Here's my take. I went to see Christopher Nolan's new movie, The Odyssey, to watch a summer blockbuster, and it more than delivered. I did not intend to comment on the various controversies around the movie, from the attacks that it is woke to the historical inaccuracies in it. For goodness sakes, it's a nearly 3,000-year-old yarn that is filled with gods and goddesses, one-eyed giants, and lots of magic. But Ezra Klein's commentary on the movie did lead me to think about the broader issues the movie raises, which strike me as interesting and important. Klein argues that the critique of Nolan's Odyssey as woke because he casts a black actress to play Helen is trivial and superficial, but that the movie is liberal in a more profound sense. Nolan fundamentally inverts the morality of the ancient world in which conquest and victory was celebrated unabashedly and replaces it with a morality that is more nuanced. While Homer's Odysseus was constantly lauded for his clever, guileful ways, Nolan's Odysseus is haunted by the ravages of the war and by his own deceit that was at the center of the victory, the Trojan horse.
Beginning with Christianity, the West gradually replaced the pagan ethic of naked conquest and domination with one centered on universal human dignity, compassion, and empathy. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth, says the Gospel of Matthew. Words that no Homeric hero would ever utter. Pre-Christian values are having a revival these days as the populist right, often joined by a new cadre of tech billionaires, look back with admiration to an older world in which strength, domination, and victory mattered more than empathy or equality. For Donald Trump, winning is all that matters, justifying all means. He uses the word incessantly. In a 60 Minutes interview in 2018, when asked about his demeaning comments about Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, Trump said simply, "We won. It doesn't matter. We won." In a best-selling book, Suicidal Empathy, Gad, one of Elon Musk's favorites on X, argues that the West is declining because it cares too much about too many outsiders, minorities, even its foes.
In fact, the greatest moral achievement of the West over the last two millennia, and especially since the Enlightenment, has been the expansion of the circle of people who are considered fully human, having equal dignity and equal rights. We've come to recognize the humanity of people once dismissed as slaves, serfs, and second-class citizens, foreigners, women, racial minorities, people with differing sexual orientations. These ideas spread throughout the world because they are, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, self-evident. This is one of the West's greatest achievements, not a decadent sickness. But there is a serious critique buried beneath the crude MAGA attacks. It is one that Nietzsche leveled, and it's being reprised by some of the tech bros today. Nietzsche worried that Christianity's egalitarian ideas made us less likely to be wildly ambitious, risk-seeking, even reckless. Have we become so humane that we've lost the primal urges that made us heroic? We should not romanticize civilizations built on blood, gore, and conquest simply because they produced heroes. But they built more than that: the pyramids, the Gothic cathedrals, the voyages of discovery, the Industrial Revolution emerged from societies animated by ambition, confidence, and a willingness to sacrifice. They often came with hierarchy and a single-minded focus on greatness. Some of populism's appeal today lies less in specific policies than a promise to restore national greatness, to build, to achieve, to win.
But must we choose between greatness and goodness? After all, Western nations in the 19th and 20th centuries were the most liberal societies in human history in their day, and they were hardly timid. They built railroads across continents, abolished slavery, industrialized the world, rebuilt Europe and Japan, landed men on the moon, built the atomic bomb, and created the internet. Think of America in the mid-20th century. Ask the experts, and they will tell you there is a clear trend: America's democracy is in decline. Freedom House's latest report, which scores countries on political rights and civil liberties, gave the US an 81 out of 100, the country's lowest score since that index began its current scoring system. The V-Dem Institute goes further this year, downgrading the US from a liberal democracy to merely an electoral democracy. Other indices deliver similar verdicts. So what ails America? Nobel Prize-winning economist Daron Acemoglu has a diagnosis and a prescription in his new book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy. Welcome, Daron.
So you won your Nobel Prize really for pointing out that the countries that have done the best over the last hundreds of years are countries that found a way to build strong, effective, legitimate institutions, and liberal democracies are really the kind of poster child for that kind of development. Now you're writing about what went wrong with your poster child. So if you were to sum it up, you know, what fundamentally has happened to liberal democracy that got you worried enough to write a book about it?
Thank you, first of all, for having me on the program and for asking that question, which goes to the heart of it. Indeed, liberal democracy is a worthy subject to study because it has been so important for our achievements. Our social achievements are really remarkable. I mean, if you think of, you know, where we come from, how our ancestors lived, the ability of forming such complex societies that are peaceful, provide public services, and create the conditions for shared prosperity, that is just amazing. And we really owe that to liberal ideas and liberal democracy. And the reason why I'm writing about liberalism's crisis is because I think it is so important for our future as well. And unless we diagnose the problems, we're not going to be able to rebuild it. And the crisis, I think, is most visible if you look at people's views. Americans have such low trust in bedrock democratic institutions. They think liberalism's agenda doesn't work, and some of its founding principles, shared prosperity, public services, and providing voice and self-government, are all broken.
