The Demons of Liberal Democracy By Adrian Pabst Polity, 160pp, £13/$19.95 Throughout his new book, Adrian Pabst patrols the frontier where the immense gains of liberal democracy collapse into grievous losses. Citizens of modern Western states now live mostly on the far side of this boundary, and the prospect, as Pabst describes it, is dismal: an “irredeemably atomistic” world of “hollowed-out civic bonds”, a place of “subtle servitude based on tutelary power that bends our will”. People are “richer but more divided, freer but lonelier”. In a better world, Pabst insists, democracy would be “as conservative as it is radical”, holding the balance between tradition and modernity, because “we are social beings who are partially constituted by an inheritance of language, relationships, place and belief, which needs to be conserved and renewed”. But instead modern democracies prefer to hold the balance between the mega-state and mega-corporations, to the advantage of both and to the detriment of millions of citizens cut adrift from them. We live, consequently, in “an age of anger”. Contemporary liberalism, Pabst concludes, has become “a catalyst for demagogy”. The Western world is quickly filling up with voters revolted by “the denigration of their values and identities by the members of the professional political class”. (Pabst gives the prize for typifying such contempt to Hillary Clinton and her “basket of deplorables” remark.) Whatever the topic, Pabst is relentless and fiercely intelligent in pursuing his case; as, for example, when he is spinning his searchlight across the modern economic system, illuminating policy and legislation that hands the reins to oligarchs and monopolists. He knows who his villains are, too: step forward Facebook and Warren Buffet among others. And his analysis of tech utopianism is bone-chilling. One has to wait more than 100 pages for the first acknowledgement that economic liberalism has produced anything to welcome. In this case, the millions lifted out of poverty in places such as China and India. But there is a heavy price: traditional workers in the West are left “jobless and worse off, both economically and in terms of self-esteem”. The Demons of Liberal Democracy is not a long book. But such is its vehemence, I did find myself suffering in places from a kind of assertion fatigue. Try these four successive sentences for size: