![]() ![]() a panorama of the unravelling world order as riveting as any beach read. concise, accessible and valuable work.” -Lawrence J. Luce offers a useful wake-up call to elites, urging them to focus on the very real struggles of America’s besieged middle class before we all lose the freedom and democracy we cherish. A compendium of telling anecdotes that enrich our understanding of a long-term trend. While the rich enjoy greater opulence, living and working among themselves in isolated enclaves, half to two-thirds of Westerners have been ‘treading water-at best-for a generation’ as globalization and robotics have combined to limit wages and eliminate jobs. Luce devotes much of his book to why this global rebellion is happening, and why now. “In The Retreat of Western Liberalism, he warns that Trumpism could prove less an accident than a portent in the United States and across the West. ![]() The West faces many problems, and Luce outlines them vividly.” -Fareed Zakaria, New York Times Book Review Throughout, one is struck by his command of the material and the activity of his prose-he is unsparing in his condemnation of the elites who didn’t see this coming. Luce writes in fluid prose, moving from a telling statistic to a striking quotation. To understand the nature of this crisis, we could not find a better guide than Edward Luce’s The Retreat of Western Liberalism. “Many around the globe sense a systemic crisis. Some of what ails the West is within our power to fix.’ Doing so means rejecting complacency about democracy and our system’s resilience, and ‘understanding exactly how we got here.’ Luce’s book is one good place to start.” -Michiko Kakutani, New York Times And in this new book, he lucidly expounds on the erosion of the West’s middle classes, the dysfunction among its political and economic elites and the consequences for America and the world. ![]() In his prescient 2012 book, Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent, Luce uncannily anticipated the politics of resentment and the bitter fights over immigration that would fuel ‘Brexit’ and last year’s American election. Timely and informed, providing an important overview of the dynamics in an increasingly interconnected and fragmented planet. Unless the West can rekindle an economy that produces gains for the majority of its people, its political liberties may be doomed.Ĭombining on-the-ground reporting with intelligent synthesis of the literature and economic analysis, Luce offers a detailed projection of the consequences of the Trump administration and a forward-thinking analysis of what those who believe in enlightenment values must do to defend them from the multiple onslaughts they face in the coming years. We cannot move forward without a clear diagnosis of what has gone wrong. Luce argues that we are on a menacing trajectory brought about by ignorance of what it took to build the West, arrogance toward society’s economic losers, and complacency about our system’s durability-attitudes that have been emerging since the fall of the Berlin Wall, treated by the West as an absolute triumph over the East. In The Retreat of Western Liberalism, Luce makes a larger statement about the weakening of western hegemony and the crisis of democratic liberalism-of which Donald Trump and his European counterparts are not the cause, but a symptom. In his widely acclaimed book Time to Start Thinking, Financial Times chief US columnist and commentator Edward Luce charted the course of American economic and geopolitical decline, proving to be a prescient voice on our current social and political turmoil.
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