The election of Joe Biden as US president is the first good news for embattled believers in liberal democracy and the postwar multilateral order since 2016. He is a decent man with an instinctive grasp of the values America has, at its best, stood for. On the assumption that Donald Trump’s attack on the electoral process fails, Mr Biden will be president. That will be a huge relief. But it is folly to imagine that Trumpist division is defeated.
More broadly, liberal democracy will remain embattled, in the US and elsewhere. The evidence on this reality is, alas, clear. Research at the Centre for the Future of Democracy at Cambridge university shows a rise in global dissatisfaction with democracy since shortly before the 2008 financial crisis. The rise in dissatisfaction in the English-speaking democracies, led by the US, is striking. Frighteningly, in 2020, the respected US-based think-tank, Freedom House, ranked the quality of US democracy 33rd in the world among countries larger than 1m people, between Slovakia and Argentina. Given Mr Trump’s record, that is hardly surprising. Moreover, this was before his attempt to throw the electoral system, the core of democracy, into disrepute, with unsupported allegations of fraud.
Mr Biden’s ability to reverse all this is likely to be limited, even though he will surely wish to do so. He will surely confront obdurate resistance from Republicans in Congress, who will try to ensure that he and the federal government are seen to fail, as was their aim during Barack Obama’s presidency.