Most Western liberals view growing tensions with China only in economic terms. They lament the intensifying trade war waged by the Trump Administration and still believe that more globalisation will somehow integrate China into the liberal world order. For them, history really did end in 1989, when they expected a global convergence towards Western market democracy.

The surprise about setbacks – from Iraq in 2003 to the 2008 financial crisis – has since morphed into a state of denial. Brexit, Donald Trump, and China’s assertion of sovereignty over the South China Sea are misunderstood as just headwinds that will not blow the ship of liberal globalisation off course for long. For liberals, low wages, deindustrialisation, and job-exporting trade deals are seen as inevitable in the forward march of progress, when, in reality, this programme favours China at the expense of the West.

Worse, liberals do not grasp that China’s fusion of Leninist state collectivism with totalitarian tech control represents a threat to Western civilisational norms, notably a commitment to the dignity of the person enshrined in fundamental freedoms, rights, and mutual obligations.

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It is not just that Beijing views political liberalism as a source of weakness and corrosion of its hard-won authority. The Chinese leadership also rejects the principles of liberality on which Western civilisation depends, such as free inquiry, free speech, tolerance for dissent, respect for political opponents, freedom of religion, and the fair treatment of minorities.

The West needs to do much better to live up to its own ideals; but contemporary China is fast becoming a totalitarian system under a new guise. This includes a crackdown on domestic opposition, the internment of up to a million of Uighur Muslims in the restive region of Xinjiang, as well as the persecution of Christians and other religious groups across the country.

What is new is a surveillance state that manipulates minds and creates a climate of fear and self-censorship, combined with the aggressive promotion of Chinese ownership of key strategic assets as part of the Belt and Road initiative of infrastructure investment. Neo-Confucian ‘global harmony’ and China’s supposedly peaceful rise are a cipher for the country’s hegemonic ambitions.

Few, if any, Western governments have taken a stand. But if the West does not speak up for the persecuted Muslim minorities in China, and for the freedoms of all the Chinese, then Western values mean nothing.

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The US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo seems to recognise this when sounding the alarm about worldwide Chinese influence. During his visit to London last week, he criticised Theresa May’s government for allowing the Chinese company, Huawei, to participate in Britain’s new 5G mobile phone network. The threat exceeds, by far, the potential theft of intellectual property and even national security. It is about the control of technology that is capable of redefining what we mean by freedom of conscience and free speech.

“I think we have to take the rose-colored glasses off and get real about the nature of the threat,” Kiron Skinner, the director of policy planning at the US State Department, said last week at a security conference in Washington. “This is a fight with a really different civilization.”

Skinner’s intervention matters because of the key position she holds within US foreign policy-making. Her office is responsible for developing US grand strategy. It was from this office that 60 years ago the US diplomat George Kennan implemented the policy of containment to counter Soviet expansion.

Skinner’s remarks about the civilisational nature of Chinese power have caused a major uproar. She has been accused of racism, for calling China the first “non-Caucasian” power to threaten the USA – even though she is one of the few senior US policy-makers who is African-American. The choice of words was perhaps unfortunate, since imperial Japan was arguably the first non-Western country to defy the West. But blunt language is needed to wake up a sleepy elite. Skinner is right that Beijing poses a unique challenge because it is not part of the tradition of Western philosophy, history, and culture, and she deserves credit for calling this out.

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Her language has also invited comparisons with the idea by the American academic Samuel Huntington about a “clash of civilizations“, which suggested that after the end of the Cold War, conflicts would be predominantly between civilisational traditions rather than ideological systems. But Skinner does not say that the battle between the West and the rest is inevitable, as Huntington (or rather a simplistic reading of him) implies. Instead, she maintains that “we also have to give a kind of respect for what the Chinese seek to accomplish”.

She’s right, though, about rival civilisational norms. The West is committed to the intrinsic worth of each and every person. Contemporary China, by contrast, is concerned with the collectivity. The West believes in personal rights and obligations set out in constitutions that constrain state power. China, on the contrary, believes in obedience to an omnipotent state that overrides constitutional boundaries.

The West promotes a market economy based on private ownership and free enterprise. China is building a model of state capitalism based on Communist control of property and state-owned corporations. The West seeks to uphold a free space of human association independently of the state, whereas China views all intermediary institutions as a conveyor belt between the party and the people. This fundamentally different outlook is at the heart of growing tensions between the West and China.

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Western concerns with the dignity of the human person enshrined in human rights rest on Christian humanism and its focus on the common good. This is not a collective ‘public good’ imposed by experts, but rather a good pursued by all, which exists only in reciprocal relationships and the constant striving towards both individual fulfilment and mutual flourishing. The liberty of each and the equality of all are important principles, but even more important is lived fraternity. It redeems freedom devoid of social solidarity and provides trust and cooperation. What binds people together is what makes us free and society more just.

By contrast, the Chinese leadership defines harmony in terms of collective utility – the greatest happiness of the greatest numbers. This is brought about by the central state and enlightened elites who have been carefully selected to enforce the will of both party and army. China’s ruling Communists are deploying high-tech facial recognition and algorithms to control individual behaviour. The system of social credits rewards obedience and compliance. The fusion of a Leninist ‘administration of things’ with neo-Confucian collectivism replaces the Western idea of a government of the people with a tyranny by numbers. All this – combined with large-scale Chinese investment in Artificial Intelligence, robotics and genetics – suggests that Beijing is more interested in the power of the strong over the weak than the equal dignity of all.

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Against this background, Skinner’s warning is one the West should heed. If China continues to deny its citizens religious freedom and the right of political dissidents to emigrate, then Western countries have a duty to act.

Skinner is leading work to develop a concept of US-China relations on the scale of Letter X, the seminal essay by Kennan that laid the foundations for Western containment policy against the Soviet Union. Such an effort is now required to be clear about the threat posed by China but also about the potential to bring about a proper balance of power anchored in respect between different civilisations.

The West needs to develop a strategy of how to confront China in the case of human rights abuses, while at the same time encouraging the country to renew the legacy of Confucian and Buddhist social virtues, such as hospitality, benevolence, and trustworthiness. The damage of Mao’s Cultural Revolution needs to be repaired and not plastered over by Xi Jinping’s increasingly atavistic nationalism.

But the West also has to uphold its own best traditions and practice the principles it inherited from Greco-Roman philosophy and law as well as Judeo-Christian religion and ethics – the unique value of the person and free human association independent of the state, which are under threat everywhere.

Above all, what is missing is meaningful dialogue between civilisations for the benefit of mutual understanding and cooperation based on shared interests. A ‘clash of civilisations’ is neither necessary nor normative.

When the Iron Curtain fell 30 years ago, Vaclav Havel – the Czech dissident turned President – said that “we are concerned for the destiny and the values that brought down Communism – the values of Western civilisation”. Havel was right. The renewal of Western civilisational norms is vital for the West and the world.​

Undoubtedly, there has been Russian meddling in democratic elections and Chinese economic pressure – but neither of these can explain the scale and depth of popular discontent. In fact, our age of anger has its origins in the moral bankruptcy afflicting economic liberalism, and the rapid cultural change brought about by social liberalism. Establishment parties seem to be struggling to understand this.

Worse, though, is their failure to recognise why liberal democracy is under strain from within. Since Antiquity, philosophers from Plato via Aristotle to Cicero have warned against the slide of democracy into autocracy. Today this warning applies to liberalism and the way it unleashes democracy’s demons – oligarchy, demagogy, anarchy and tyranny.

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Liberals today, instead of defending open markets, promote existing cartels and new monopolies. As a result, more than a decade after the financial crash, the banking behemoths that rule global finance are still ‘too big to fail’. Our everyday economy is dominated by the Frightful Five – Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent company of Google. By controlling access to information, these tech monopolies restrict not just economic competition but also free speech. Their plutocratic power undermines both open markets and democratic debate.

In turn, this oligarchic control reinforces the drift towards demagogic politics, as both establishment liberals and populist insurgents exploit popular fears about economic and cultural insecurity. Democracy is, as a result, caught between technocratic facts and the ‘post-truth’ of anti-elite challengers. Neither upholds common sense and what George Orwell called ‘common decency’, including respect for political opponents. Instead, they demonise each other and practise a politics of ideological purity and the closing down of robust yet civilised debate.

The demons of oligarchy and demagogy reinforce anarchy, in the sense of social fragmentation, and as a result societies are increasingly balkanised. The social capital involved in interpersonal trust and cooperation has declined significantly. Civic ties are weaker just when public trust in our main public institutions is substantially lower. Loneliness has escalated from personal misfortune into a social epidemic with around 9 million people in Britain being socially isolated. All this feeds a strong sense of powerlessness.

Oligarchy, demagogy and anarchy also exacerbate what Alexis de Tocqueville called in Democracy in America the ‘tyranny of voluntary servitude’ – a “kind of servitude, ordered, mild and peaceable, a singular power, tutelary, all-encompassing”. This applies to the surveillance capitalism of the tech monopolies, which extract data from their users and use it to manipulate their behaviour for maximum profit. In the name of choice and emancipation, personal autonomy is usurped by permanent monitoring and free will is subverted. We voluntarily hand over our humanity without realising it.

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But these three irrepressible demons of liberal democracy can be tamed. The alternative to an ever-greater oligarchic concentration of wealth and power is not simply better regulation but a much more fundamental change of ownership to transform the rentier economy that extracts excessive profits, as with the tech platforms.

The radical move would be to downsize incumbents by breaking them up and introducing limits on ownership concentration – not simply send them off with a  fine. Anti-monopoly regulators in the US and Europe should force monopolies to spin off recently acquired business lines, so that there is a structural separation of the core business from new activities.

Facebook would have to sell off its acquired image and messaging services Instagram and WhatsApp. Google should relinquish ownership of YouTube that provides a rich data mine with end-to-end control, from email via web browsing to operating systems and advertising platforms such as Chrome or Android. And Amazon should be compelled to separate its e-commerce platform from its offline retail operation.

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Those who object on grounds of market freedom have to be reminded that it is the ‘robber barons’ who replace open and competitive markets with closed corporate monopolies. There is a noble tradition of enforcing anti-trust laws, as with Theodore Roosevelt deciding to smash the monopoly of Standard Oil in 1911, and it needs to be renewed. Politicians and regulators should hold Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg to his word: “Move fast and break things.”

Splitting up the tech platforms is also an important element in tackling the demon of demagogy. Facebook and Google have to be treated as media corporations and subject to the same rules and regulations. The regulators should be given powers to hand out fines to all new media found to produce or distribute bogus stories in an attempt to attract attention and advertising. That includes those click-hungry mainstream media outlets which persistently feature falsehoods by embedding links to lies on their websites. Printing insincere apologies on page 19 will not do.

Persistent misinformation in all media should lead to the loss of their legal licence. Where individuals or groups are explicitly targeted, the ‘right to reply’ should be extended in a spirit of free yet fair argument.

The fundamental task for both media and politics is to nurture a commitment to truthfulness that can once again inspire popular trust. What is required is a new ethos in public discourse. This would involve informal norms such as the defence of robust debate, viewing your opponents as legitimate instead of demonising them as ‘traitors’, and a joint concern for mutual flourishing rather than merely personal advancement at the expense of others. Without such a shared ethos and some common norms liberal democracy will continue its slide into the anarchy of social fragmentation.

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To rebuild civic ties, a genuine democracy needs to pluralise the state, not just by devolving political authority and central bureaucracy to lower levels according to the principle of subsidiarity. It also has to encompass a much greater participation of groups and associations in the public sector.

For example, associations could provide a wide range of public services by forming cooperatives and mutuals that use state funding to deliver education, health care or welfare. By contrast with free-market managerialism or bureaucratic statism, such associations would focus on members – funders such as local government, but especially workers and users.

Moreover, the pluralisation of the state can extend to utilities by establishing public-interest and community-interest companies. Like cooperatives or employee-owned businesses, such companies operate on the basis of mutualist principles that involve in their governance owners, workers and users. Public- or community-interest companies pursue not just private profit but also a social purpose by reinvesting their profits in the business and in the community instead of simply enriching the top management or institutional shareholders. The building of an associative democracy is an alternative to oligarchy and anarchy.

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Taming democracy’s demons is especially urgent at a time when both liberal elites and anti-establishment insurgents are undermining parliamentary democracy and are silent about what binds people together as members of national communities. Both polarise politics just when democracy needs a transcendent conversation about how, in a context of plural values, we can forge a common life.

This will require far more than restating liberal democracy’s founding values of liberty and equality or delivering on the promise of prosperity and peace. Rather, democracy requires a renewed civic covenant – what Edmund Burke called “partnership … not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”.

This emphasis on covenantal ties among generations can help us address the growing economic injustice between young and old today. Society is not a contract of individuals but a partnership between the generations that balances individual rights with mutual obligations and contributions with rewards. Without a commitment to civic covenant, democracy will continue to disintegrate.

Adrian Pabst is the author of The Demons of Liberal Democracy

Western liberal market democracy, especially in its Anglo-Saxon variety, maintains the illusion of open, competitive markets that generate prosperity for the people, yet it enforces cartels and enriches a new professional class of tech experts and financiers.

State corporations in the East and tech platforms in the West extract rents on account of their hegemonic position. For all their innovation, Silicon Valley and Wall Street are the symbols of a new oligarchy that celebrates greed and practices usury.

The Protestant tradition is often portrayed as the handmaiden of the capitalist system. Lutheranism’s separation of faith from work appears to inform the Protestant work ethic, which seeks material prosperity in this life while hoping for spiritual salvation in the next. Calvinist doctrine seems to take this further by suggesting that wealth is a sign of divine favour whereas poverty reflects sinfulness. Accordingly, the wealthy are predestined for redemption while the poor will receive eternal damnation for their sins.

However, both Luther and Calvin believed everyday work was imbued with spiritual significance. They saw each economic activity as a vocation through which God works to distribute his gifts, including individual talents and other ways of contributing to the common good. Far from merely chasing worldly riches, their Protestantism viewed the earthly economy as embedded in the divine economy, in which the commandment to love God coincided with the commandment to love your neighbour as yourself.

Binding them together is the idea of shared flourishing within the order of creation. This means that well-being has both an economic and an ethical dimension. Conversely, property and profit can contribute to the common good through the creation of value. Enterprise and employment provide people not just with an income but also with meaning – a recognition of their role in the economy and their contribution to society.

At the same time, the Protestant tradition contained the seeds of division between commerce and social morality. Its emphasis on the individual encouraged the idea that, after the Fall, humanity was so depraved as to be incapable of pursuing goodness without divine intervention. So God’s providence was seen as operating through the market to make vice balance vice and produce a simulation of economic harmony. One influential example of this thinking is the book The Fable of the Bees by the exiled Huguenot Bernard Mandeville, with its subtitle “Private vice, publick benefits”.

Within this thinking lay the foundation for Adam Smith’s Calvinist-influenced idea of the “invisible hand”. There is a tension at the heart of Smith’s thought between the exchange of mutual regard or esteem in society (the focus of his Theory of Moral Sentiment) and the exchange of goods and services (the focus in his Wealth of Nations). The tension arises from Smith’s conception of the market as a morally neutral space in which the balance of individual self-interest with other individual self-interest leads to a mutually beneficial outcome.

But the early twentieth-century Anglican historian R.H. Tawney argued that individual interest unchecked by a strong culture of virtue risked turning the sin of greed into an engine of insatiable acquisitiveness – a prophetic warning we would do well to heed.

Protestantism has rich resources to defend the market against excesses. In the past, as today, Protestant practices of virtue in the economy abound. At the time of the Industrial Revolution, Methodism inspired thrift, sobriety, hard work, education and a determination to delay gratification in favour of investment. These Methodist values attracted the working and middle classes, including artisans and entrepreneurs who viewed the Anglican establishment with suspicion and preferred the building of free, democratic self-organisation in small groups or mutual aid societies.

Believing in proper stewardship, Methodists rejected any opposition between rich and poor in favour of a responsible sharing of risks, rewards and resources. This ethical vision inspired many Methodists to set up their own banks and insurance companies. Going back to the late nineteenth century, a network of Methodist hospitals emerged that until today serves the community regardless of colour, class or creed.

Similarly, Quakers have nurtured apprentices and helped them set up their own businesses. Famous Quaker businesses, such as Barclays and Lloyds banks, Clarks shoes and Bryant & May matches, have a proud history of caring about their employees and establishing new schemes for housing, health and education.

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But their ethical record has been tainted by recent scandals, as with Barclays’ involvement in manipulating the inter-bank lending rate Libor or Lloyds mis-selling of payment protection insurance. Such scandals suggest a hollowing out of their ethos, turning these businesses from being a force for social good founded upon Quaker ideals of restraint into an example of corporate greed.

Being part of the temperance movement, Quakers and other non-conformists pioneered new business models that continue to be relevant today. Instead of competing in price, they worked as part of fraternities to raise the quality of products such as confectionary – a sector which for over 100 years in Britain was in the hands of three Quaker businesses: Cadbury of Birmingham, Fry’s of Bristol and Rowntree’s and Terry’s of York.

Key to their ethical business was a commitment to fair prices. That was as much to do with transparency, which had been missing from barter trade, as with the commitment to good quality rather than cut-throat competition in a race to the bottom. Quakers were renowned for their pursuit of shared prosperity that benefited both the business and its employees. Customers knew they were not being ripped off and suppliers did not have to haggle over prices.

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Of equal importance was the approach to workers. The Cadbury brothers, for example, built the village of Bournville on the south side of Birmingham for their employees. This model of urban development came with schools, parks and leisure facilities for workers and their families. The Cadbury firm was also one of the pioneers of pension provisions and new initiatives such as providing a staff canteen.

Knowing that a healthy workforce would be more productive and stable, Cadbury employed company dentists and doctors before the creation of the NHS. “The welfare of employer and employed is not antagonistic, but complementary and inclusive,” so said Cadbury in 1912. “Each position brings its duties and its rights.” Rather than a collection of individuals focused on their separate advancement, companies like Cadbury were more like corporate bodies committed to the mutual flourishing of their members.

There are many lessons for today’s economy. One is the importance of balancing individual responsibility with a sense of fraternity. The ethos of self-reliance among Methodists and Quakers is bound up with the emphasis on fraternal help. As Danny Kruger, government adviser and founder of the rehabilitation charity Only Connect, wrote in 2006, “Fraternity is the sphere of belonging, of membership, the sphere of identity and particularity”. Ethical enterprise is just as much a space for fraternal relations as friendly societies in the past or charities nowadays.

Another lesson is the provision of services that help people to combine their work with family life. This includes more generous arrangements for maternity and paternity leave, support for childcare as well as flexible working hours. Instead of waiting for the state to legislate, businesses could and should increase the ways they support working families.

Globalisation and the digital age are changing the context, but the fundamental task is to build a just economic and social settlement that combines new sources of prosperity with the protection of people in their families, communities and workplaces. There is much to learn from Protestant practices anchored in the dignity of labour and the sacred character of both land and life.