The centre does not hold forever. Sometimes it decays slowly, like damp spreading behind wallpaper. Sometimes it collapses all at once.
Liberal societies tend to imagine that legitimacy evaporates through dramatic acts of rupture: coups, revolutions, tanks in the streets, black-shirted militias battering down parliamentary doors. But history suggests something more disquieting.
Political orders often rot long before they fall. Institutions continue to function, elections continue to occur, newspapers continue to publish, stock exchanges continue to tick upward, even as confidence in the foundation of those societies quietly bleeds away.
By the time the formal crisis arrives, the substantive crisis has already happened.
The comparison between the crisis of liberal democracy in the North Atlantic world after 2008 and the collapse of confidence in bourgeois institutions during the Weimar era is therefore both illuminating and dangerous.
Dangerous, because the temptation toward vulgar historical analogy is overwhelming. Every populist is not Hitler. Every banking crisis is not 1929. Every demagogue is not the herald of fascism.
Illuminating, because the comparison reveals structural tensions within capitalist democracy that recur with startling regularity whenever political systems cease to mediate social antagonism effectively.
In both cases, broad sections of the population came to suspect that democratic politics no longer exercised meaningful sovereignty over economic life. Governments appeared simultaneously omnipotent and impotent: capable of disciplining society, incapable of protecting it.
The example of the Weimar Republic is singular in its violence and intensity. Germany experienced military defeat, revolution, attempted counterrevolution, territorial dismemberment, paramilitary violence, reparations crises, hyperinflation, and eventually mass unemployment on a catastrophic scale.
The hyperinflation of 1922–23 destroyed savings, annihilated middle-class security, and shattered confidence in the state’s ability to preserve the symbolic order represented by money itself. Inflation was not merely an economic phenomenon. It produced a psychological and moral dislocation that permanently destabilised the republic’s legitimacy.
However, the centrist Heinrich Brüning’s time as Chancellor, between 1930 and 1932, provides a more pertinent comparison to the contemporary North Atlantic world.
Hyperinflation has exercised a nearly erotic fascination over liberal memory because wheelbarrows full of banknotes make for dramatic historical imagery. Yet the actual political economy of the post-2008 order resembled deflationary austerity far more than inflationary collapse.
Brüning’s government responded to the economic crisis by suppressing wages, adhering to fiscal orthodoxy, cutting spending, and attempting to restore confidence through discipline. The result was social devastation and political radicalisation.
This logic should sound familiar. Following the financial collapse of 2008, governments across Europe and North America mobilised astonishing state capacities to stabilise financial institutions while simultaneously insisting that meaningful social reconstruction was impossible.
Banks were rescued because they had to be rescued. Public investment, debt relief, housing guarantees, or large-scale democratic economic planning, by contrast, were treated as irresponsible fantasies. The message delivered to ordinary citizens was painfully clear: the state could suspend normal rules for capital but not for society.
One of the central ideological achievements of neoliberalism was the transformation of political questions into technical necessities.
Markets were no longer presented as historically contingent institutions but as quasi-natural informational systems beyond the reach of democratic will. Governments could manage, adjust, incentivise, or streamline. But they could not fundamentally direct.
Scholars Colin Crouch and Peter Mair tracked this transformation. Under neoliberalism, politics narrowed into administration. Elections favoured custodians of constraints rather than authors of collective projects.
Crouch’s notion of “post-democracy” referred to political systems in which democratic forms survive while substantive democratic agency withers away. Elections continue. Parties compete. Public discourse persists. But major decisions migrate into increasingly insulated technocratic, bureaucratic, judicial, financial, and supranational structures.
Citizens retain the ritual forms of participation while losing meaningful control over the trajectory of the social order. Politics becomes a spectacle orbiting around an increasingly inaccessible core of managerial administration.
Mair’s Ruling the Void sharpened this diagnosis considerably. He argued that the problem wasn’t just that citizens had disengaged from political parties, but that parties themselves had partially withdrawn from society.
The old mass parties of the twentieth century had mediated between social classes, interests, and institutions. By the early twenty-first century, they increasingly resembled professionalised governing cartels oriented toward state management rather than popular mobilisation.
Political competition remained intense at the level of symbolism and personality while converging substantially at the level of macroeconomic governance.
The consequence was a peculiar form of depoliticisation. Politics did not disappear. On the contrary, cultural conflict intensified almost without limit. But the domain of democratic contestation narrowed precisely when and where material stakes were highest.
Fundamental questions concerning monetary policy, industrial strategy, capital mobility, fiscal architecture, and investment priorities were increasingly treated as technical matters unsuitable for democratic determination.
The European Union became the paradigmatic expression of this tendency. During the eurozone crisis, elected governments found themselves constrained by bond markets, central banking structures, treaty obligations, and creditor institutions capable of overriding domestic democratic mandates.
Greece’s experience under the Syriza party remains the clearest illustration. An elected government attempted modest deviations from austerity orthodoxy and rapidly discovered that sovereignty itself had become conditional.
This is why the Weimar analogy persists beneath the surface of contemporary political theory, even where scholars avoid stating it openly.
The issue is not the inevitable return of fascism. It is the recurring crisis of liberal legitimacy, at a time when democratic institutions appear incapable of controlling the economic structures that shape social life.
In this respect, the post-2008 order generated a political atmosphere remarkably similar to that identified by the German sociologist Max Weber during the crises of early-twentieth-century capitalism.
Weber feared the emergence of what he called an “iron cage” of bureaucratic rationalisation in which substantive political questions would be displaced by technical administration. One can see this anxiety mutating through the twentieth century, resurfacing in the work of figures as different as Carl Schmitt, Jürgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault.
Schmitt—who was producing his most important work during the Weimar Republic— is especially relevant here, though in ways that should inspire caution. His critique of liberalism centred on the conviction that parliamentary systems inevitably sought to dissolve political conflicts into endless procedural discussion and technocratic management.
For the German right-winger, liberalism neutralised existential antagonisms without eliminating them. Conflict merely returned in more pathological forms.
As John McCormick notes in his study of Schmitt, the latter viewed liberalism as increasingly infiltrated by technological and managerial rationality, incapable of sustaining substantive political solidarity under modern conditions.
We can recognise the force of the diagnosis even if we reject Schmitt’s authoritarian conclusions.
Post-Cold War liberal political systems behaved as though antagonism could be managed away through expertise, procedure, and economic growth. But the 2008 financial crisis shattered that illusion. Suddenly, millions of people discovered that enormous political decisions were being made by institutions they neither controlled nor comprehended.
The resulting populist wave should therefore not be understood merely as an irrational backlash. It represented, however distortedly, the return of demands for political agency into systems increasingly organised around technocratic inevitability.
The slogan “take back control” resonated not because it offered coherent policy content, but because it expressed a generalised sense that key decisions were being made in arenas closed to democratic participation.
This is also why contemporary populism differs substantially from classical fascism. The social conditions under which it emerged were different. Its organisational structures are different. And its ideological coherence is dramatically weaker.
Contemporary right-wing populism does not reflect disciplined revolutionary mobilisation so much as permanent ambient resentment. Its survival is less dependent on mass party structures than on fragmented media ecosystems, conspiratorial narratives, algorithmic outrage, and the cultivation of generalised distrust.
At the same time, it clearly bears a family resemblance to its counterpart in the Weimar Republic. When institutional systems fail to translate social demands into political outcomes convincingly, the appeal of immediacy grows.
People feel the need to bypass institutions. They crave a strong leader who will bypass normal procedures. Decision takes precedence over deliberation. And politics becomes increasingly affective, because confidence in institutional rationality has eroded.
What makes the current conjuncture, starting with 2008, especially dangerous is that the crisis appears chronic rather than episodic.
Weimar unfolded through compressed catastrophe. The contemporary Atlantic world instead experiences rolling instability: financial crises, housing crises, migration crises, legitimacy crises, ecological crises, pandemics, debt crises, and security crises.
Emergency becomes normalised. Governance increasingly operates through the management of permanent exception.
In this respect, the postwar distinction between war and peace has itself begun to blur in ways that would have interested both Schmitt and his intellectual hero Thomas Hobbes enormously. The language of emergency saturates public life even outside formally military contexts.
Financial contagion, cyberwarfare, terrorism, disinformation, pandemics, climate collapse, border insecurity, and technological disruption all produce a condition of ambient mobilisation without formal declaration.
In other words, society exists in a suspended state, somewhere between normal administration and generalised crisis management.
The irony is that liberalism once derived much of its legitimacy from promising precisely the opposite condition. The postwar order offered security through prosperity, stability through technocratic competence, and moderation through institutional mediation.
For several decades, this bargain functioned tolerably well. But once economic growth slowed, inequality accelerated, and social mobility stagnated, the ideological legitimacy of technocratic governance began to decay.
The result is not yet terminal collapse. Liberal democracy possesses enormous adaptive capacities. The North Atlantic world retains levels of wealth, institutional continuity, and state capacity unimaginable in the Europe of a century ago.
The comparison to Weimar is therefore not predictive. History does not repeat itself with such mechanical precision.
But the analogy remains useful because it highlights a recurring contradiction within capitalist democracy itself: liberal institutions depend upon the perception that democratic politics can meaningfully shape collective life.
Once politics becomes visibly subordinate to impersonal economic imperatives, legitimacy erodes. Citizens may continue obeying institutions long after they stop believing in them. But eventually the distance between formal consent and substantive conviction becomes politically combustible.
The tragedy of the contemporary centre is that it often responds to this legitimacy crisis by doubling down on the very managerial logic that produced it.
Faced with populist insurgency, the instinct of liberal elites is to frequently invoke expertise, norms, proceduralism, institutional sanctity, and technocratic competence ever more aggressively. And distrust of their actions, especially those taken behind closed doors, continues to grow.
Liberal democracy may soon collapse, with catastrophic results. But it’s more likely to deteriorate more slowly, preserving electoral rituals while substantive power migrates elsewhere. This is the hollowing out that Colin Crouch and Peter Mair warned us about.
The result would be a hybrid, reviled from all sides, neither democracy nor dictatorship, a kind of permanent technocratic interregnum. That may ultimately prove more characteristic of the twenty-first century than any straightforward return to the nightmares of the twentieth.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
