This year’s surrender of the crown has proved smoother than the contested handovers of 2016 and 2020: this time, neither side has summoned up their mobs. Broken, dejected, for the first time self-doubting, America’s liberal establishment has come to accept the extinction of its political order. Had they taken their project — or their right to eternal rule — as seriously as they claimed to, no doubt they would have chosen stronger candidates than Joe Biden and Kamala Harris: that they could not do so itself speaks of a certain exhaustion. Beyond the rhetoric, at least as messianic and civilisational in scope as anything the further reaches of the Right could dream up, Left-liberalism — the last of the great 20th-century ideologies — possessed very little of substance to fight for. Bereft of ideas and confidence, American liberalism died from the head down: all that is left of it is an entrenched caste of bureaucrats to be weeded out and replaced. The old order is dead: but what is struggling to be born?

For a time, in the 2010s, confused and frightened liberals cycled through a series of personality cults, latching onto populist avatars of its own — Trudeau, Merkel, Ardern, Macron – who promised, like King Arthur against the invading Saxons, to hold back the waves of history for a time at least. Yet all of these are now politically dead, having achieved little but accelerating the incoming power of the waves that would wash them away: in Macron’s case, characteristically the most interesting, seemingly by design. No doubt, this cult of personality took root due to the absence of serious policy: it is an obvious fact of our present political moment that anyone concerned with shaping the world they actually live in can only now engage with “the Right,” simply because “the Left” is both intellectually and politically defunct. We see this in the intellectual Left’s new engagement, part fearful but increasingly curious in its own right, with the ferment of ideas on the Right. What is the Left’s project, what are its big ideas now it has broken its political and intellectual power through its catastrophic self-derailment into identity politics? It is a difficult question to answer, but also a pointless one: it simply doesn’t matter, and is unlikely to for the next few decades at least. One might as well ask what is next for Baathism.

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Welcome back to 1945

By Aris Roussinos

Yet even still, “the Right” is, conceptually, an absolute mess. Much of what is novel in it is genuinely harmful, and presents huge risks of even worse political futures than those given to us by millenarian Liberalism. As Yeats saw it at a similar time of political flux, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” If it possesses any coherent, unifying purpose, the new Right consists merely of rolling back the liberal innovations of the Sixties onwards: and perhaps that is progress enough. Much of Trump’s initial appeal was that of the boy in the Emperor’s New Clothes, mockingly pointing out the nakedness of the West’s rulers. Had they taken the critique seriously — of their radical identity politics of race and gender, of their programme of economic self-destruction through a unilateral energy transition, of their commitment to an imaginary borderless Utopia in which the rest of the world dreams only of achieving its historic destiny as Western liberals — perhaps the destruction of their order would not be so total. The dying liberal order chose suicide through want not just of self-reflection but of pragmatism. And indeed, perhaps if the incoming order has a single defining characteristic, it is pragmatism rather than any coherent replacement ideology. Perhaps it is not just the great 20th century ideologies — fascism, communism, postwar liberalism — that are dead, but any all-consuming ideology at all.

The sudden and dramatic seizure of power by Syria’s former al-Qaeda faction Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is a moment of wider political significance than mere regional analysis assumes. Over the decade-long course of the country’s bloody civil war, the assumed end state for Syria was one or another totalising 20th century ideology — whether liberal democracy, Baathism, or Salafi jihadism was preferred aligning with the sympathies of the beholder. Yet instead the new power on the throne seems, so far, a purely pragmatic technocrat, a centralising moderniser closer to Lee Kuan Yew, Bukele or Mohammed Bin Salman than anything in either liberal or jihadist theories of governance. In this sense, al-Jolani is perhaps a bellwether of the coming post-ideological century. Simply put, the central political question is “If you were to found a new state in 2024, what would it look like?” Certainly, the 20th century liberal democratic model is no more attractive than the 20th century Baathist model. Perhaps, by its very nature, results-driven technocracy is non-liberal, even if it isn’t necessarily illiberal. Perhaps, the new Syria even offers glimpses of our own society’s future.

The 20th century liberal democratic model is going the same way as the great 20th century totalitarianisms it defined itself against. Yet — as reflected in liberal discourse where the assumption made is that politics is a binary choice between liberalism and fascism — liberals are still trapped in the 20th century, fighting ghosts, even as the world has already moved on. Applied to the international order, then, the conclusion — we must hope — of the war in Syria is a perfect example of this conceptual shift. Just a few years ago, the operating assumption that a stable conclusion to the Syrian war was really something within the West’s (which means America’s) power to bring. Instead, we have witnessed the opposite: rebel victory was brought by a group the West shuns, under US terror sanctions for perfectly valid reasons. The West’s purported end state in Syria, a rebel victory, was brought about by the West walking away from the problem, and conceding strategic defeat. Yet the relatively bloodless form of political transition witnessed in the past few weeks was also brought by the seeming strategic victors — the supposed resistance axis of Iran, Russia and Hezbollah — making the pragmatic decision to withdraw support from Assad, confident that they could maintain their interests in the new order.

For all the moralising discourse we’ve suffered on Syria over the past decade, the conflict was internally, a multipolar one, with multiple armed groups making pragmatic bargains and shifting alliances depending on their self-interested needs of the moment. That internal dynamic has now recapitulated itself in terms of the international order, with the pragmatic and so far mutually agreeable deal-making of regional powers presenting, if anything, a hopeful vision of multipolarity in action. What does all this mean for us, for Britain and for the West?

Just before Christmas, Robert Jenrick published a piece in The Telegraph arguing that “liberal interventionism is dead”, saying, explicitly, that “The experiment in liberal utopianism has proven to be a fantasy.” It is difficult to imagine a senior Conservative politician — and, surely, the next leader of the Tory party — making this case, and certainly not using this terminology, then seen as rather a fringe view within IR discourse, even during the last Trump administration. That Jenrick does so is a reflection not just of the manifold and obvious failures of liberal interventionism at the height of American imperial power, but also of the fact that its power has waned, we can assume, permanently — unless, like HTS, liberals wage a shock campaign of reconquest from their embattled stronghold.  Arguing, as Jenrick does, for Britain’s “Palmerstonian pursuit of our self-interest abroad” is a tentative glimpse of British foreign policy in this new multipolar order — something that would have sounded naughtily transgressive just a few years years is now the common sense worldview of a senior Tory writing for The Telegraph readership. That is how rapidly the world has changed.

Will the second coming of the Trump World Order be similarly pragmatic? On Ukraine, Trump’s likely aim of imposing a painful peace on the country, writing off its losing war, can certainly be framed as ruthlessly pragmatic. Yet, whether bullying humour or sincere, Trump’s rumblings of annexations and interventions in North America — of absorbing Canada and Greenland while imposing order on Mexico — are surely less so. Yet intimidating Canada and Denmark at least robs America’s Nato vassals of the comforting illusion they are partners instead of vassals: perhaps a pragmatic case can be made for establishing the ground rules of 21st-century international politics early on. The lanyard-wearing, security conference-attending clerisy of liberal Atlanticism now finds itself wedded to an order of purely homeopathic liberalism. Flanked from across both the Atlantic and the Channel by a Rightist surge whose form is still being defined, the changing political order will hit Whitehall’s ideologues hardest of all.

Perhaps, like Jolani, we should rethink our situation from first principles. If we could put every aspect of 21st-century Britain’s governance, individually, to a referendum, which parts would survive? The gap between the likely answers and the current reality explains British politics at this moment. It is sadly ironic that while Syria seems to be acquiring pragmatic, post-ideological governance led by al-Qaeda veterans, Britain is still ruled by the arcane processes and ideological fixations of zealots. As in France and Germany, now rendered ungovernable by the last ideological spasm of Left-liberalism, its total commitment to mass immigration and its consequences as a moral end in itself — its last irreducible principle when all other goals and aspirations have been abandoned —  will define British politics in the coming decades. European politics in the 2020s is largely the product of safe, orderly societies suddenly becoming not so; Americans, who are used to this lifestyle, thinking we’re being prissy about it; and European progressives, who are entirely America-brained provincials, are taking social cues from the imperial metropole rather than their own lived experience.

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Why liberals keep losing

By Jeff Bloodworth

Yet it is the liberal argument, that such a dramatic and socially-disruptive course of action is both natural and desirable that now requires defending — the pragmatic case is simply that the experiment has been tried and, as many warned, failed. Slowly, then suddenly, the progressives became marginal reactionaries and the dissident Right, the sensible pragmatists. The fundamental demand of the British new Right, from which Conservative party and its allied thinktank-thought is now increasingly downstream, is a return to the Britain of the early Nineties: a hard reset to fix the bad coding newly written into the system. Yet, as it stands, the British state in 2024 appears to be an experiment in formulating an angry ethnic nationalism, by heightening competition for increasingly scarce resources. This is a dangerous path to travel: the pragmatic choice is simply to admit, and undo, the errors of past ideologues.

Yet no less than Starmer’s Labour Party, an increasingly isolationist holdout of a now-dead order, the Conservative Party is wedded to the past. Its choice of Badenoch, a leftover 2010s culture warrior seemingly self-exiled from party politics in search of ageless Tory principles to bear back down from the mountain, was a poor one. The British Right is now rapidly consolidating on a Cummings-Jenrick-Lowe platform, of data-driven questioning of bad governance, and urging the necessity of radical reform — with Starmer now signalling his own agreement. The previous model failed, but we live in a time of change: in Britain as in Syria, the people will tolerate experiments in governance that offer them prosperity, security and stability. The rigid ideological certainties of the 20th century did not serve us Europeans well. To survive the coming order, our political leadership should accept the luxury of pragmatism over fossilised principles that the dawning world order affords it.

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What would 'living with less' actually look like?

By Peter Franklin

So, if you could snap your fingers and wish those years away, would you? I’m placing the decision entirely in your hands. There is a catch however. If you do decide to turn back time, you don’t get any younger. Nor do the people in your life. The dearly departed don’t come back, but on the other hand any children you might have aren’t erased. Rather, it’s the state of the world that goes back by two whole decades: politics, society, culture, technology — that sort of thing.

By the way, if you’re currently doing a job that didn’t exist at the Millennium, this is magicked into the nearest equivalent. Thus if you’re an Uber driver then you’d be working for a regular taxi firm instead. If you’re a journalist at a current affairs website, then you’d be working for the dead tree press. You get the idea. That said, I’m not sure what a social media ‘influencer’ would be doing in my scenario — but let’s pretend it’s something useful.

Anyway, for the purposes of this thought experiment, assume that your personal circumstances are more or less as they are now, it’s just the bigger picture that’s been reset to the 1st January, 2000.

With all that understood, do you still snap your fingers? I’d imagine those of an optimistic disposition definitely wouldn’t. Why wish away 20 years of progress? But the pessimists might ask: what progress?

At the start of the 21st century, 9/11 hadn’t happened yet. We hadn’t ploughed into Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, George W Bush had yet to be elected President. And even if the hanging chads were still to swing the same way, we shouldn’t forget that Dubya was elected on a foreign policy platform of non-interventionism. In re-setting history, there’s a chance that the hijacking plot would be foiled. Failing that, the response of the US (and UK) governments might not be to invade a country that had nothing to with 9/11.

Obviously, the Middle East featured a pretty horrible set of governments in 2000, but they’re still pretty horrible now. Certain groups — such as the Iraqi Kurds and Shiites — are less downtrodden, but other populations have been devastated by civil war and brutal persecution. Would things have been as bad had the Second Gulf War never happened?

However, I’m getting into the realms of alt-history here and my purpose is much simpler: to ask whether we’re better off now than in 2000.

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Don’t sweat the small stuff, or why the ‘New Optimists’ are only half right

By Peter Franklin

For most of the developing world, the answer is definitely yes. Across a range of issues, including poverty, malnutrition, disease and illiteracy, there’s been real progress. It’s not all good, obviously — the blessings of development must be weighed against the curses, for instance traffic deaths and industrial pollution. But, on the whole, humanity (if not the natural world) is better off than it was 20 years ago. This is the strongest argument — indeed, an overwhelming one — for not hitting the reset button.

Okay, but what if the question was limited to the developed world? Just how good has the 21st century been for us in the UK and the West more generally.

Well, it’s certainly not all bad. Cancer survival rates have improved, for instance. Since the mid-1990s there’s been a long-term decline in crime, including violent crime. Indeed, young people in the 21st century are generally more sensible than previous generations at the same age, with lower levels of drug use and teenage pregnancy. The Post-Millennial generation appears to be especially cautious — almost to a fault. However, patterns do vary from country-to-country — with America’s multi-generational opioid epidemic and the rise in ‘deaths-of-despair’ casting a shadow over the last decade.

In many ways, western societies have become more tolerant over the last 20 years, with big shifts in social attitudes on issues like same sex marriage and associated changes in the law. But, again, there’s a countervailing tendency — support for populist political movements is now at a level that would have shocked us 20 years ago.

At the start of the 21st century, liberal internationalism was all but unchallenged. Bill Clinton was still President in the US, Tony Blair Prime Minister in the UK and Gerhard Schröder Chancellor in Germany. The Euro had been launched the previous year, but Greece wasn’t a member yet. In both Russia and China, those in charge were assumed to be reformist and well-disposed to us. The ex-Communist countries of central and eastern Europe were in the process of integrating with the West, and in the world as a whole globalisation was the order of the day. Francis Fukuyama’s End of History, published in 1992, looked like a pretty good guide to the future.

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How to beat the politics of punishment

By Peter Franklin

But there were early signs of trouble: on 31 December 1999, Boris Yeltsin resigned to be replaced by Vladimir Putin. Earlier that year, an obscure political party called UKIP won its first MEPs in the European Parliament, including a chap called Nigel Farage. The US presidential election of 2000 was unusually divisive, culminating in a bitterly polarising battle over the Florida result. 2000 also saw the dot-com crash — an advanced warning of the bubble-prone weakness of 21st-century capitalism.

However, the cracks in the system went unnoticed — not least due to the external shock of 9/11. And yet the warnings kept coming. In 2002, there was a major upset in the first round of the French Presidential election — when Jean-Marie Le Pen knocked-out the Socialist candidate to make it through to the run-off. He was then trounced by Jacques Chirac, but the result prefigured a new pattern for western politics — the rise of the populist Right and the decline of the centre-Left.

Pre-occupied with the Middle East and an economic boom back home, political establishments across the West didn’t see themselves as under threat. The Le Pen thing was written off as a French aberration. But then came disaster after disaster: The Iraq insurgency. The Afghan quagmire. The credit crunch. The banking crisis. The Great Recession. The Eurozone crisis. The Syrian civil war. The rise of ISIS. The refugee crisis. Brexit. Trump. Populist revolts in western Europe. Populist governments in the east.

This wasn’t just bad luck, but the result of errors of judgement and lapses in responsibility on the part of the rich and powerful. Furthermore, people can feel this failure in their daily lives: the weakness of wage growth, the unaffordability of home ownership, the escalating cost of higher education. Despite the deepest recession in living memory, most economies have grown since 2000. But for a lot of us — especially the young and those left behind by the geographical concentration of economic opportunity, things haven’t got better — and certainly not 20-years’-worth of better.

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What if we were to lose the last ten years of technological progress?

By Peter Franklin

Oh, but what about technology? Would you really want to swap your iPhone 11 for a BlackBerry 850? Your Samsung Galaxy A50 for an original Nokia 3310? Would you want the squat mass of CRT monitor sitting on your desk again? Do you miss the weird sounds made by a dial-up internet connection? Or download speeds that would make a tortoise blush?

Digital is one area where progress is unmistakable — and everyday life is different as a result. And yet, in 2000, the internet was still a hopeful place — we genuinely believed that tech would enable a great decentralisation of power. But that, of course was before Facebook and Amazon conquered the world; before the nastiness of online debate poisoned politics; before China began building its techno-totalitarian state.

In 2000, we had the convenience of mobile communication — minus the downsides we’ve come to discover since. There being no smartphones, we’d yet to be zombified by them. But what about the upsides of unlimited access to the global store of human knowledge? Well that, perhaps, is the most depressing thing about the 21st century so far. Previous breakthroughs in communication have triggered breakthroughs in science, industry, culture and philosophy. But what does the West have to show for the Internet? Science is slowing down and productivity is faltering. As for a 21st-century Renaissance or Enlightenment, where is it? (And, no, the Great Awokening doesn’t count).

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Why I've reported Douglas Murray to the police

By Titania McGrath

I don’t want to be too much of a grump here. Taking a global view, I wouldn’t want to go back to the year 2000. Thanks to trends set in train decades previously, the last 20 years have improved conditions for most of humanity. As for the developed world, we shouldn’t deny the progress made this century — let’s count our blessings and be grateful for them.

And yet we could have, should have, achieved more. We’ve every right to be disappointed — both in our leaders and ourselves.