Luce, Edward. The Retreat of Western Liberalism. London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2017. 226 pp.

The paradox of liberalism, ultimately, is that it isn’t. And Edward Luce’s latest book, The Retreat of Western Liberalism, is a perfect synecdoche of the entire problem. Despite its grand title, Retreat was clearly written in a moment of cathartic anguish following Donald Trump’s victory in the American presidential elections of November 2016, and consequently cleaves dearly to that moment. As such, it presents a limited yet sharp analysis of the problems besetting American – and perhaps, to a lesser extent, Western – liberalism and offers some preliminary solutions. This introspection is certainly a welcome development for liberal refugees on the centre and right who were feeling more and more alienated by the recent tone and politics of the Democratic party.

Luce divides his book into four sections. The first explains the impact of globalisation and technology on Western economies; the second explores the effect these corporate and international forces have had on domestic politics – I suppose Britain may, after all, be considered as the first US state; the third part of the book follows from the first and second in considering the loss of Western hegemony and its repercussions; finally, the fourth segment concludes with some suggestions towards a resuscitation of the Western liberal project.

Much of what Luce pontificates on, however, has to some degree been covered in the thousand and one opinion pieces that have flooded newspapers since 8 November last year, and this latest book-length treatment of the subject has little that is particularly new or noteworthy. However, the greater length allows for a fuller exploration and contextualisation of the materialist failure of liberalism. In this, Retreat does not disappoint – the pace is brisk, the concepts are simple, and the language clean. Luce is adept at deploying powerful anecdotes to persuade readers of his message, my favourite being when Henry Ford takes his union leader, Walter Reuther, around a new factory floor. Ford points at the robots in his factory and quips: “How will you get union dues from them?” Reuther replied: “How will you get them to buy your cars?”

Luce leans heavily – one might say solely – on economics to explain the erosion of liberalism in America and the West. Increasing unemployment, falling wages, and inflation have fuelled starker inequality and impoverished the middle class. According to the Toil Index, in 1950 it took a labourer 45 hours per month to earn enough to pay his monthly rent; a generation later, it had edged up to 56 hours. Today, it is up to 101 hours. To make matters worse, liberal identity politics has left the white-majority bourgeoisie feeling neglected by their leaders in lean times. It is these disgruntled masses that have turned their backs on the liberal establishment that has failed them. As Daniel Bell once wrote, economic growth is the secular religion of advancing industrial societies. Luce adds, “We are taught to think our democracies are held together by values. Our faith in history fuels that myth. But liberal democracy’s strongest glue is economic growth... the West’s souring mood is about the psychology of dashed expectations rather than the decline in material comforts.”

A materialist explanation does clarify the rightward drift of the electorate to some extent, but values, beliefs, and world views – the sort of stuff Luce only ephemerally alludes to – is exactly what has made Western liberalism blind to the rot within it and what makes Retreat a smaller representation of the larger whole. The inability to understand how the world might look from a different vantage point is the ultimate failure of Western liberalism as well as this book.

Non-Western readers will be jarred by Luce’s grasp of world history, especially when he suggests that the Raj “gave benighted lower-caste Indians the chance to read and write” or “protected upper-caste widows from sati” – as if the purpose of the Raj was to save upper-caste widows and the lower castes! According to Luce, “Europe’s economic success was chiefly driven by technological superiority rather than by a fit of immoral looting.” What is given a miss is that it was the superior technology that facilitated the immoral looting.

Luce’s view that China “rarely sought to export its model by force or colonise other lands” is another googly but one that is quickly forgotten when he absurdly suggests that the Chinese invasion of India in October 1962 was merely Mao Zedong attempting to rectify China’s century of humiliation – not even the Chinese Communist Party could expect a better narrative of history. In Luce’s defence, it is not just Asian history he seems to have trouble with. “Sparta opted for war with Athens and lost,” we are informed. Anyone with such a poor grasp of history should not be allowed anywhere near a stylus, quill, or keyboard.

Despite these ultimately minor – as far as they affect the main argument – shortcomings, Luce presents a persuasive case for why liberals have abandoned their faith. Liberalism has indeed retreated – but more by apostasy in its ranks rather than the swelling numbers counted among opposite ideologies. It is tempting to see Retreat as a disappointment for its failure to seize the opportunity to ask the really big questions about modernity and liberalism in an era of the “rise of the Rest”, but to do so would only be to fault Luce for his book the way I would have written it.

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