Berlin would have warned us against hubris and intolerance, but also against fatalism. In the battle to come, history is on no one’s side. The outcome of this struggle over who owns the meaning of freedom will come down, as it always does, to the eternal question that decides history’s shape: who is prepared to fight hardest for what they believe.
The populist revolt against mainstream politics highlights tensions between majority rule and rule of law that are intrinsic to any version of democracy worth defending. Provided these questions are debated and resolved within the institutions of democracy itself, then the conflict is not a negative phenomenon, but a positive one, a sign of the inherent vitality of democracy.
The current populist challenges in western liberal democracies should not be seen as evidence of their decline, but as a constituent part. The history of democracy shows us that such challenges enable democracy’s growth and evolution.
We can begin to understand why the barbarians were a kind of solution. They forced us to remember what freedom was and to imagine what it could be once again. Now we face a new challenge: how to conserve liberal freedoms once our citizens feel safe enough to take them for granted.
