The election of Donald Trump, the referendum on the Brexit and the election victory of the Five Star Movement and Lega in Italy have led to the believe that democracy is at a crossroad. Many scholars and opinion makers raise concerns about the future of liberal democracy in Europe and the United States.
This article gives an overview of recent publications on the future of liberal democracy. The article focuses on the causes and possible solutions that are presented in these publications.

Populism, terrorist attacks, global revolutions, threats against public figures, hate and fury on social media. All of this suggests that we appear to be living in an ‘age of anger’, as Pankaj Mishra calls it. Everyone is sometimes outraged or angry, but in these times we see permanent moods of anger and revenge raging. This makes classic questions current again: how should anger in the public domain be understood? Is it always inappropriate and should it be controlled and condemned under all circumstances? Or is anger necessary to highlight structural injustices and to force change? The justification of anger is very delicate.. In this article the author discusses these questions based on philosophical treatises of anger by Martha Nussbaum, Peter Sloterdijk, Slavoj Žižek and Pankaj Mishra.

In this paper it is argued that the discourse on the retreating government is a story about mobilizing executive power deemed necessary for enforcing a neoliberal worldview. The intellectual discourse about the retreating government, the argument goes, develops as a radical and neoliberal critique of the Keynesian planning and organization of the enlightenment – an organization that is above all expressed in the postwar welfare state. The Dutch policy discourse, by contrast, is of a practical nature: it is about the organization of the government retreat. In the reconstruction of the policy discourse, as it is manifest in leading policy documents of the Dutch central government, it is observed that this discourse has emancipated from the intellectual discourse. The policy discourse of the retreating government has developed into a financial management discourse, free from European ideals.