Democracy, it is often said, was invented to stop Europeans from wiping one another from the face of the earth. From the dawn of the Inquisition in the twelfth century, through the wars of the Reformation, to the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), Catholic Europe was rent with apostates, mostly from within its own ranks. The papacy struggled with autonomist bishops and secessionist princes. In the struggle between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, millions of Europeans were slaughtered. The only answer to such bloodshed was religious tolerance, but such a democratic concept had to await the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.

In revolutionary France, men and women got the vote, but from 1799 Napoleon’s dictatorship quickly quashed any remnant of female suffrage with a deeply patriarchal constitution. Paradoxically, Napoleon’s counter-revolution also exported the liberal principles of the Revolution, even as his armies swept across the continent. The French military’s occupation of Prussia, Westphalia, and Spain led not only to popular uprisings against the oppressors, but also to the spread of liberalism. Ironically, French imperialism awoke the spirit of German nationalism; however, Otto von Bismarck relied ‘upon war, rather than parliamentary or democratic processes to bring about German unification’ in 1871. He could not have imagined that his confederal project would unleash an arms race that ended in the trenches of Flanders Fields. Unsurprisingly, when the kaiser’s dictatorship ended in 1918, the defeated, unstable, and vulnerable Weimar Republic merely trod water until Hitler extinguished the nascent democracy, inaugurating the ethno-nationalism of Kristallnacht and the horror of the Holocaust.

Economic crises are overwhelmingly the single most important factor behind both liberal and illiberal revolutions. From Charles I’s inability to convince Parliament to grant him supply, to James II’s far-too-efficient taxation regime, absolutist monarchs have tried – and failed – to govern without the legislature and paid the price. The medieval revenue system in France, which forced the peasantry to pay for the palatial indulgences of both nobility and clergy, forced Louis XVI to summons the Estates-General to plead for financial reform. The French aristocracy and nobility, with telescopes to the blind eye, refused to pay tax, thus paving the way not only for the Declaration of the Rights of Man and (Female) Citizen, but also the Jacobin Terror.

As Berman writes, on the eve of the 1848 revolutions, ‘bad harvests, a financial crisis, and an economic depression hit France’. In the Chamber of Deputies, Tocqueville warned the ruling classes that they were sitting on a powder keg. In twentieth-century, neo-feudal Russia, Nicholas II’s regime, confronted by the German threat in 1914, resorted to printing money in the face of a food crisis; his failure led to not one but two revolutions in 1917, exacerbated by chronic bread shortages. Mussolini’s March on Rome was preceded by a severe economic crisis where the pauperisation of the middle class led to a wave of paralysing strikes. In Germany, Hitler’s accession to power could not have occurred without war reparations and the mass unemployment of the 1930s Depression. Similarly, the 2008 financial crisis destroyed so much wealth that Eurozone austerity, Brexit, Trump, and the electoral rise of the far right can be traced, plausibly, to the dislocation and deflationary wages wrought by the ‘Great Recession’.

The ‘Velvet Revolution’, Timothy Garton Ash’s description of the 1989 Czechoslovakian abandonment of Soviet socialism, became a portmanteau to describe the post-Berlin Wall democratisation of central and eastern Europe, where barely a shot was fired as eastern-bloc totalitarianism collapsed. Repressed communists transmogrified into capitalists virtually overnight. Germany unified as a federal, democratic republic. Czechoslovakia dissolved, peacefully and constitutionally. None of this could have been achieved without first handcuffing the Soviet bloc to Western banks. Eastern Europe became a Soviet financial liability by 1980. Under Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, Russia accumulated US$70 billion in foreign debt; by 1991, Poland owed almost $US50 billion. The failure of socialist economics led to a debt addiction that could only be cured by a liberal democratic surrender to Western capitalism.

Neoliberalism dominated the post-communist transition to capitalism, but it also imposed uneven development upon deeply unequal societies. Is modern illiberalism the populist response to the austere strictures of neoliberalism? Berman is right to point to the loss of faith in democratic institutions and structures wrought by the free-market deregulation initiated by Thatcher and Reagan. After forty years of de-industrialisation, even as London banks boomed, is it surprising that Brexit became a working-class revolt led, bought, and paid for by glib Europhobe élites, with Cambridge Analytica an enthusiastic accessory? That people who lost their jobs, homes, and security fell for Trump’s populism? Or that unemployment, inequality, and immigration led to parliamentary seats for racists and ultra-nationalists?

Democracy’s failures are failures of the political élite: their inability to explain to Brexit Britain that three million casual workers receive parental, sickness, and holiday-leave benefits because the EU mandates them, entitlements that neither Labour nor the Tories guarantee. Instead, élites have squandered the post-1945 democratic consolidation by plundering the public purse for their own benefit; they have studiously ignored the theft of national wealth by powerful multinationals stashing billions in tax havens and special-purpose entities, aided and abetted by an army of expensive accountants. Liberal democracy, once a beacon of consensus and wealth distribution, has become corrupted, leading to voter indifference or abandonment.

Winston Churchill labelled democracy the worst form of government ‘except for all those others’, but in the final analysis, he remained a steadfast political élitist: ‘The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.’