ANN CROTTY: Hurtling headlong toward dystopia?
Are we returning to a world of an elite and underclass?
If you’ve managed to get all the way through Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles, a brilliant fictional account of how the US copes in the aftermath of a trade war with China, I have just the book for you. The Retreat of Western Liberalism, by Financial Times columnist Edward Luce, is a chilling account of the period between 1989 and the election of Donald Trump as US president. Though not fictional, the book could be regarded as a prequel to Shriver’s grim, barely fictional story. Where did it all go wrong? Western democracy was so gung ho in 1989, nothing could stop it. It would surely be just a few short years before every government in the world adopted the capitalist democratic system that guaranteed the benefits of economic growth for all.Shriver’s book describes how badly wrong things got. It was published before Trump’s victory but, by the day, the plot, which is set after 2025, feels less outrageous. Luce’s book describes how such a dystopian future became possible. For those wh...
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