Losing Faith in Liberal Democracy
One consequence of the current economic trends is growing pessimism throughout the high-income world. Half of all Europeans believe that future generations will suffer worse economic conditions than they did, according to the Pew Research Center. In France, the pessimistic view predominates by seven to one. A pessimistic trend is also marked in the usually more upbeat societies of Australia (64 percent), Canada (67 percent), and the United States (57 percent). Overall, Pew found that 56 percent of residents in advanced economies believe their children will do worse than they did.26
Pessimism is also growing in East Asia, which has been the economic dynamo of the current era. In Japan, a full three-quarters of those polled expect things to be worse for the next generation, and that expectation also predominates in such successful countries as Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea.27 Many young people in China have reason for pessimism: in 2017, eight million college graduates entered the job market to find they could only earn salaries that they might have gotten by going to work in a factory straight out of high school.28
Another sign of pessimism is declining birth rates, particularly in the high-income countries. In Europe as well as Japan, and even in the once relatively fecund United States, fertility rates are nearing historic lows, even though young women state a wish to have more children.29 This demographic stagnation, another throwback to the Middle Ages, has various explanations, including women’s high levels of participation in the workforce and a desire for more leisure time. Other reasons are economic, including a shortage of affordable family housing. Liberal capitalism in its heyday built large stretches of affordable housing for the upwardly mobile middle and working classes, but the new feudalism is creating a world where fewer and fewer people can afford to own homes.30 A trend of diminishing expectations has weakened support for liberal capitalism even in solidly democratic countries, particularly among younger people.31 Far more than older generations, they are losing faith in democracy, not only in the United States but also in Sweden, Australia, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and New Zealand. People born in the 1970s and 1980s are less strongly opposed to such undemocratic assertions of power as a military coup than are those born in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.32
Today there is a turning away from democratic liberalism around the world. Authoritarian leaders are consolidating power in countries that previously appeared to be on a liberalizing path—Xi Jinping in China, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey. In more democratic countries, we can see a new longing for a strongman—such as the bombastic and often crude Donald Trump, as well as equivalents in Europe, some of them more functionally authoritarian. Many people who are losing faith in the prospects of liberty look for a paternalistic protector instead. Authoritarian leaders often rise by evoking the imagined glories of the past and stoking resentments both old and new. At the end of the Cold War, the world seemed to be traveling on a natural “arc” to a more democratic future, but today’s new world order has instead become a promising springtime for dictators.33
Peasant Rebellions
The feudal order did not go unchallenged in the Middle Ages: periodically there were peasant uprisings, sometimes led by religious dissidents. Could we see a kind of uprising from within the Third Estate today? The modern yeomanry can still mount a resistance, but the expanding “serf” class, without property or a stake in the system, might prove far more dangerous to the dominant orders.
Like the revolutionaries of 1789, many in today’s Third Estate are disgusted by the hauteur and hypocrisy of the upper classes. In prerevolutionary times, French aristocrats and top clerics preached Christian charity while indulging in gluttony, sexual adventurism, and lavish spending. Today, many in the struggling middle and working classes see the well-to-do displaying their environmental piety by paying “green” indulgences through carbon credits and other virtue-signaling devices, while these “enlightened” policies impose extraordinarily high energy and housing costs on the less well off.34 Alienated elements of the middle and working classes are responding with what might be likened to a modern peasants’ rebellion. It can be seen in a series of angry votes and protests against the policies championed by the clerisy and oligarchy—on climate change, global trade, and migration. This anger was expressed in the election of President Trump, in the support for Brexit, and in the rise of populist parties across Europe.35
Perhaps nowhere is the rebellion more evident than in France: a clear majority of French people regard globalization as a threat, while most executives, many trained at elite schools, see it as an “opportunity.”36 In an echo of 1789, the so-called gilets jaunes (yellow vests) demonstrated against higher gas taxes in the winter of 2018–19. The protests began in small towns, but then moved into the Parisian suburbs.37
In the United States, restiveness among the Third Estate has prompted discussion among the oligarchs and the clerisy about expanding the scope of the welfare state, with subsidies and direct cash payments for the masses, in the hope of staving off rebellion by those who no longer see a possibility of improving their own lot. But will that be enough?38
Is a Feudal Future Inevitable?
The return to feudalism is not necessarily inexorable. To change the course we are on, we first need to understand and acknowledge what is happening. We possess the advantages brought by centuries of liberal capitalism and free intellectual inquiry; we have knowledge of the past feudal era, and of what democratic capitalism achieved. We do not have to be like the proverbial frog slowly boiling, unaware of its fate.
Reversing the slide into a neo-feudal order will require the development of a new political paradigm. The current “progressive” approach to “social justice,” with its attachment to a powerful central government, will only strengthen the clerisy by vesting more authority in the “expert” class. On the other hand, the devotees of market fundamentalism, refusing to acknowledge the dangers of oligarchic power and the harm being done to the middle and working classes, might further a political trajectory that threatens the viability of capitalism itself. Some prominent business executives now recognize the problem and seek ways to remedy it, but there is much less awareness or concern among market ideologues on the right.39
A new perspective is needed, but it can emerge only when the reality of an emergent neo-feudalism is widely acknowledged and its dangers understood. There is still time to challenge this threat to liberal values. “A man may be led by fate,” wrote the great Soviet novelist Vasily Grossman, “but he can refuse to follow.”40 The future course of history is never inevitable if we retain the will to shape it.
CHAPTER 2
The Enduring Allure of Feudalism
Modern thinking tends to cast the Middle Ages as a benighted and backward time, although some historians regard that common perception as exaggerated and unfair. By the same token, feudalism is widely seen as a retrograde form of social and political organization, but it developed for a reason, to fill pressing needs of the time. As Roman governance dissolved, it left a power vacuum. Slowly, a new elite grew, and a new system of power relations that would last in some form for a millennium or more in some places.1 Its persistence suggests that some version of feudalism could still have an appeal in modern times.
Feudalism in the Middle Ages varied from one place to another, but everywhere it centered on a distinct social hierarchy, the submission of inferiors to superiors, and restricted mobility for the lower classes—the vast majority of the population. Property was mostly consolidated into large manors. The urban middle classes dwindled as towns declined, and the independent peasantry mostly descended into serfdom. Large landowners took on public functions—justice, taxation, military—and offered protection to their dependent workers against the threat