How democracy’s spread has dashed dreams of liberalism

South Africa’s Zuma is outwas the Washington Post’s headline on Thursday morning. “Will things actually get better?” The question signifies more than journalistic skepticism. It points to a shift in the liberal worldview.

Over more than a quarter of a century, that view – triumphant as, in 1991, both Soviet communism and South African apartheid were swept away – has been knocked hard. Interventions in Iraq and Libya, undertaken in part on the liberal grounds of a “responsibility to protect” a population from its murderous leaders, are now viewed as having produced more chaos than liberation.