The Retreat of Western Liberalism sides with Dani Rodrik’s argument: ultimately, economic globalization is incompatible with national democracy. Either democracy must be globalized—but the insulated chambers of the EU show what that can look like in practice—or a degree of national determination must be restored. Luce sides with his former mentor Summers’ call for political elites to adopt a policy of ‘responsible nationalism’, rather than a deeper globalization. Against Thomas Friedman’s image in The Lexus and the Olive Tree, likening the nostrums of the Washington Consensus to a ‘golden straitjacket’—within which ‘your economy grows and your politics shrink’—Luce notes that straitjackets are for lunatics: no wonder Western democracies ‘have begun to lose their minds.’ [...]

So searing is the earlier indictment of contemporary America—and of the Davos mindset of ‘global governance’ and ‘multi-stakeholder collaboration’—that one might expect a climactic call to rethink liberalism from bottom up. Instead, Luce rallies to it. The entirely conventional capstone to the book sets out the reforms that will restore US politics as ‘the envy of the world’. In a book that takes elites to task for their complacency towards the lower orders, it is striking that Luce never sees fit to define the words western or liberalism, alone or together, or to tell us why they are superior to the alternatives—actual or potential. The ‘retreat’ of the title turns out to be unimaginable. All that is needed to reverse it are the standard vacuous fixes: vocational upgrades, no offshore tax havens, campaign-finance reform, carbon taxes, healthcare, if certainly no universal basic income; above all a ‘massive Marshall Plan to retrain the middle class’ for skills in a post-automated age. As Luce has explained elsewhere, this could be easily brought off on the model of Denmark, with high job turnover and two weeks’ free training a year for every adult.