Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency

"This book reflects all of the bad things that have gone on in the last 10 years. That includes the rise of Russia and China as consolidated authoritarian states. China doesn’t make any apologies, it doesn’t pretend to hold elections like Russia does, it simply says the Communist Party represents China and it’s going to rule regardless. And it’s been very successful, both economically and in terms of political stability. Russia, which looked like it might be heading towards democracy back in the early 2000s, has made a clear turn, under Putin, not just towards authoritarian government, but also a very aggressive foreign policy. It has occupied the territory of Georgia and Ukraine and Moldova, it has tried to interfere in the politics of the United States and Britain and a lot of other democratic countries. It sent troops to Venezuela. So that has changed. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But I think that Larry would point to the rise of populist nationalism as an equally grave threat. In a sense, we’ve always been dealing with these external threats. In the 20th century there were very powerful authoritarian countries. Today, the threat is really an internal one that was captured by the January 6, 2021 riot, where pro-Trump protesters occupied the US Congress . Larry wrote the second book, Ill Winds, before that happened, but I think that it would simply confirm the kinds of anti-democratic trends that he saw arising in the United States. And that, in a way, caps a very bad turn in which people have lost confidence in basic democratic institutions, both on the right and on the left. The real question is about modernization theory because China disproves that social science theory. China is already past the per capita income point that South Korea and Taiwan hit in the 1980s when they became democracies. And if that theory is true, there should be greater grassroots demand for democracy in China, because a lot of Chinese are very rich, they surf the internet, they purchase stuff on Alibaba, they communicate with each other using the Chinese versions of social media, and they’re increasingly well educated. But there doesn’t seem to be much enthusiasm for democracy in China right now, people seem to be pretty satisfied with the regime that’s given them stability and jobs and economic prosperity. And so it seems to me that we need to question the underlying theory. I’m not arguing that it is. I do think that they have long-term weaknesses in both their economic model and in their political model. However, I think in terms of the theories that have been guiding Western policy, we really need to rethink whether a richer China is going to be a friendlier or a more democratic China. In Bill Clinton’s day, that was the theory, that we could engage with China, we could trade with it, we could invest in it, because as China got richer, it would be more like us, it would become more liberal. And in fact, since the rise of Xi Jinping in 2013, just the opposite has happened. It’s become a more aggressive, more authoritarian country. And that’s the reality we’ve got to deal with. I think I agree with him. Polarization in the United States and in other countries has a lot of different sources. It has economic roots; it has cultural roots. Nobody would deny that. But political institutions also make a big difference. And in the United States, as in Britain, we’ve got a plurality voting system or, as it’s sometimes called, a ‘first past the post’ system. In Britain, in one of Tony Blair’s elections, he got less than 40% of the popular vote, and yet he got a very powerful majority in Parliament, because his vote was spread out over enough districts that he got the seats. It creates a winner-take-all politics, because winning that majority becomes an important source of power. In the United States, it’s made worse by our presidential system, where a winner inherently takes all—I mean, you can only have one president, you can’t have a coalition presidency. And I think that that has been one of the factors that has made American politics so bitter and divided. Ranked-choice voting was introduced first by Australia. It allows people to rank order their preferences while keeping single member districts. The theory is that you would then avoid something like what happened in the United States in 2000 in Bush v. Gore, where George Bush lost the popular vote and would have lost but for a third-party candidate, Ralph Nader. Nader was to the left of Al Gore, and a lot of Gore’s potential voters instead voted for him and threw the election to Bush. Under ranked-choice voting, that wouldn’t have happened because all those Nader voters would have put Gore as their second choice, and he would have won a clear majority. It’s an example of how a change in the institutional rules may create a more multi-party and therefore more representative form of government."