Social-democratic parties are shrinking, while right-wing demagogues promise to protect “Western values” from the Islamic hordes. And the economic debacles of the last few years seem to bear out Mikhail Gorbachev’s recent warning that “Western capitalism, too, deprived of its old adversary and imagining itself the undisputed victor and incarnation of global progress, is at risk of leading Western society and the rest of the world down another historical blind alley.”