"What is the story of democracy in our time? Not long ago the Western formula of democracy and free markets seemed unassailable. When the Cold War ended in 1989, the new “great game” played by diplomats, politicians, and intellectuals alike became to promote and report on the further spread of democracy about the globe. The tendency was to assume that democracy was working well still at home. The war on terror and the financial crisis have more recently framed those assumptions in a less comfortable light. By the time of the uprisings that swept across the Arab world in 2011, the dimming status of the liberal democratic formula was clear. Whatever was being demanded on the streets of Cairo it was not Western-style liberal democracy. Nor was a liberal democratic form of government any longer something that could be “built” on behalf of these nations, as the United States had attempted in the previous decade in Iraq. In the aftermath of 2011, as Syria imploded and Islamic State dug in its bloodied claws, the former call to democratic arms of the pundits in Washington was replaced by a faint piccolo whistling about “democracy in retreat.” From the point of view of the West it was not long before the high drama of the Arab Spring was drowned out by a pervasive and growing cacophony of discontent at home. The former narrative of democracy’s historical spread has now been firmly replaced by one of its crisis and decline. “Never has there been such a thin line between a positive outlook for democracy and the chance that it might go off the rails,” wrote the French historian Pierre Rosanvallon in 2008. “What’s gone wrong with democracy?” asked London’s The Economist a few years later in 2014. Neither were looking across the Mediterranean to Tunisia or Algeria, but home to the disaffected banlieus of Paris, to the US Congress and the European Union. The concerns over 4 million British voters, who in 2016 signed a petition demanding repeal of the country’s recent referendum on “Brexit,” or of those dumbfounded by the election of Donald J. Trump to the White House later the same year, revealed that sense of anxiety to be spreading. “Democracy has survived the twentieth century by the skin of its teeth,” observed Arthur Schlesinger Jr. presciently at the end of the millennium. “It will not enjoy a free ride through the century to come.” In recent years Western democracy has indeed come under threat; the basic right of citizens to habeas corpus has been pared back after centuries of struggle to flesh it out. Distrust in politics has grown. Foreign government have been shown to have interfered in national elections. Civil liberties, including the right to privacy in the home, have been openly infringed. The growing power of political lobbies has given moneyed interests undue influence over policymaking, and has endowed a new class of politician with the ability not only to fundamentally misunderstand their constituents but to be rewarded for this. Socioeconomic inequality, which for much of the postwar era had been warded off by the welfare state, has returned."