result was not only hardship but the conviction that prosperity had become selective.
Galston links that stagnation to a second wound: the erosion of the American Dream. Earlier generations could reasonably expect their children to do better than they had done. That expectation no longer seemed secure. Intergenerational mobility weakened, and the symbolic core of the American promise—progress across generations—began to fray. Here his analysis is subtle: economic disappointment did not automatically create populism, but it undermined the social confidence that keeps political frustrations from hardening into resentment. Once people no longer believe that effort will be rewarded or that the next generation will advance, they become much more willing to blame elites, institutions, outsiders, and historical change itself.
The chapter’s social analysis shows why the economic story was not sufficient. Since the late 1960s, American society has been divided by culture-war issues, but immigration gave these tensions a new organizing focus. Galston distinguishes several layers of concern. Some citizens feared direct economic competition from less-skilled immigrants. Others reacted to demographic transformation, especially after the post-1965 immigration regime changed the visible composition of the country. Still others experienced immigration through the lens of crime and terrorism, regardless of whether the empirical connection was strong. These fears were strongest outside the metropolitan zones where diversity had long been normal. For many voters, the issue was not simply border management but the feeling that the country they knew was slipping away.
Political dysfunction magnified these social and economic tensions. Galston describes a system in which polarization is no longer merely ideological disagreement but mutual hostility. Partisans increasingly dislike and distrust one another as people, not just as holders of opposing views. In a parliamentary system that would already be troubling; in the American constitutional system, with its multiple veto points and frequent divided government, it becomes crippling. Gridlock makes government appear incapable of solving core problems, and repeated failures of performance intensify the public belief that the system is corrupt, rigged, or indifferent. The consequence is a vicious cycle: poor performance fuels rage, rage fuels polarization, and polarization further reduces the system’s capacity to perform.
This makes the anti-elite component of American populism easier to understand. Galston notes that trust in expertise has been damaged by a long sequence of elite failures: Vietnam, Iraq, and the financial crisis are emblematic examples. Meanwhile, the winners of the meritocratic order clustered in media, finance, academia, and politics, visibly benefiting from globalization and the knowledge economy while often seeming blind to the costs paid by others. The contempt bundled into phrases like “flyover country” captures the emotional side of the divide. Populism in this setting is not just a rebellion against policy outcomes; it is also revenge against condescension. Ordinary citizens came to believe that elites had prospered from the new order while dismissing those displaced by it.
Galston’s portrait of Trump’s coalition is one of the most important parts of the chapter because it cuts across simplistic explanations. Trump did not win with a monolithic bloc of conventional conservatives. His most energized supporters were disproportionately less educated, lower income, distrustful of the system, favorable to higher taxes on the wealthy, and open to government benefits such as Medicaid. They were not uniformly pro-life or classic small-government Republicans. What united them was stronger anti-immigrant and ethnocentric sentiment, along with a belief that the system was stacked against people like them. The “diploma divide” emerges here as a defining reorganization of party politics. White voters without college degrees moved heavily toward the GOP, and many Obama-to-Trump switchers did so because identity issues—immigration, Muslims, race—became more salient than before.
Yet Galston resists a reduction of the 2016 result to pure racism or pure economics. He argues instead for an interaction effect. Economic insecurity made some voters more susceptible to narratives of threat, and those narratives were then organized around cultural and national markers. In good times, tribal impulses can remain muted because there is little need to assign blame. Under conditions of insecurity, however, and especially when security fears and rapid demographic change are added to economic disappointment, We/They thinking intensifies. Populism flourishes in precisely that environment because it provides a moral map of adversity: it identifies the people, the enemies, and the strong leader willing to defend the former against the latter.
The final section asks directly whether American democracy is in danger. Galston’s answer is cautious rather than alarmist. Public trust in government and other major institutions has been low for decades, and survey evidence suggests a troubling impatience with liberal-democratic restraints. Still, he argues that public discontent does not automatically translate into institutional collapse. American history contains repeated episodes in which fear, war, crisis, or executive ambition placed pressure on liberty, yet constitutional structures and political norms eventually reasserted themselves. The real tests come when courts block executive power, when national-security claims tempt presidents to defy legal limits, or when governments attack the press. So far, Galston concludes, American institutions had shown resilience. But that resilience should not breed complacency. Liberal democracy is not historical destiny; it survives only if citizens, parties, and institutions actively defend it.
Chapter Six. Liberal Democracy in America: What Is to Be Done?
The sixth chapter shifts from diagnosis to prescription. Galston begins by revisiting the postwar decades in order to explain why growth once produced broadly shared prosperity and why it no longer does. In the decades after World War II, the United States occupied an exceptional position. Foreign competitors were devastated, domestic production overwhelmingly supplied domestic consumption, unions remained strong, and government, labor, and capital could shape wages and prices within a relatively closed national economy. Under those conditions, productivity gains translated into rising wages and a growing middle class. Galston’s point is not nostalgic but analytical: many Americans came to think that growth naturally generated inclusion because they mistook a historically unusual arrangement for a permanent law of democratic capitalism.
That arrangement broke down under the combined pressure of globalization and technological change. Firms relocated production, automation reduced labor demand, private-sector unions weakened, and corporate fortunes became less tied to the wellbeing of particular American communities. The labor market hollowed out, with more opportunities at the highly skilled top and the low-wage service bottom, but fewer stable middle-income jobs in between. At the same time, the top 1 percent surged ahead and executive compensation became increasingly detached from ordinary wages. Galston does not dwell on philosophical disputes about inequality for their own sake. His practical claim is clearer: conditions for less educated workers and much of the middle class worsened, and no serious path back to democratic stability exists unless public policy pushes much more aggressively against these structural headwinds.
That is why he makes accelerating growth the first imperative. Since 2000, U.S. growth has been dramatically weaker than during the second half of the twentieth century, and weak growth makes it much harder to restore incomes, mobility, and confidence. Galston does not pretend there is a single magic formula, but he identifies broad priorities: expand labor-force participation, increase both public and private investment, and remove regulatory burdens whose costs now exceed their social benefits. The tone matters here. He is not arguing for growth because it solves every problem or because material progress is the whole of politics. He is arguing that without stronger growth, democratic leaders will lack the economic room needed to repair the social bargain that liberal democracy requires.
Still, growth alone is not enough, because the experience of recent decades shows that market outcomes do not automatically diffuse gains. Galston therefore makes “sharing the fruits of growth” the chapter’s second major task. The centerpiece is full employment. The late 1990s serve as his model because that was the last moment when the entire income distribution improved together. Full employment strengthens workers’ bargaining position, draws marginalized people back into the workforce, and shifts income away from profits and toward wages. He treats this not only as an economic preference but as a moral principle. Work gives structure, status, and social connection; prolonged detachment from employment corrodes self-respect, families, communities, and trust in institutions. Absent extraordinary emergencies, he argues, full employment should stand near the center of economic policymaking.
The next step is to reconnect productivity and pay. Galston favors policies that encourage profit-sharing, worker ownership, and other arrangements through which employees receive a meaningful share of productivity gains rather than watching those gains flow almost exclusively to executives and shareholders. He also stresses that this is not just about fairness. Demand depends on income. When wages stagnate, families compensate temporarily through more household labor or more debt, but neither strategy is durable. The weak post-crisis recovery reflected, in part, the fact that households had to repair their balance sheets while wage growth remained inadequate. If markets do not generate higher wages on their own, he argues, public policy should alter incentives so that rising productivity once again supports rising living standards.
His tax argument follows the same logic. There is, in his view, little justification for a code that often treats unearned income more favorably than wages and salaries. Preferential treatment for capital gains and related forms of income disproportionately benefits those already well served by markets. Galston is not hostile to investment, but he wants tax advantages tied to genuinely productive activity—new capital formation, start-ups, business expansion—rather than speculative gains from existing assets. This section is part of a broader attempt to push liberal democracy away from a political economy that rewards ownership and financial engineering much more generously than work, effort, and contribution.
Galston then widens the lens from class to territory. The gap between metropolitan centers and rural or small-town America is not an incidental feature of the new economy; it is one of the core drivers of populist resentment. Dense urban regions concentrate talent, capital, and innovation, while many peripheral regions lose jobs, people, and confidence. Public policy cannot erase that difference entirely, but it can soften it. Better transportation can connect smaller communities to urban opportunity, and universal broadband can do for the twenty-first century what rural electrification did for the twentieth. The political point is as important as the economic one: when entire regions feel abandoned, national solidarity erodes.
A particularly strong section examines the tension between present demands and future obligations in market democracies. Liberal democracies promise security, but efforts to reduce insecurity can also impede innovation and long-term growth. Workers, incumbents, and regulated industries all seek protections against disruption; aging populations demand expensive social insurance; consumers prefer immediate comfort; and the high private cost of raising children contributes to demographic stagnation. Galston does not treat these as signs that democracy should be abandoned. Rather, he argues that modern democracies must strike a difficult balance among past promises, present needs, and future investment. They must protect citizens against shocks without sacrificing the innovation, infrastructure, and family support systems on which long-run prosperity depends. That balance, he suggests, will require asking more of the wealthy.
From there the chapter moves beyond economics to the identity questions populists exploit so effectively. Immigration is central. Galston recognizes that concern about immigration can reflect labor-market fears, pressure on public services, worries about terrorism, unease with rapid demographic change, and anxieties about sovereignty. He refuses the easy liberal move of dismissing these concerns as mere prejudice. A democratic politics that hopes to contain populism must acknowledge that citizens care about borders, legal order, assimilation, and national identity. His proposed approach is relatively restrictionist in tone but not nativist in principle: place greater weight on economic contribution, encourage English fluency and civic knowledge, and pair recognition of the rule-of-law problem with a humane settlement for those already present illegally. The crucial political insight is that moral denunciation is a poor substitute for policy.
Political reform is the next domain. Galston argues that many Western democracies suffer from versions of the same complaint: power is concentrated at the center, wealth shapes decisions, insiders manipulate rules, and ordinary citizens conclude that corruption is endemic. In the United States, this interacts with polarization, gerrymandering, geographic sorting, and primary systems that reward the most intense activists rather than compromise-minded majorities. He favors selective devolution, shorter and less money-driven campaigns where possible, a broader attack on rent-seeking, forms of worker ownership and public return on publicly funded innovation, and procedural reforms that make government more effective. At the same time, he resists fantasies of a frictionless democracy. Some “veto points” block necessary action, but the same constitutional devices also protect liberty against concentrations of power. The challenge is to recover effectiveness without destroying restraint.
The chapter ends on culture, status, and strategy. Higher education has become a deep moral and social divide, not just an income difference. Educated elites are more open to diversity and expertise, but when those differences harden into social disdain, populist resentment intensifies. Galston’s response is not sentimental reconciliation. It is a demand that elites show respect, stop sneering at “flyover country,” and recognize that nationalism cannot simply be ceded to the populist right. Citizens want leaders who take their country seriously as a morally meaningful community. That creates a strategic dilemma for the center-left: whether to build around an emerging coalition of educated professionals, minorities, and the young, or whether to revise some of its cultural positions in order to reconnect with working-class voters alienated by immigration, identity politics, and national decline. Galston does not offer an easy synthesis. He ends by arguing that liberals and progressives must finally engage, openly and seriously, with immigration, nationalism, and identity rather than pretending that economics alone can settle the argument.
Chapter 7 — Democratic Leadership
Chapter 7 examines one of the book’s most important tensions: democracy needs leadership, but democratic societies are often psychologically suspicious of leaders. Galston begins by rejecting the shallow opposition between populist strongmen and technocratic guardians and instead placing the problem in a longer tradition. The real issue, he argues, is not whether leadership is compatible with democratic principle. It is. The deeper problem is that democracy fosters habits of mind and feeling that can make the exercise of good leadership unusually difficult.
To frame the issue, Galston turns to Aristotle. Political rule, unlike command in the army or the household, operates among free and equal persons and therefore depends on persuasion rather than simple obedience. That means leadership in democracies is inseparable from rhetoric, character, emotion, and public argument. The qualities that make a leader persuasive are partly shaped by the regime in which he or she operates. Democratic citizens prize liberty, resent superiority, and often tolerate diverse ways of life, so democratic leadership must speak in a voice that resonates with those traits.
Galston then engages John Kane and Haig Patapan, who argue that democracy cannot fully justify leadership because equals have no innate right to rule one another. He reconstructs their argument carefully and then rejects its first premise. Leadership, he says, does not require any natural right to rule. In a democracy, leadership becomes legitimate through authorization by the people and remains justified insofar as it serves democratic ends. Capacity matters, but ability alone never confers rightful authority. Only public consent does.
This leads him to a qualified defense of elections as a mechanism that combines popular will with the selection of talent. Galston notes that elections have an aristocratic tendency in Aristotle’s sense, because they allow citizens to compare candidates and choose those thought most capable. He invokes Hamilton and Jefferson to show that the American founders expected republican institutions to elevate the able and the virtuous without abandoning the principle of popular sovereignty. Still, elections can fail. Democratic publics are capable of poor judgment, passion can overwhelm prudence, and no institutional design can fully eliminate the risk of serious mistakes.
The chapter’s next major move is to distinguish democratic principle from democratic psychology. Populism, in this psychological sense, consists of leveling hostility to expertise, animus against hierarchy, suspicion of power, mistrust of representation, impatience with opacity, and a demand for constant accountability. Galston treats these impulses with some sympathy, because they arise from real dangers in political life. Yet he argues that, pushed too far, they turn into a culture of suspicion that makes effective leadership nearly impossible and ultimately undermines the public’s own interests.
The American case shows how this works. Citizens in a large representative republic cannot govern directly, so they must rely on agents who inevitably possess discretion and whose interests can diverge from their own. That gap naturally produces mistrust. Galston adds that modern government cannot function without discretionary judgment, because no legal code can anticipate every contingency. Attempts to eliminate discretion by multiplying rules and procedures do not remove power; they entangle institutions, expand bureaucracy, and weaken the capacity to act. A democracy that cannot trust anyone enough to govern will eventually fail at governing itself.
But populist resentment is only half the story. Galston then turns to the opposite danger: elitist arrogance. Exceptionally talented individuals may come to believe that their gifts entitle them to rule and that ordinary citizens have no standing to judge them. The chapter’s examples are revealing. Shakespeare’s Coriolanus despises the need to solicit the people’s favor, while Douglas MacArthur, for all his brilliance, pushed against civilian control because of his faith in his own judgment. Galston’s point is that the contemptuous expert or heroic commander can be just as dangerous to democratic order as the demagogue.
Good democratic leaders therefore need both capability and legitimacy. They must know how to govern wisely, but they must also keep seeking and deserving public authorization. Galston says such leaders need first to understand and articulate the public culture of their community. He points to Martin Luther King Jr., Franklin Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan as figures who spoke in ways that connected political purpose to a shared civic language. Leadership in a democracy is not only administrative competence; it is the ability to summon a people by appealing to what they already, at some level, recognize as their common inheritance.
Persuasion also requires judgment about timing and circumstance. Galston uses Earl Warren’s management of the Court before Brown v. Board of Education as an example of leadership that sought unanimity in order to maximize legitimacy. He then develops Abraham Lincoln’s handling of the Emancipation Proclamation as a deeper case of political timing. Lincoln had to weigh constitutional constraints, foreign policy risks, military realities, party pressures, and public opinion. Galston’s conclusion is that statesmanship often lies in moving neither too soon nor too late, but at the moment when principle and feasibility can be joined.
The chapter then shifts from skills to virtues. Chief among them is democratic humility: the conviction that power is legitimate only through the will of the people, not through one’s own superiority. That humility is hard to sustain because democratic politics tempts leaders either to flatter the public cynically or to withdraw from it contemptuously. In crises, the burden becomes even heavier. Statesmanship demands decisions under conditions of moral ambiguity, where private morality and public responsibility do not align neatly. Galston illustrates this with Obama’s response to the financial crisis, where the perceived needs of system preservation clashed sharply with popular demands for punishment.
The final test of democratic leadership, Galston argues, is moral restraint. Leaders must be willing to forgo power if keeping it requires unacceptable compromise, yet they cannot survive politically by saying every hard truth in the bluntest possible way. This produces the chapter’s concluding paradox. Roosevelt’s maneuvering before World War II may have been defensible, but it still carried moral and political costs. John McCain’s immigration stance showed a different kind of democratic courage: risking ambition for principle. In the end, Galston insists that democratic citizens do sometimes reward candor and conviction. Trust, once established, becomes one of the greatest assets a leader can possess; when absent, even experience and expertise may count for little.
Chapter 8 — The Incompleteness of Liberal Democracy
Chapter 8 deepens the book’s theoretical account of populism by asking why liberal democracy is so vulnerable to it. Galston starts with a blunt proposition: populism is not always antidemocratic, but it is always anti-pluralist. Its vision of politics divides society into two morally saturated camps, the pure people and the corrupt elite, and it calls forth a leader who claims to embody the people against their enemies. That dyadic moral drama is fundamentally at odds with liberal democracy, which depends on the recognition that society contains multiple legitimate interests, identities, and viewpoints.
From there, Galston explains what liberal democracy asks of citizens. It requires respect for evidence, expertise, law, compromise, and representation. It also requires toleration in a demanding sense: not merely enduring people we like, but permitting the public expression of beliefs and forms of life we may strongly dislike. Liberal citizens must resist the impulse to treat opponents as evil, must keep particular loyalties subordinate to wider civic principles, and must accept a political ethos that prizes peace and security more than heroic struggle. These are genuine achievements, but they are not psychologically easy.
That difficulty is the chapter’s core theme. Liberal democracy, Galston argues, is incomplete because it never fully satisfies durable human longings. People often want more solidarity, intensity, drama, and moral clarity than liberal societies can offer. They do not naturally incline toward abstraction, restraint, or coexistence with difference. Populism becomes powerful because it gives public expression to desires that liberalism must discipline: tribal loyalty, moral simplification, righteous antagonism, and the thrill of common struggle.
Galston explores this first through the problem of passion. Modern thinkers often hoped that commerce and self-interest would tame destructive impulses, but history never justified that hope. He recalls the antibourgeois romanticism that greeted World War I and fed the interwar authoritarian imagination. The point is not that war is admirable, but that danger, sacrifice, and high-stakes collective purpose answer to something real in human beings. A politics organized only around comfort, prosperity, and private gain leaves a residue of dissatisfaction that illiberal movements can exploit.
He then shows that liberal freedom itself is ambivalent. Freedom brings dignity, but also anxiety and burden. Individual responsibility can feel heavy, while hierarchy and submission can feel psychologically relieving. Galston uses thinkers such as Erich Fromm and Ernst Jünger to suggest that authoritarian temptations arise not only from coercion imposed from above but also from desires generated within individuals who would rather escape uncertainty by handing responsibility over to a commanding structure. Liberal democracy therefore contends not just with external enemies but with impulses rooted in ordinary experience.
A related tension lies between universalism and particularism. Liberal principles push toward equal concern for all human beings, regardless of birthplace or inherited identity. Yet political communities also understand themselves as peoples with claims to self-determination. These two moral languages can collide, especially around borders, refugees, and national membership. Galston refuses to dissolve the conflict. He presents it as one of the standing contradictions of liberal democracy: equality can refer both to persons and to peoples, and the two do not always point toward the same policy conclusion.
The chapter then moves to tribal sentiment. Human beings, Galston suggests, are predisposed to trust and favor those who seem like them. Populism thrives because it legitimates precisely those preferences that liberal-democratic norms try to contain. When populist leaders mock the constraints of respectable speech, many followers experience relief, even exhilaration. Prejudices that elites try to repress are no longer forced underground; they become badges of authenticity. Once scarcity or danger enters the picture, mere difference can harden into a friend-enemy distinction, and political life becomes more emotionally satisfying precisely by becoming more dangerous.
Galston is careful, however, not to reduce populism to irrationality. Liberal democracies generate real grievances. They combine moral equality with economic inequality, and when wealth appears detached from the common good, anger is justified. Status inequality may be even more explosive. Modern meritocratic societies confer prestige on educational and professional success, leaving many others feeling not simply poorer but dishonored. That is why appeals to expertise often backfire. They are heard not as neutral claims about competence but as assertions of superiority by people who already dominate the cultural hierarchy.
He next considers frustration with liberal-democratic procedure itself. Representation is inevitably imperfect, government is slow, divided institutions force bargaining, and constitutional restraints stop majorities from doing whatever they want. Even freedom of speech has psychic costs, because it requires living alongside expressions and behaviors one would prefer to suppress. Liberal democracy thus asks citizens to renounce many instinctive satisfactions: immediate victory, moral purity, decisive action, and the silencing of opponents. Populists gain strength by promising release from those renunciations.
The final section turns to the relation between markets and democracy. Galston argues that market economies help sustain liberal democracy by creating prosperity and by preserving a sphere of activity not wholly subject to political control. But markets also generate inequality, and once inequality passes a certain threshold, it destabilizes democracy by shrinking the middle class and converting economic power into political power. Liberal democracy therefore cannot simply celebrate markets; it must periodically discipline them in the name of democratic balance.
He closes by arguing that no final settlement is possible. The tensions between liberty and solidarity, equality and hierarchy, action and constraint, state and market are not problems to be solved once and for all. They are enduring conditions of liberal-democratic life. What gives liberal democracy its advantage over rival regimes is not completeness or inner harmony, but adaptability. Its survival depends on the capacity to rethink inherited assumptions, devise new institutional responses to technological and social change, and reinvent itself before its incompletenesses are turned against it by anti-pluralist forces.
See also
- galston_anger_fear_domination_resumo — Galston’s companion volume on the dark passions (anger, fear, humiliation, domination) that liberal theory forgot; where Anti-Pluralism maps the structural logic of populist politics, Anger, Fear, Domination supplies the psychology of why it works
- thymos — Galston’s Chapter 8 argument that liberal democracy fails to satisfy longings for solidarity, drama, and recognition is the institutional-level version of the thymic deficit that the vault traces through Brazilian politics
- norris_inglehart_cultural_backlash_resumo — Norris and Inglehart’s empirical evidence for the cultural backlash thesis is the data counterpart to Galston’s theoretical claim that populism cannot be reduced to economic grievance
- mounk_people_vs_democracy_resumo — Mounk’s separation of “illiberal democracy” from “undemocratic liberalism” is the framework Galston engages and complicates in Chapter 3, arguing that populism threatens both halves
- A Economia Não É Suficiente — Thymos, Incorporação e o Erro Materialista da Esquerda — The vault’s own essay on why redistribution without recognition fails maps directly onto Galston’s central diagnostic claim that economic repair is necessary but insufficient
- lilla_once_and_future_liberal_resumo — Lilla’s diagnosis of identity liberalism as a strategic dead end for the center-left converges with Galston’s Chapter 6 argument that liberals must re-engage with nationalism and community rather than ceding those to populists