The Fifth Republic is far from alone here. For Western democracy is under threat — not from “foreign adversaries”, or “far-Right populists”, but from its own elites. Whether in Britain, Germany or Ireland, censorship has become routine across Europe and beyond, even as dissent is increasingly criminalized and legal systems are weaponized to suppress opposition. In recent months, these trends have escalated into direct assaults on the basic institutions of democratic governance. In Romania, to give one example, an entire election was annulled because it delivered the wrong outcome, while other countries contemplate similar measures too.

In theory, all this is being carried out in the name of defending democracy. In truth, the purpose is clear: to help ruling elites maintain their grip on power in the face of a historic collapse of legitimacy. Whether they will succeed in doing so remains to be seen. What is clear, though, is that the stakes are enormous. If elites manage to entrench their control through increasingly authoritarian means, the West will enter a new era of managed democracy — or democracy in name only. If they fail, and in the absence of a coherent alternative, the resulting vacuum may give way to deepening instability, social unrest and systemic crisis. Either way, the outlook for the future of Western democracy is grim.

Critics have been raising alarms about this elite-driven democratic backsliding for years. As far back as 2000, political scientist Colin Crouch coined the term “post-democracy” to describe the fact that, even though Western societies boasted the trappings of freedom, they had increasingly become a meaningless facade. Elections, Crouch argued, had become tightly managed spectacles, orchestrated by professional persuaders who operated within a shared neoliberal consensus — pro-market, pro-business, pro-globalization — and offered voters little choice on fundamental political or economic questions. Citizens, for their part, played a passive role, helpless in the face of political and corporate power. Politics, Crouch said, was “slipping back into the control of privileged elites in the manner characteristic of pre-democratic times”.

Crouch was writing at the peak of what Francis Fukuyama famously called the end of history. In the political scientist’s telling, the Cold War’s end, and the global triumph of Western liberal democracy, marked the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution”. Subsequent upheavals — especially following the 2007-8 financial crisis — shattered any illusion of history’s halt. Yet Fukuyama’s core argument wasn’t so much that the clock of history had stopped spinning, but that, from then on, there would be no essential challenge to liberal democracy and market capitalism, deemed the pinnacle of social evolution.

For a while, Fukuyama’s prediction proved correct. The historical defeat of socialism shrank the ideological space in the West, foreclosing any fundamental challenge to capitalism and enabling the emergence of a technocratic, depoliticized governance model underpinned by the “TINA” (There Is No Alternative) consensus around neoliberalism — centered on individual responsibility, market hegemony and globalization. Left-wing protests, whether against globalization or the Iraq War, failed to transition into formal politics. On the contrary, much of the post-Cold War Left, having abandoned class conflict for liberal-cosmopolitan identity politics, became a legitimizing force for an aggressive “progressive neoliberalism” — a fusion of pseudo-progressivism and neoliberal economic policies.

Geopolitically, meanwhile, US “hyperpower” status allowed it to aggressively assert global hegemony, creating a unipolar “new world order”. This was underpinned by structural economic shifts within the West: the decline of traditional manufacturing, and the Fordist-Keynesian social contract, replaced by services, labor dispersion, precarity and fragmentation. Most Western countries saw manufacturing employment decline by a third-to-half in absolute numbers. This pulverized the working class as a unified political subject — along the way wrecking trade unions and other material symbols of postwar mass politics.

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Kaja Kallas is the real threat to Europe

By Thomas Fazi

This historical trend was exacerbated by policies deliberately aimed at reducing labor’s bargaining power (anti-union laws, labor market flexibilization), and promoting privatized consumerism and apathy. Meanwhile, decision-making processes were increasingly insulated from democratic pressures, chiefly through the surrendering of national prerogatives to supranational institutions and super-state bureaucracies such as the European Union. This strategy of depoliticizing democracy birthed what some have called “post-politics”: a regime where political spectacle thrives, but where systemic alternatives to the neoliberal status quo are not just repressed but foreclosed. The American journalist Thomas Friedman aptly described the post-political neoliberal regime as one where “policy choices get reduced to Pepsi or Coke” — minor variations within an unchallenged framework.

The concept of post-politics inevitably intersects with that of democracy. A minimalist view of democracy, focused only on rules and elections, suggests it survived the “end of history”, as formal institutions persisted and in some cases expanded (such as in former communist states). Yet substantive democracy — meaning citizens’ ability to actively shape government policy and the political agenda — has eroded dramatically. With no systemic alternative, politics and substantive democracy withered, resulting in declining voter turnout. One might say that the defining characteristic of post-democracy is that, despite the existence of elections, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. Instead, power and influence are concentrated in the hands of a small subset of society.

Of course, since authors like Crouch first diagnosed this hollowing out of democracy from within, things have become exponentially worse, especially in the wake of the financial crisis. The post-democratic politics of the neoliberal era were actually intensified during the 2010s, becoming increasingly repressive and authoritarian. In the EU, under the pretext of responding to the financial and euro crises, the bloc’s supranational institutions (notably the ECB and European Commission) dramatically expanded their powers, imposing budgetary rules and structural reforms on member states without democratic oversight.

Beyond these institutional shifts, meanwhile, unelected elites increasingly interfered in the democratic processes of member states. The ECB’s “monetary coup” against Berlusconi in 2011, where the central bank effectively forced the prime minister to leave office by making his ouster the precondition for further support for Italian bonds and banks, is one good example here. The financial blackmail of Greece’s Tsipras government is another. Taken together, anyway, these events led some observers to suggest that the EU was becoming a “post-democratic prototype” — one fiercely opposed to national sovereignty and democracy both.

The scorched earth left behind by the financial crisis, and the elite-imposed austerity that followed, fueled in the mid-2010s our century’s first major anti-establishment uprisings: Brexit, Trump, the Yellow Vests and growing anti-EU sentiment across Europe. This mass awakening seemingly marked the “end of the end of history”, a widespread rejection of the post-Cold War neoliberal order. Even so, these challenges ultimately failed — absorbed or neutralized by the establishment through repression and ideological counter-offensives.

In this sense, the pandemic, beyond its epidemiological nature, can be interpreted as a “deep structural event” that accelerated this authoritarian centralization of power. Governments inflated the danger of the virus to sweep aside democratic procedures, militarize societies, crack down on liberties and implement unprecedented measures of social control — in the process “freezing” democratic politics and sapping whatever energy was left from the populist movements of the late 2010s.

Similar authoritarian dynamics resurged with the Russia-Ukraine conflict, with the media-political establishment smearing, censoring and even punishing voices critical to Western hawkishness. Just over a month ago, the EU, in a shocking and utterly unprecedented decision, sanctioned three EU citizens — banning them from traveling through the EU and freezing their bank accounts — for allegedly engaging in “pro-Russian propaganda”.

At the same time, new populist threats to the established order have emerged, predominantly from the Right. But so far, these too have failed to disrupt the status quo, partly because the West’s increasingly unpopular and delegitimized elites have turned to ever more brazen forms of repression to influence electoral outcomes and suppress these challenges. The Romanian case marked a fateful escalation: elites, backed by NATO and the EU, overturned a presidential election result, barring the populist candidate via unsubstantiated claims of Russian interference.

These events signal a disturbing trend: elites no longer limit themselves to “managing” electoral outcomes through “soft” or covert means — media manipulation, censorship, lawfare, economic pressure and intelligence operations. Rather, they are increasingly willing to discard the formal structures of democracy altogether. In retrospect, the “post-democratic” era of technocratic managerialism described by Crouch appears positively benign by comparison. All this repression is carried out in the name of defending democracy from so-called internal threats (populists) and external ones (foreign adversaries). Yet it is becoming increasingly clear that its true aim is shoring up elite power.

Most anti-establishment analyses of the current “crisis of democracy”, however, rest on flawed assumptions: that the current phase deviates from a historical norm; that postwar social-democratic capitalism was truly democratic; and that a return to it is possible. These assumptions crumble under scrutiny.

Western liberal democracy, even minimally defined as representative government based on universal suffrage, is a very recent phenomenon. Full male suffrage emerged in a limited number of countries only between the middle of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Women’s suffrage generally came after the Second World War. Effective voting rights for racial minorities, such as African Americans, arrived decades later. In short, democracy as universal adult suffrage, regardless of wealth, property, race or class, has existed for mere decades. Previously, it was the exclusive domain of propertied elites, or else based on sex or skin color.

Besides, as noted above, democracy is about something far more substantial than the mere act of voting. If it means anything, it must surely allow citizens to influence the state’s direction and shape the political agenda on fundamental issues — whether immigration, foreign policy, or the overall trajectory of social and economic policy. It’s hard to claim Western democracy is thriving on those terms. Yet that still leaves one more question: if “real democracy” is now dead, was it ever alive at all?

For a relatively short period — roughly between the Forties and the Seventies — we did witness a form of democracy that was decidedly more substantive than what exists today. Over these decades, often described as the “golden age” of capitalism, the working classes were integrated into the West’s political systems for the first time in history. This allowed them to gain a significant influence over the political agenda, leading to a substantial expansion of social, economic and political rights, in a context of growing politicization of the masses. The contrast to the post-political period is very stark indeed.

All the same, it’d be wrong to idealize the mid-century West. Even then, democracy in its substantive sense remained heavily constrained. Though the ruling classes were forced — under pressure from popular movements, the Cold War, and the threat of social unrest — to extend voting rights and acknowledge a range of political and social rights, they did not do so willingly. On the contrary, they were often driven by the fear that the masses could pose a real threat to the established social order — that workers might use democracy to overturn existing power relations.

As a result, alongside economic concessions, Western elites also constrained democratic participation in various ways. Modern constitutional systems — including nascent supranational ones like the European Court of Justice, established in 1952 — explicitly limited popular sovereignty. Elected governments were prevented from enacting certain economic or social policies, or even challenging existing international alliances. All the while, power shifted. Parliaments got weaker, and technocrats and judges grew more powerful, each in their way proving capable of overriding national laws. This was often justified as a way of protecting democracy from what elites feared could be the irrational or destabilizing demands of the masses — a longstanding argument in liberal political thought that equates too much popular participation with the risk of populism, mob rule or economic irresponsibility.

In some countries, the concept of “militant democracy” became a further means to limit the popular will. In Germany, for example, it legitimized the banning of political parties, most notably the country’s Communist Party. State authorities, supported by media and institutional elites, systematically repressed demands for deeper democratization, whether via police force, media delegitimization or institutional restructuring. Meanwhile, Western “permanent states” — the military, intelligence and security apparatuses — exercised considerable influence behind the scenes, generally under the direction of the US. That infamously included terrorist acts aimed at curbing the power of Left parties and movements, for example through Gladio. In short, from the very beginning of modern liberal democracy, the ruling classes actively worked to contain democracy within the boundaries of what they deemed acceptable politics.

All the same, for a while, the organized power of the masses was indeed able to constrain, to a greater degree than ever before, the power of capital. As noted, however, this brief period of relative substantive democracy depended on a unique confluence of factors. As these conditions crumbled from the mid-Seventies, the marriage between capitalism and democracy dissolved.

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By Aris Roussinos

The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the symbolic end of this era. In the decades since, we have witnessed a steady erosion of democratic norms — a process that has accelerated dramatically in recent years. Relevant, here, is Carl Schmitt’s “state of exception”, whereby constitutional safeguards are suspended to impose decisions unachievable via normal democratic channels. Yet as the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben emphasized over 20 years ago, the state of exception has now become a permanent condition in Western states.

This, of course, is a paradox: if it is permanent, then, by definition, it is no longer a state of exception. It becomes the rule. But is this permanent state of exception unique to the “post-democratic” era? An analysis of the postwar era suggests not. Rather, it is a fundamental characteristic of the state itself, even in its liberal-democratic guise. This challenges common conceptions of the state: across the Western world, we are accustomed to identifying the state with the executive and with parliament, assuming that these institutions act in accordance with constitutions and the rule of law.

But this is a misunderstanding: the state doesn’t coincide with the institutions of representative democracy. Rather, the two belong to entirely distinct spheres of politics. On the one hand, there is the politics of the state. On the other, there is what we might call popular politics, embodying popular sovereignty and typified by political parties, trade unions, social movements and civil society. The state operates with a significant degree of autonomy from the latter, meaning it is not only largely independent of civil society, but also of parliaments and even governments themselves.

In theory, after all, state bureaucracies act as neutral executors of government policy. In reality, they often act independently of, or even in opposition to, elected parliaments and governments, particularly when it comes to protecting institutional continuity, legal norms or elite interests. Supreme and constitutional courts, for example, frequently rule against government policies — especially when it comes to controversial issues like immigration. The way in which the Bank of England derailed Liz Truss’s infamous mini-budget is another example here. This phenomenon is obviously much more pronounced when national governments are subordinated to supranational institutions, as in the European Union. And then, of course, you have the military and intelligence bureaucracies, which today arguably exercise more influence than ever before (see, for instance, the Russiagate hoax).

The state thus emerges as a social organism endowed with its own internal logic and continuity, capable of pursuing goals and directions often independent of those declared or pursued by the political leadership of the day. This has always been true — even if, depending on the relative balance of class forces within society, the state may at times be forced to make concessions to the forces of popular politics. In other words, then, today’s crisis doesn’t represent democracy’s sudden collapse, but instead the unveiling of how power truly works. The contemporary crisis of Western democracy exposes the limits of formal democratic institutions, bringing the logic of state power into blindingly sharp relief.

The future, unfortunately, seems bleak. The conditions enabling the brief period of substantive democracy are gone, and unlikely to return soon. In a real sense, substantive democracy is dead. Even so, the unraveling geopolitical order underpinning Western dominance — challenged by the emergence of a multipolar order underpinned by the rise of powers like China — marks a profound political and economic shift. The erosion of Western hegemony is weakening its elites, whose dominance has long relied on both internal suppression and power projection abroad. Declining influence overseas exacerbates domestic discontent, especially when fueled by rising and systemic inequality.

This unraveling exposes the structural weaknesses of the Western system. Without the geopolitical stability and economic dominance that once masked its internal contradictions, elites are growing more vulnerable. Crucially, this decline also paves the way for a potential new order — not just a geopolitical reconfiguration, but a potential reimagining of political and economic systems. As Western elites grapple with their waning power, there are vast opportunities for alternative visions of governance and democracy.

What lies ahead is not merely a question of whether democracy can be “restored”, but whether a new political project can emerge to replace the exhausted model of elite-managed liberalism. The old order is collapsing, but the new has yet to be born. In this vacuum, anything can happen.

There’s nothing new about this sort of arrangement. In its day, the British Empire controlled an even larger share of the planet’s wealth, and the Spanish Empire played a comparable role further back. Before then, there were other empires, though limits to transport technologies meant that their reach wasn’t as large. Nor, by the way, was any of this an invention of people with light-coloured skin. Mighty empires flourished in Asia and Africa when the peoples of Europe lived in thatched-roofed mud huts. Empires rise whenever a nation becomes powerful enough to dominate other nations and drain them of wealth. They’ve thrived as far back as records go and they’ll doubtless thrive for as long as human civilisations exist.

America’s empire came into being in the wake of the collapse of the British Empire, during the fratricidal European wars of the early 20th century. Throughout those bitter years, the role of global hegemon was up for grabs, and by 1930 or so it was pretty clear that Germany, the Soviet Union or the US would end up taking the prize. In the usual way, two contenders joined forces to squeeze out the third, and then the victors went at each other, carving out competing spheres of influence until one collapsed. When the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, the US emerged as the last empire standing.

Francis Fukuyama insisted in a 1989 essay that having won the top slot, the US was destined to stay there forever. He was, of course, wrong, but then he was a Hegelian and couldn’t help it. (If a follower of Hegel tells you the sky is blue, go look.) The ascendancy of one empire guarantees that other aspirants for the same status will begin sharpening their knives. They’ll get to use them, too, because empires invariably wreck themselves: over time, the economic and social consequences of empire destroy the conditions that make empire possible. That can happen quickly or slowly, depending on the mechanism that each empire uses to extract wealth from its subject nations.

The mechanism the US used for this latter purpose was ingenious but even more short-term than most. In simple terms, the US imposed a series of arrangements on most other nations that guaranteed the lion’s share of international trade would use US dollars as the medium of exchange, and saw to it that an ever-expanding share of world economic activity required international trade. (That’s what all that gabble about “globalisation” meant in practice.) This allowed the US government to manufacture dollars out of thin air by way of gargantuan budget deficits, so that US interests could use those dollars to buy up vast amounts of the world’s wealth. Since the excess dollars got scooped up by overseas central banks and business firms, which needed them for their own foreign trade, inflation stayed under control while the wealthy classes in the US profited mightily.

The problem with this scheme is the same difficulty faced by all Ponzi schemes, which is that, sooner or later, you run out of suckers to draw in. This happened not long after the turn of the millennium, and along with other factors — notably the peaking of global conventional petroleum production — it led to the financial crisis of 2008-2010. Since 2010 the US has been lurching from one crisis to another. This is not accidental. The wealth pump that kept the US at the top of the global pyramid has been sputtering as a growing number of nations have found ways to keep a larger share of their own wealth by expanding their domestic markets and raising the kind of trade barriers the US used before 1945 to build its own economy. The one question left is how soon the pump will start to fail altogether.

When Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the US and its allies responded not with military force but with punitive economic sanctions, which were expected to cripple the Russian economy and force Russia to its knees. Apparently, nobody in Washington considered the possibility that other nations with an interest in undercutting the US empire might have something to say about that. Of course, that’s what happened. China, which has the largest economy on Earth in purchasing-power terms, extended a middle finger in the direction of Washington and upped its imports of Russian oil, gas, grain and other products. So did India, currently the third-largest economy on Earth in the same terms; as did more than 100 other countries.

Then there’s Iran, which most Americans are impressively stupid about. Iran is the 17th largest nation in the world, more than twice the size of Texas and even more richly stocked with oil and natural gas. It’s also a booming industrial power. It has a thriving automobile industry, for example, and builds and launches its own orbital satellites. It’s been dealing with severe US sanctions since not long after the Shah fell in 1978, so it’s a safe bet that the Iranian government and industrial sector know every imaginable trick for getting around those sanctions.

Right after the start of the Ukraine war, Russia and Iran suddenly started inking trade deals to Iran’s great benefit. Clearly, one part of the quid pro quo was that the Iranians passed on their hard-earned knowledge about how to dodge sanctions to an attentive audience of Russian officials. With a little help from China, India and most of the rest of humanity, the total failure of the sanctions followed in short order. Today, the sanctions are hurting the US and Europe, not Russia, but the US leadership has wedged itself into a position from which it can’t back down. This may go a long way towards explaining why the Russian campaign in Ukraine has been so leisurely. The Russians have no reason to hurry. They know that time is not on the side of the US.

For many decades now, the threat of being cut out of international trade by US sanctions was the big stick Washington used to threaten unruly nations that weren’t small enough for a US invasion or fragile enough for a CIA-backed regime-change operation. Over the last year, that big stick turned out to be made of balsa wood and snapped off in Joe Biden’s hand. As a result, all over the world, nations that thought they had no choice but to use dollars in their foreign trade are switching over to their own currencies, or to the currencies of rising powers. The US dollar’s day as the global medium of exchange is thus ending.

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We are the authors of our decline

By John Michael Greer

It’s been interesting to watch economic pundits reacting to this. As you might expect, quite a few of them simply deny that it’s happening — after all, economic statistics from previous years don’t show it yet, Some others have pointed out that no other currency is ready to take on the dollar’s role; this is true, but irrelevant. When the British pound lost a similar role in the early years of the Great Depression, no other currency was ready to take on its role either. It wasn’t until 1970 or so that the US dollar finished settling into place as the currency of global trade. In the interval, international trade lurched along awkwardly using whatever currencies or commodity swaps the trading partners could settle on: that is to say, the same situation that’s taking shape around us in the free-for-all of global trade that will define the post-dollar era.

One of the interesting consequences of the shift now under way is a reversion to the mean of global wealth distribution. Until the era of European global empire, the economic heart of the world was in east and south Asia. India and China were the richest countries on the planet, and a glittering necklace of other wealthy states from Iran to Japan filled in the picture. To this day, most of the human population is found in the same part of the world. The great age of European conquest temporarily diverted much of that wealth to Europe, impoverishing Asia in the process. That condition began to break down with the collapse of European colonial empires in the decade following the Second World War, but some of the same arrangements were propped up by the US thereafter. Now those are coming apart, and Asia is rising. By next year, four of the five largest economies on the planet in terms of purchasing power parity will be Asian. The fifth is the US, and it may not be in that list for much longer.

In short, America is bankrupt. Our governments from the federal level down, our big corporations and a very large number of our well-off citizens have run up gargantuan debts, which can only be serviced given direct or indirect access to the flows of unearned wealth the US extracted from the rest of the planet. Those debts cannot be paid off, and many of them can’t even be serviced for much longer. The only options are defaulting on them or inflating them out of existence, and in either case, arrangements based on familiar levels of expenditure will no longer be possible. Since the arrangements in question include most of what counts as an ordinary lifestyle in today’s US, the impact of their dissolution will be severe.

In effect, the 5% of us in this country are going to have to go back to living the way we did before 1945. If we still had the factories, the trained workforce, the abundant natural resources and the thrifty habits we had back then, that would have been a wrenching transition but not a debacle. The difficulty, of course, is that we don’t have those things anymore. The factories were shut down in the offshoring craze of the Seventies and Eighties, when the imperial economy slammed into overdrive, and the trained workforce was handed over to malign neglect.

We’ve still got some of the natural resources, but nothing like what we once had. The thrifty habits? Those went whistling down the wind a long time ago. In the late stages of an empire, exploiting flows of unearned wealth from abroad is far more profitable than trying to produce wealth at home, and most people direct their efforts accordingly. That’s how you end up with the typical late-imperial economy, with a governing class that flaunts fantastic levels of paper wealth, a parasite class of hangers-on that thrive by catering to the very rich or staffing the baroque bureaucratic systems that permeate public and private life, and the vast majority of the population impoverished, sullen, and unwilling to lift a finger to save their soi-disant betters from the consequences of their own actions.

The good news is that there’s a solution to all this. The bad news is that it’s going to take a couple of decades of serious turmoil to get there. The solution is that the US economy will retool itself to produce earned wealth in the form of real goods and non-financial services. That’ll happen inevitably as the flows of unearned wealth falter, foreign goods become unaffordable to most Americans, and it becomes profitable to produce things here in the US again. The difficulty, of course, is that most of a century of economic and political choices meant to support our former imperial project are going to have to be undone.

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By Michael Lind

The most obvious example? The metastatic bloat of government, corporate and non-profit managerial jobs in American life. That’s a sensible move in an age of empire, as it funnels money into the consumer economy, which provides what jobs exist for the impoverished classes. Public and private offices alike teem with legions of office workers whose labour contributes nothing to national prosperity but whose pay cheques prop up the consumer sector. That bubble is already losing air. It’s indicative that Elon Musk, after his takeover of Twitter, fired some 80% of that company’s staff; other huge internet combines are pruning their workforce in the same way, though not yet to the same degree.

The recent hullaballoo about artificial intelligence is helping to amplify the same trend. Behind the chatbots are programs called large language models (LLMs), which are very good at imitating the more predictable uses of human language. A very large number of office jobs these days spend most of their time producing texts that fall into that category: contracts, legal briefs, press releases, media stories and so on. Those jobs are going away. Computer coding is even more amenable to LLM production, so you can kiss a great many software jobs goodbye as well. Any other form of economic activity that involves assembling predictable sequences of symbols is facing the same crunch. A recent paper by Goldman Sachs estimates that something like 300 million jobs across the industrial world will be wholly or partly replaced by LLMs in the years immediately ahead.

Another technology with similar results is CGI image creation. Levi’s announced not long ago that all its future catalogues and advertising will use CGI images instead of highly-paid models and photographers. Expect the same thing to spread generally. Oh, and Hollywood’s next. We’re not too far from the point at which a program can harvest all the footage of Marilyn Monroe from her films, and use that to generate new Marilyn Monroe movies for a tiny fraction of what it costs to hire living actors, camera crews and the rest. The result will be a drastic decrease in high-paying jobs across a broad swathe of the economy.

The outcome of all this? Well, one lot of pundits will insist at the top of their lungs that nothing will change in any way that matters, and another lot will start shrieking that the apocalypse is upon us. Those are the only two options our collective imagination can process these days. Of course, neither of those things will actually happen.

What will happen instead is that the middle and upper-middle classes in the US, and in many other countries, will face the same kind of slow demolition that swept over the working classes of those same countries in the late 20th century. Layoffs, corporate bankruptcies, declining salaries and benefits, and the latest high-tech version of NO HELP WANTED signs will follow one another at irregular intervals. All the businesses that make money catering to these same classes will lose their incomes as well, a piece at a time. Communities will hollow out the way the factory towns of America’s Rust Belt and the English Midlands did half a century ago, but this time it will be the turn of upscale suburbs and fashionable urban neighbourhoods to collapse as the income streams that supported them disappear.

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This is not going to be a fast process. The US dollar is losing its place as the universal medium of foreign trade, but it will still be used by some countries for years to come. The unravelling of the arrangements that direct unearned wealth to the US will go a little faster, but that will still take time. The collapse of the cubicle class and the gutting of the suburbs will unfold over decades. That’s the way changes of this kind play out.

As for what people can do in response this late in the game, I refer to a post I made on The Archdruid Report in 2012 titled “Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush”. In that post I pointed out that the unravelling of the American economy, and the broader project of industrial civilisation, was picking up speed around us, and those who wanted to get ready for it needed to start preparing soon by cutting their expenses, getting out of debt, and picking up the skills needed to produce goods and services for people rather than the corporate machine. I’m glad to say that some people did these things, but a great many others rolled their eyes, or made earnest resolutions to do something as soon as things were more convenient, which they never were.

Over the years that followed I repeated that warning and then moved on to other themes, since there really wasn’t much point to harping on about the approaching mess when the time to act had slipped away. Those who made preparations in time will weather the approaching mess as well as anyone can. Those who didn’t? The rush is here. I’m sorry to say that whatever you try, it’s likely that there’ll be plenty of other frantic people trying to do the same thing. You might still get lucky, but it’s going to be a hard row to hoe.

Mind you, I expect some people to take a different tack. In the months before a prediction of mine comes true, I reliably field a flurry of comments insisting that I’m too rigid and dogmatic in my views about the future, that I need to be more open-minded about alternative possibilities, that wonderful futures are still in reach, and so on. I got that in 2008 just before the real estate bubble started to go bust, as I’d predicted, and I also got it in 2010 just before the price of oil peaked and started to slide, as I’d also predicted, taking the peak oil movement with it. I’ve started to field the same sort of criticism once again.

We are dancing on the brink of a long slippery slope into an unwelcome new reality. I’d encourage readers in America and its close allies to brace themselves for a couple of decades of wrenching economic, social, and political turmoil. Those elsewhere will have an easier time of it, but it’s still going to be a wild ride before the rubble stops bouncing, and new social, economic, and political arrangements get patched together out of the wreckage.

Some people are seeing this war as further evidence of the demise of the liberal world order; you seem to see in it an opportunity?

Vladimir Putin is at the centre of a global anti-liberal campaign waged by authoritarian great powers like Russia and China, but also by a number of populists that have arisen in democratic countries, like Viktor Orbán in Hungary or our Donald Trump. Putin said very explicitly that he thought liberalism was an obsolete doctrine. And a lot of conservatives in the United States have actually (they’re backing away from it now) said they like Putin; they like the idea of a strongman that could cut through all the liberal nonsense they saw going on in their societies. With this invasion of another democratic country, Putin has created a certain amount of moral clarity. The biggest advantage of a liberal state is the fact that it’s not authoritarian. It’s not a dictatorship; it doesn’t kill people; it doesn’t invade neighbours. Putin’s demonstrated what the alternative to liberalism is.

So you see in this war the possibility of “a new birth of freedom”. What do you mean by that?

Well, I think that our liberal democracies have gotten very complacent over the last 30 years. After the fall of the former Soviet Union, we had this extended period of peace and prosperity. And I think that especially younger people who grew up in that world, where they didn’t experience either the violent conflict of the twentieth century, or the dictatorship of a communist regime, began to take liberal democracy for granted. They assumed that this was simply the way the world was, and nobody could threaten that. And as a result, they weren’t willing to actively defend democracy where it was under threat. And I think that’s one of the reasons that Putin thought that he could get away with this invasion: because he thought that the United States is internally very divided, that Europe really doesn’t believe in much of anything anymore. One of the nice things that has happened is the unity that’s been expressed within the Nato alliance, especially in Germany, where they basically revised 40 years of Ostpolitik.

But the reality is that it’s a nationalist battle, isn’t it? 

I don’t think you can be in favour of liberal democracy unless it’s embedded in a nation. I don’t think there’s an abstraction called “liberal democracy” that people fight on behalf of; they fight for liberal institutions in their country, and they fight as a result of national pride, and because they like the institutions. I remember distinctly — I’ve been to Ukraine many times since 2013 — walking around Maidan Square: you feel like you’re in a free society because people can come and go as they wish, they can criticise the government, they can vote for opposition parties. There was a freedom that you could experience in Ukraine prior to this invasion that you couldn’t experience in Russia. That’s really what made Ukrainian nationhood different from Russian nationhood: Russians had to live with this centralised dictatorship and Ukrainians could live with a very similar culture, but in a free society.

Is there an outcome where, while the West becomes more assertive, it continues on the road of becoming essentially less liberal — because it’s more effective to assert your competitive advantage in a more Chinese or East Asian-style society?

No, I think that the real alternative is to correct some of — what I would regard as — the excesses of liberalism that have driven some of the opposition to liberalism itself, and I think that exists both on the Right and the Left. It has nothing to do with accommodating a more Chinese type of regime. But really the important choices are within what we’ve understood to be the liberal tradition, and I think that’s true on both the Right and the Left. On the Right, you had a kind of economic liberalism that evolved into what’s now called neoliberalism, which was a kind of worship of the market and a denigration of the state, which led to a kind of globalisation that put economic efficiency above all other social goods and led to a big increase in inequality. Globally, it led to a deterioration of a lot of public services; everything was just seen to be an expression of private interest. That needs to be walked back. On the Right, you had a vast expansion of the idea of personal autonomy. One of the good things about a liberal society is that it protects personal autonomy, but our autonomy is not unlimited. We are creatures that want community: we want to share values with other people. When you have a liberalism that is like an acid that destroys any prior sense of community: that’s something people don’t really like. When it undermines a sense of nation, and the ability to feel patriotic: that’s a problem liberal societies have had.

One example of this is the debate around free speech, which you observe has become more problematic in the past few years. Do you now see that being able to be reversed?

Some of the biggest threats to free speech are not actually those that are being done by governments, particularly governments in the democratic world. The real problem is a private one. Big internet platforms like Google and Facebook have been amplifying material that is toxic — often conspiracy theories — because what they’re primarily interested in is not the broader democratic community. They care about their bottom lines. A big concentration of private power has contributed to the toxicity of a lot of the discourse in modern democracies. And it leads to these real conundra, because there’s then a call for the government to regulate their activity. So in Germany, they have the NetzdG law that criminalises publishing false or fake news. And that’s where you get into real danger, because it’s not clear that the government is the right regulator of that kind of activity. But it’s not clear either that these large platforms should simply be allowed to make these determinations on their own. Right now, for people on the Left, the leaders of Google and Facebook are sympathetic to their agenda. But imagine if a Rupert Murdoch takes over Facebook, or some equivalent character on the Right, and has that kind of power to amplify certain messages and suppress others.

One of the deeper themes in your work that stretches right back to the End of History — you talk about the Greek word thymos in that book — is that there’s something about polite, liberal democracy in its perfected sense that doesn’t answer some deep questions in the human soul. Do you now think we are predisposed to prefer war to peace in some way?

Not under all circumstances. But there is something that drives us in that direction. Thymos is usually translated into English as spiritedness. You could call it pride, or the demand for respect or recognition. And I think that a great deal of politics is really not about contest over material goods, it’s really a contest over respect. So you think about something like gay marriage or the Me Too movement, these are fundamentally dignity issues where gays and lesbians want to have their unions celebrated as having equal status to heterosexual unions, or women want to be treated with the same respect as men. And this is not really governed by economic calculations. It’s governed by a different kind of desire that oftentimes works at cross-purposes. If you think about what’s going on in populist politics: this kind of demand for respect was very much driving the whole upwelling of voters that voted for Brexit and voted for Donald Trump. It’s really the more educated, more cosmopolitan people living in big cities like London, or New York, or San Francisco, that tended to vote for progressive parties, and then people living in smaller communities in the countryside with more traditional values that voted for populists. There’s an economic division there. But there’s also a respect division, because those more educated people tended to look down on the others that didn’t share their particular kind of cosmopolitan worldview. And a politician like Donald Trump was quite brilliant in understanding how much resentment there was, and could play on those resentments. That’s defined a lot of our politics in recent years.

You don’t actually differ that dramatically from some of the more populist thinkers — only while they felt these impulses were virtues or important things that needed to be accommodated, you seem to think they are dangers. Is that fair?

No, I don’t think that’s right. I think that any human striving depends on this sense of pride. This is true at an individual level. If you didn’t want to be recognised as a great pianist, or a great writer, or baseball player, or football player, or whatever, you probably wouldn’t strive for excellence. All of us want the attention and the respect that comes with great human achievement. But the greatest criminals in the world are driven by that desire to stand out. Donald Trump realised that he could be noticed by everybody for saying completely outrageous things that didn’t make any sense in a more narrowly rational way, but they excited people and it got him attention. This desire for respect and recognition is the basis of good behaviour and it’s the basis of bad behaviour. But it doesn’t fall within the economic calculus associated with classical liberalism.

What about the instinct to want to belong to a culture that you recognise as your own, and that you feel at home in. Is that something that the liberal world needs to accommodate better?

It really depends on what that community is based on. In today’s world, if you simply base it on race, or ethnicity, or on a single religion, it isn’t going to work — because our societies today are too diverse, really, to have a single point of reference. But people have a very deep social instinct: they want to have something in common, they want to conform to social norms, they believe in their national identity. And I think the key trick is to make that national identity compatible with liberal values. So it should be based on things that can be accepted by people regardless of their gender, race, ethnicity. That kind of community is going to be thinner than one that’s based on a single, let’s say, religious belief. But I think that it can still be built. The classic one was the Republican community coming out of the French Revolution: it was based on the French language, literary tradition, even a culinary tradition. Someone like Léopold Senghor, the great Senegalese poet, could be taken into the Académie Française because, despite the fact that he’s a black man, he writes beautiful French. That’s my understanding of what a liberal national identity is. You need that identity, but it also needs to be an open and accessible one that accommodates the actual diversity that exists in your society.

So you’re arguing for a pushing back of some of the excesses of liberalism: less ultra-individualism, more of a sense of community, a sense of virtue. In a European context, you’re sounding like a conservative.

If to be a European conservative means that you still believe in the importance of nations, then I would probably categorise myself that way. You need nations, for very pragmatic reasons. The nation is the repository of legitimate violence, basically. This is the old Max Weber understanding of what a state is: a legitimate monopoly of force. And right now, there isn’t an alternative to the nation as a locus of power that is, at the same time, controlled by institutions like the rule of law, and democratic accountability. Therefore, you’re going to have to deal with a world of nations. The European Union sought to get beyond that. In theory, you could have created a federated Europe that behaved more like an actual nation, but what you ended up with was something that wasn’t really that. And when push came to shove, like during the Euro crisis, it fell apart it. There wasn’t that sense of European solidarity between, let’s say, Greeks and Germans.

In this latest book you discuss the preconditions for a confident liberal democracy — its institutions, its rule of law. Are you worried that confidence has now gone in Western countries?

I worry about that more in the United States than in most parts of Europe, because our polarisation has become really intense, to the point where a lot of people on the Republican Right are willing to actually abandon some really important aspects of institutionalised democracy: a pretty strong majority of Republican voters believe that the 2020 election was fraudulent, based simply on a manufactured lie by one person. That’s a really big threat. Liberalism does not accommodate all forms of diversity. If you have a particular party or force or political movement within your society that rejects some of the foundational principles of liberalism, you can’t deal with that. And I think we do face that kind of threat in the United States. It’s ironic, because the United States was always seen as the ur-liberal country. But actually, it’s safer in most parts of Europe, where there’s a greater degree of political consensus.

So does that mean you’re less optimistic about the future for the US?

There are scenarios for the 2024 election that could be very, very nasty, and involve actual violence. I hope it doesn’t come to that. But I think it’s a real danger that, as an American citizen, I’m quite worried about.

Your phrase, “the end of history” is constantly quoted back at you, but it quite accurately describes a period of history. What are we to call the next period that’s coming?

I don’t know what it’s going to look like. A lot of it will depend on the outcome of this war in Ukraine. Because if Putin, who has been so central to the anti-liberal world order, succeeds, then that period is going to look much more authoritarian. On the other hand, if he’s humiliated, forced to back down, then it’s going to look much better for liberal societies around the world. But even if the latter materialises, and he is forced to back down, there are plenty of other illiberal forces out there in the world. There’s China, which is a bigger challenge in a sense, because they’re a more powerful country, and more successful in many ways than Russia has been. There’s all the Venezuelas and Irans and Syrias — these would-be authoritarian or actually authoritarian countries that have ambitions. There’s going to be plenty of struggle left, even if we win this one in Ukraine in the short run.

And your bet, for the record, is that we are going to win that one in some form?

The only reason I think liberalism is going to survive all of this the history of the last 300 years. Liberalism arose after the European Wars of Religion because people realised that fighting over which sect of Christianity you followed was not worth it, and therefore we should have religious toleration. It then got challenged by the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And after those two bloody world wars, people again said, “Well, maybe we shouldn’t be fighting over which nation is dominant, maybe we should come up with a more tolerant system.” And we’ve now gone through another cycle where we have taken liberal principles for granted. And now people are striving for more. So maybe we have to go through another cycle of witnessing the alternatives to liberalism, before we come back to saying, “Oh, well, maybe, tolerating diversity is not such a bad thing after all.” It’s not as bad a cycle as the previous ones. Maybe we might get a little bit inoculated by what Putin has done in Europe.

It’s like a necessary war of some kind?

I hate to say that any war is necessary. But that’s the way it’s worked out in prior centuries of human history.

Bombs are not raining down on our cities; instead, what we are experiencing is the psychological weaponisation of war — and its exploitation as a tool of indoctrination and statecraft in the hands of the establishment.

The Ukraine crisis is undoubtedly a tragedy, but it is merely the latest in a series of geopolitical events stretching back at least 20 years in which the media coverage has been biased, one-sided, and ideological. All of these instances — Iraq, Libya, Syria, and the Afghanistan Withdrawal — were riddled with “structural information traps” that we ignored at our peril.

With each of these conflicts, the coverage gets worse, and the traps become ever more luring and incendiary. In each case, a narrative is constructed and transposed over the reporting, reinforced by sensationalist imagery that could rationalise an intervention and perhaps military action. But none compares to Ukraine. Here, we have witnessed the media of the Free World disseminating dishonest or otherwise uncritical coverage, fake news, Ukrainian disinformation, and propaganda aimed at conditioning the public to internalise the establishment’s Manichean narrative of a deranged madman’s random war of aggression.

Not only has the Ukraine coverage been highly charged, morally self-righteous, and plainly political, it actively demands a collective suspension of disbelief as it cultivates and redirects a natural reaction of sympathy felt by all into a moral outrage that insists on certain retaliation. Some, such as the former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, have irresponsibly vilified the entire Russian population. Others, such as The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, have begun to senselessly demonise prescient realist American academics for daring to shed light on Russia’s basic national security interests and the possibility of a confrontation if they go unrecognised.

So far as the Western legacy media is concerned, we really do live in the post-historical age Francis Fukuyama triumphantly proclaimed in 1989, with liberal internationalism the only acceptable paradigm through which to understand the world. Alternative views are now tantamount to championing tyranny. In each instance, the dictator comes to personify internationally Hegel’s thymotic, if savage, primitive man — the inhumane antithesis of the “last man” —  fighting maniacally against liberal democracy, the march of modernity, and progress itself. Assad, Ghaddafi, the Taliban, and Vladimir Putin all fit this archetype as reactionary actors par excellence necessitating a holy alliance to confront and civilise.

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Such a melioristic framing of international politics justifies and indeed privileges a Manichean narrative of good and evil. In this context, rationality itself is bound to the good, defined as effective conformity with liberal hegemony.

This is how the permanent members of the ruling class view the world. The former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, for instance, has made the enlightening observation that the years-brewing war in Ukraine was a result of Putin simply becoming “unhinged”, suggesting he might be suffering from neurological problems. Not to be outdone, Condoleezza Rice, one of the architects of the Iraq War and the ill-advised 2008 Bucharest declaration (which affirmed Nato’s “open door” towards Ukraine and therefore helped to spark this most recent conflict), bemoaned Putin’s “delusional rendering of history” and “erratic” behaviour.

Perhaps, given the profound crisis of meaning in the West and the gap in solidarity and social cohesion, we should not be surprised. Living under the conditions of rootlessness, spiritual emptiness, and angst, every crisis is an opportunity for mythopoesis. Tragedy is reborn, and we are easily enthralled by the periodic cycles of worship and hero-making. Our faith in the cult of expertise, meanwhile, blinds and lulls us to the potential dangers of such black and white thinking.

As good Straussians, American neoconservatives were among the first to intuit this fact: that owing to disenchantment and the dissolution of our “sacred canopy”, the myth — or the Platonic “noble lie” — can be used to strengthen the Regime. Through their co-option, they would ensure the inherent power of the “noble lie” would be harnessed to regularly generate casus belli for global liberal imperialism. After all, what better unifying force than the “grand American project” of war to energise one’s desire for national greatness and the need for the regimentation of life in a disordered, chaotic Zeitgeist. Led by America, the grand mission of the Anglosphere would therefore have to be “to advance civilisation itself”. Not to mention, heroes also need villains, and it does help that in the Ukrainian archetype, ‘evil’ is not an intangible virus but can be personified onto an ‘other’ — in this case, Vladimir Putin.

This is the fake, performative, and internationalist nationalism of the American elite class: they use emotional triggers to rally the people behind the flag of the state in the name of lofty humanitarian causes which mask their own self-importance and narcissistic greatness. In fact, the systematic and periodic milking of tragedy to sow mass hysteria and manufacture support for the liberal imperium and its rulers has become the modus operandi in Washington. The consequence is not only further empowerment of the martial state, but also the enabling and even the ennobling of America’s war machine.

But so what? So what if our information ecosystem in the West is substantively flawed and prejudiced? Is this kind of systemic information bias, unbalanced coverage, and outright favouritism not endemic to all culture-complexes, prevalent also across state-run media in China, Iran, and Russia? The answer is certainly yes, but with an important qualification: the latter are not liberal democracies.

Some might say the foreign policy hawks have not learned from their catastrophic regime-change wars in the Middle East. But they have. They learned the importance of narrative control and information warfare targeting domestic audiences: consolidating the media, tightening their hold on information, marginalising the few investigative journalists that remain, and nullifying scepticism as examples of appeasement or Putinism. Undoubtedly, the situation seriously endangers civil liberties and freedom of thought in the Anglosphere, undermining the very foundation of Western democracy.

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But wedded to a disturbing, yet ascendant, neo-McCarthyism, the homogenisation of the Western media environment could ultimately prove more ominous than simple government censorship à la North Korea or Iran. At its core, the phenomenon aims to condition public opinion into “correct” acceptable speech patterns in the service of the “noble lie” — using the good heart of most ordinary citizens and their repulsion at human suffering as bait.

This noxious development, unless fully defanged and neutralised, could yet tear the very fabric of Western society, unleashing the dystopia of internalised totalitarianism, wherein the public-private boundaries disappear and citizens — even informed ones — can hardly distinguish between planted or socially-reinforced information and their own views. In such a world, the only choice is to virtue signal and self-censor.

Gone unchecked, it could amount to mass indoctrination around key national security questions and spell the end of democracy — in spirit if not procedurally. This is the ultimate fog of war.

Despite their litany of failures, the lesson drawn by the foreign policy establishment from their calamitous interventionism under the banner of democracy and freedom (“democratism“) was not to abandon their evangelical crusades for empire and to affirm restraint, moderation, and prudence. It was, instead, a desire not to be caught in the lie, as they were with their patently false claim about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD). To achieve this, the military-industrial-congressional complex and the professional-managerial class that runs it had to dominate a new battlespace: information. Not for foreign audiences, in which Western intelligence has had a long track record, but to domesticate, intellectually sterilise, and effectively neutralise their own citizens.

To guarantee the continuation of its globalist misadventurism, the establishment had to control and limit the political discourse at home. It has done so largely in two ways. The first was to claim monopoly over ‘truth’, and to discredit anyone who might not go along with the endorsed narrative by doubting their patriotism and brandishing them as appeasers, apologists, and/or outright traitors. The second was to ensure a total consolidation of national security narratives — so that even when instances of falsehood and misinformation are discovered, this would not receive much exposure but be shunned to the darkest corners of the internet.

Any war is a tragedy. We should work to de-escalate and see it end in Ukraine. But there are always at least two sides to a conflict: two agendas, not counting the designs of external actors. War does not occur in a vacuum. It often betrays (and is the culmination of) a long history of grievances and distrust.

Having claimed over 14,000 lives since 2014, the conflict in Ukraine is not about Vladimir Putin and his character but realpolitik, national interest, and great power rivalry. Countries have genuine security interests, some of them existential. They have real red lines.

“No Russian leader could stand idly by,” Putin told William Burns, now the director of the CIA, and accept Nato membership for Ukraine, Georgia, or Belarus, or allow Western weapons systems into these countries. As one of American greatest strategists and the architect of “containment” against the Soviet Union, George Kennan’s reaction to the Clinton administration’s insistence on Nato’s enlargement is particularly telling: “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves.”

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Almost 25 years on, such sober-minded analysis is increasingly rare. And this sidelining of neutral, dispassionate scrutiny in the Russo-Ukrainian War is particularly alarming because this is not America’s war. The North Atlantic has little vital geostrategic interest in Ukraine other than in trying to avoid a refugee or energy crisis. Yet many in Washington, London, or Brussels have goaded and encouraged, and are now revelling in, the conflict — convinced as they are that an extended quagmire there could become the kind of vulnerability for Russia that Afghanistan was for the Soviet Union, a malignant tumour metastasising to the whole of the Russian body politic and instigating regime change.

While diehards may desire a West-East clash packaged under the tired rubric of Democracy versus Autocracy to prove their machismo, the situation in Ukraine is boiling over — and it is still early days. Things are about to get far more dreadful. Ukraine is a small state neighbouring a great power, a historical buffer and bridge between Russia and the West. “To Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country,” wrote Henry Kissinger in 2014. “Russian history began in what was called Kievan-Rus,”. The sooner we heed and accept this fact, the sooner we can sensibly gauge the situation as is and review our commitment critically.

Statesmanship is the art of not letting emotions drive policy. Sentimentality is the enemy of reason, all sense of proportion, and limits: in short, it kills realism and breeds wishful thinking. Such utopianism is senseless and dangerous: it will prolong the conflict and get lots of innocent civilians needlessly killed. Meanwhile, fomenting false hope in the public domain could further fan the flames of war, entangling Europe and the US in a confrontation with nuclear Russia — an Armageddon the tale of which we will likely not live to tell.

War is not sports-betting, where one can feel good about siding with the underdog from the comfort of a couch or a bar. It is geopolitics in its most visceral, existential form: wagers have real costs involving human lives, and they are settled only with power and political will.

The point is that this tragedy was entirely predictable and avoidable. We invited (if not compelled) conflict with our politics of intrigue and meddling in Eastern Europe, our disregard for Moscow’s security interests, and our moral grandstanding over items like Nato’s eastward expansion, Ukrainian neutrality, and demilitarisation. Any seasoned diplomat of the Cold War would be left utterly mystified. This was and remains political and strategic malpractice.

The question now is whether we want to put millions of Ukrainian lives in jeopardy simply to keep it as a Western Bulwark on Russia’s frontier and a dagger at Moscow’s throat. The Russo-Ukrainian War must be condemned and brought to an end using diplomacy, but the West must accept a degree of culpability for leading the Ukrainians “down the primrose path” and egging on their showdown with their giant neighbour to the east. Any attempt to escalate and prolong this conflict by giving false hope to the Ukrainian people with tough rhetoric, moralistic bluster, lethal arms, and economic sanctions, the brunt of which will be felt by civilians on both sides, is irresponsible and callous. It would only ensure more death and suffering.

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As former US Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor contended in a recent television interview: “I see no reason why we should fight with the Russians over something that they have been talking about for years, [and] we simply chose to ignore… We will not send our forces to fight, but we are urging Ukrainians to die pointlessly in a fight they can’t win. We’re going to create a far greater humanitarian crisis than anything you’ve ever seen if it doesn’t stop.” Only this time, our liberal conceit and messianic delusion could potentially spiral a regional conflict into a global maelstrom that would exterminate humanity in a nuclear apocalypse.

The road to hell, as the wise aphorism has it, is paved with good intentions. Unless we course-correct now, we could soon find ourselves in a Huxleyan Brave New World that exploits the illusion of freedom while normalising the sophistic manipulation of public discourse to manufacture consent around the establishment’s liberal internationalist foreign policy.

When all roads lead to interventionism and war, pause, think, and consider how we got to where we are. Ask yourself who designed this dystopian city of lies and to what purpose — before it is too late.

Now that history has returned with the vengeance of the long-dismissed, few analyses of our present moment are complete without a ritual mockery of Fukuyama’s seemingly naive assumptions. The also-rans of the 1990s, Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilisations thesis and Robert D. Kaplan’s The Coming Anarchy, which predicted a paradigm of growing disorder, tribalism and the breakdown of state authority, now seem more immediately prescient than Fukuyama’s offering. 

Yet nearly thirty years later, reading what Fukuyama actually wrote as opposed to the dismissive précis of his ideas, we see that he was right all along. Where Huntington and Kaplan predicted the threat to the Western liberal order coming from outside its cultural borders, Fukuyama discerned the weak points from within, predicting, with startling accuracy, our current moment.

In The Last Man, the under-discussed addendum to The End of History, Fukuyama took his intellectual cues from Nietzsche rather than Hegel, observing that “it is impossible to complete our present discussion without refer­ring to the creature who reportedly emerges at the end of history, the last man,” a creature who is, “in essence, the victorious slave”. With all his demands met and material wants assuaged, will the last man be content at last, pausing the endless revolving wheel of history?

“Left to themselves,” Fukuyama asks, “can those stable, long-standing liberal democracies of Europe and America be indefinitely self-sustaining, or will they one day collapse from some kind of internal rot, much as communism has done?” Beyond the demands for absolute equality, freedom from want and overarching authority which underlie the politics of liberalism, Fukuyama contends, “lies the question of whether there are other deeper sources of discontent within liberal democracy—whether life there is truly satisfying.”

How does this vision compare to the world we live in today? It’s worth noting that Fukuyama radically overestimated the prosperity that the triumphant liberal order would provide for those sheltered under its wings. By all metrics, living standards have declined across the liberal West, leading to the rapid proletarianisation of the middle class in the United States and much of Europe.

The ongoing wave of protests, now curdling into civil conflict in the United States, in which the heavily indebted and downwardly mobile products of the  American university system play such a prominent role, represent a serious challenge to the liberal order birthed from within liberalism. Indeed, here it is darkly ironic to observe Fukuyama in 2011 appreciate just such a threat, though  he directs his warning at China rather than America.

Debating with Weiwei Zhang, the triumphalist theorist of the Chinese civilisation-state, Fukuyama warns that  growing prosperity threatens China’s future stability because “revolutions are never created by poor people. They are actually created by middle-class people. They are created by people who are educated to have opportunities. But these opportunities are blocked by the political or economic system. It is the gap between their expectation and the ability of the system to accommodate their expectation which causes political instability. So the growth of a middle class, I think, is not a guarantee against insurgencies, but a cause of insurgencies.” 

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Similarly, in The Last Man, Fukuyama underestimates the potential of liberalism to adopt the zealous moral certainties we now see being proclaimed with revolutionary fervour across the United States, claiming that liberal democracies “do not tell their citizens how they should live, or what will make them happy, virtuous, or great… In America today, we feel entitled to criticise another person’s smoking habits, but not his or her religious be­liefs or moral behavior.” 

Within the realm of liberalism, Fukuyama asserts, the furious passions of the past had, at the time of writing, been superseded by comfort and plenty, and “the loyalties that drove men to desperate acts of courage and sacrifice were proven by subsequent history to be silly prejudices.” Instead, “men with modern educations are content to sit at home, congratulating themselves on their broadmindedness and lack of fanaticism.”

And yet, Fukuyama predicts, this would be only a temporary reprieve from the great revolving wheel of history. Like August 1914, when “many European publics simply wanted war because they were fed up with the dullness and lack of community in civilian life,” the human soul clamours for more than peace and plenty.

Harking back to the Homeric heroic ideal of Thymos, the greater passions which drive man to seek glory and renown, Fukuyama observes that “Thy­mos is the side of man that deliberately seeks out struggle and sacrifice, that tries to prove that the self is something better and higher than a fearful, needy, instinctual, physically determined animal. Not all men feel this pull, but for those who do, thymos cannot be satisfied by the knowledge that they are merely equal in worth to all other human beings.”

The danger of liberal democracy, for Fukuyama, is that it cannot assuage these passions. With all our material and political wants satisfied, the human soul will search out deeper, older drives, a need for recognition and glory like that which drove Achilles, foreknowing, to his death on the battlefield of Troy. “Those who remain dissatisfied will always have the potential to restart history,” Fukuyama observes, simply because “the virtues and ambitions called forth by war are unlikely to find expression in liberal democracies.” Instead of a world of pacific consumers, blissful lotus eaters happy to enjoy the material benefits and hedonic pleasures of liberalism, “the absence of regular and con­structive outlets for megalothymia may simply lead to its later re­surgence in an extreme and pathological form.” 

In this world— our world— Fukuyama argues, people “will want to risk their lives in a violent battle, and thereby prove beyond any shadow of a doubt to themselves and to their fellows that they are free. They will deliberately seek discomfort and sacrifice, because the pain will be the only way they have of proving definitively that they can think well of themselves, that they remain human beings.”

We are reminded here of Orwell’s comparison of the Utopian technocratic appeals of liberalism, the essential “falsity” of their “hedonistic attitude to life,” with the dark, heroic passions offered by Hitler to the German people. “Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet,” Orwell observes, adding “whereas for the common-sense, essentially hedonistic world-view which Mr. Wells puts forward, hardly a human creature is willing to shed a pint of blood.”

In a world with no great causes, where all the grand passions and conflicts of the past have been settled, Fukuyama predicts, “if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier gen­eration, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and pros­perity, and against democracy.” 

We can see these frustrated passions in the way the miseries of the Syrian Civil War provided a source of relief for thousands of frustrated Westerners who flocked to join one side or another, or to propagandise for their chosen faction from behind a computer screen. As Fukuyama notes, “the fact that a large historical world co-exists with the post-historical one means that the former will hold attractions for cer­tain individuals precisely because it continues to be a realm of struggle, war, injustice, and poverty,” observing astutely that “it is probably healthy for liberal democracies that the Third World exists to absorb the energies and ambitions of such people; whether it is good for the Third World is a different matter.”

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'Global Britain' is in for a rude awakening

By Aris Roussinos

We see it also in the stirrings of the multifaceted revolt against the liberal order growing at home, whether the warnings of the Catholic integralist R. R Reno that, tired of the bloodless anomie of liberalism, people will search out “strong gods” in their search for meaning, or in Jacob Siegel and Angela Nagle’s typology of the alt-right as a front in “modernity’s perennial war against itself” which ends with “a camp of rebels fleeing freedom into an embrace of violence, absolutism and the idolatry of race”.

Liberalism, for Fukuyama, if severed from its pre-liberal roots, is destined to fail. “Stable democracy re­quires a sometimes irrational democratic culture,” he cautions, “and a spontaneous civil society growing out of pre-liberal traditions.” Indeed, there is in The Last Man, a striking distaste for the blandness of liberalism, an aesthetic and moral disgust with the world liberal principles has brought into being that goes beyond conservatism into reaction.

“Liberal economic princi­ples provide no support for traditional communities; quite the contrary, they tend to atomize and separate people,” Fukuyama warns. Contrary to the assertions of absolute equality which, at least rhetorically, govern the liberal order, Fukuyama argues that if liberalism attempts “to outlaw differences between the ugly and beautiful, or pretend that a person with no legs is not just the spiritual but the physical equal of someone whole in body, then the argument will in the fullness of time become self-refuting, just as communism was.”  

Like any 21st century internet reactionary, Fukuyama pronounces that “a civilization devoid of anyone who wanted to be recognized as better than others, and which did not affirm in some way the essential health and goodness of such a desire, would have little art or literature, music or intellectual life. It would be incompe­tently governed, for few people of quality would choose a life of public service. It would not have much in the way of economic dynamism; its crafts and industries would be pedestrian and un­changing, and its technology second-rate.”

Furthermore, Fukuyama predicts, in a startlingly prescient passage foreshadowing the rise of the 21st century civilisation-state, “perhaps most crit­ically, it would be unable to defend itself from civilizations that were infused with a greater spirit of megalothymia, whose citizens were ready to forsake comfort and safety and who were not afraid to risk their lives for the sake of dominion”. 

Suggested reading

The woke have no vision of the future

By John Gray

In his aristocratic distaste for the world summoned into being by the temporary triumph of liberalism, his Nietzchean disgust at the Last Man it has created, and his awareness of the stronger and more meaningful passions aroused by the prospect of struggle, sacrifice and glory, Fukuyama is widely at variance with the worldview ascribed to him. Were he writing in today’s more hysterical climate rather than in the early 1990s, he would more likely be accused of meandering towards fascism than of liberal triumphalism.

“The virtues and ambitions called forth by war are unlikely to find expression in liberal democracies,” he observes, and not in celebration. His Last Men, “those earnest young people trooping off to law and business school, who anxiously fill out their résumés in hopes of maintaining the life­styles to which they believe themselves entitled,” neutered by the “liberal project of filling one’s life with material acquisitions and safe, sanctioned ambitions,” are more or less identical to the “Bugmen” of the modern internet far-right. 

Indeed, Fukuyama uncannily foreshadows writers of the modern internet Right like the pseudonymous Bronze Age Pervert, whose Nietzchean glorification of the piratical hero, the Homeric warrior or steppe warlord figure come to overthrow the liberal order in its age of terminal chaos is viewed by liberals as a hateful threat and by a sprinkling of American conservatives as a source of inspiration.

The lazy popular reading of Fukuyama as a liberal triumphalist ignores the darker prophecies he appended to his bestseller, the stark warning that “modern thought raises no barriers to a future nihilistic war against liberal democracy on the part of those brought up in its bosom.” He warns us that, contrary to the assertions so often invoked in his name, “those who remain dissatisfied will always have the potential to restart history”.

Observing the world around us, particularly the wave of popular protests in America, the omphalos of liberalism, that have already devolved into shootings and revenge killings, we now see clearly they already have.

I thought of this quote while reading a whole raft of recent pieces on the future of politics — specifically the future of populism. Every few years, the same question rolls around. Have we reached ‘peak populism’, or is there still room for growth?

Your answer is inevitably shaped by your ideological priors. If you think that the world is generally going to hell in a handcart pushed by the populists, then you have probably spent this crisis searching around for any sign, however small, that things are about to shift gear.

Here’s one possible chain of events. Joe Biden defeats Trump in November; Emmanuel Macron is then re-elected in France, while Jair Bolsonaro loses in Brazil. National populists lose support at European elections in 2024, while Boris Johnson’s Conservatives are replaced by a Labour-led coalition. Suddenly the debate is transformed. Ding dong the populists are dead. Liberalism is back. The End of History returns. Francis Fukuyama smiles.

Populists, in general, have not had a good crisis. Trump’s approval ratings are down. Bolsonaro’s have fallen off a cliff. Matteo Salvini’s League has been sliding in the polls. Austria’s Freedom Party is down. Sweden Democrats are down. The Alternative for Germany is down. Spain’s Vox is just treading water. Marine Le Pen’s movement just captured the southern city of Perpignan but her candidate did not use the party brand, while her party stood fewer candidates and saw its number of councillors decline by nearly 600.

Further reading

The paranoid populists who run Brazil

By Benjamin Teitelbaum

Furthermore, the grand coalition in Germany is up in the polls and so too is Macron. Despite suffering losses to the Greens a week ago, his own leadership ratings have improved. Meanwhile, contrary to the prediction that other EU member states would follow Britain by staging their own version of Brexit  — or what I am told would be called Quitaly in Italy, Frexit in France, Leavia in Latvia, No-Land in Poland, Out-stria in Austria and Czech-Out in the Czech Republic — the latest results of the most reputable survey on the continent find strong and robust public support for EU membership almost everywhere (including, um, Britain).

In short, no serious analyst can look at the coronavirus crisis and say that it has been good for populists. Perhaps then we really have reached peak populism?

There is a different and more nuanced view, however. It was put forward last week by Gideon Rachman who agrees that while the crisis might eventually kill populism, not least because Covid-19 demands evidence-led managers over ideology-led amateurs, “there is no guarantee that the populists will go quietly”.

What does he mean by this?

The renewed prospect of culture wars over emotive issues like race and national symbols, the fact that the underlying drivers of populism are deep-rooted and still visible and the possibility that democratic norms could still break down in America (I find this less likely) and Brazil (this is more so) all suggest that while we might soon be getting off the populist rollercoaster there could yet be a few more twists and turns in store.

It’s a perfectly compelling argument, not least because the one thing we know about all big crises, as sure as night follows day, is that they are followed by significant political volatility.

The Great Depression was followed by totalitarianism and global war, while even quite localised crises like the ERM crisis in Britain fed into seismic changes in the polls (John Major’s Conservatives never again enjoyed a lead over the Labour Party that was outside the margin of error). And then came the Great Recession.

Further reading

Macron's pointless green gestures

By Anne Elisabeth Moutet

Had readers been asked to take a guess at the effects of the post-2008 crisis in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Lehman Brothers, then I think very few would have forecast the sheer scale of the turmoil that was about to unfold.

Ten years ago, a younger you walks into your local bookie and asks for an accumulator bet that the then-host of the US show The Apprentice will become President, that the UK will vote to exit the European Union, and that a far-right party in Germany will win more than 90 seats in the Bundestag. Who’d have guessed that you’d clean up.

It’s only by looking back now, over a decade later, that we can see how the crisis cleared the way for the rise of anti-establishment populism, the fragmentation of Europe’s party systems and much higher rates of political volatility. We can also see how it sparked a general collapse of public trust in politics and a sharp decline in satisfaction with democracy, most visibly in southern Europe — an area that has today once again been hit by yet another crisis.

So, if we accept that political turbulence always lies downstream of crises, then perhaps we can agree that the Great Lockdown will also have seismic effects. I would probably go further than Rachman and argue that this crisis looks set to have a far more profound impact on our politics than we probably realise.

What differentiates the Great Recession from the Great Lockdown is that while the former presented a double crisis that started in the markets and then trickled down into society, the latter has thrown us into a far more complex triple crisis that is unfolding on three fronts — health, economics and politics.

It is already massively reshaping the relationship between the citizen and state. If the 1930s saw the return of the state after the failure of financial markets, and the 1980s saw the return of the markets after the failure of the state, then the Great Recession and the Great Lockdown combined have paved the way for the return of the state after the failure of the markets.

The end result, as we can already see, will be bigger government that is more willing to intervene and spend. The sheer number of private-sector workers who have relied on the state, the bailouts, the sharp increases in deficits and rocketing piles of debt all point to how fiscal conservativism was one of the first victims of this crisis. The ‘neo-liberal’ free market capitalism that ran riot in earlier years is simply no longer in touch with the public mood.

Further reading

Fukuyama's blinkered view of history

By Douglas Murray

As Fukuyama has pointed out, just try to make the Reaganite argument to voters today that government is not the solution but the problem. It simply no longer sounds credible. We are living in a world where Jack Dorsey donated $1 billion to tackle the crisis while the US congress has so far thrown more than $2 trillion at it. This could help mainstream parties that are more experienced at using the state and government to deliver results.

But it seems to me that this more protectionist mood in politics could just as plausibly chime with the arguments that populists are making. Back in the 1990s it was argued that the winning formula for the populist right was a combination of economic liberalism and cultural authoritarianism. Stay relaxed about the markets but crack down on migrants, basically. But since then many populists have been drifting Left on economics, becoming more critical of globalisation, corporate elites and crony capitalism. It’s Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and Marine Le Pen mixed together.

Only a few years ago, economic nationalism was widely derided but it’s worth pointing out that today you do not need to look far to find mainstream politicians and governments making similar ‘nation first’ noises. Populists might not need to win power. Things might simply move in their direction anyway.

The sheer scale of the crisis also means that the issue agenda of politics will likely change. It was nearly 30 years ago, in 1992, when James Carville convinced a lot of us that it really is the economy, stupid. But then along came the 2010s with the message that it’s the culture too, stupid. Perhaps, though, the 2020s will see the revenge of Carville as debates over identity make way for a resurgence of debates over the economy. We’ve all grown used to talking about the arrival of a second values dimension in politics that runs from liberal to conservative. But perhaps the ‘Left versus Right’ dimension isn’t finished with us just yet.

Some have argued that it was in the aftermath of the depression of the 1930s and then global war that people found a new spirit of collective solidarity that led to the New Deal, welfare states in Europe and a compromise between governments and workers. But this more optimistic take does not sit comfortably with the fact that Covid-19 has been an asymmetric shock — we have not been ‘in this all together’. And this is especially true in Europe.

Further reading

Could Italy tear Europe apart?

By Matthew Goodwin

I tend to treat all economic forecasts with caution as they are like sausages; when you’ve seen how they are made you don’t want to go near them. But even then, the IMF tells us that while states like Germany will see a 7.8-point drop in GDP next year, in Italy and Spain this will be closer to 13-points. The asymmetric shock was not only visible as we headed into the crisis but will be even more visible as we eventually come out of it on the other side. Growth rates, jobless rates, the scale of debt and the level of investment will all look remarkably different according to whether you are in the north or south of the continent. The clear and present risk facing Europe is also something that will likely produce more of those twists and turns: economic divergence.

This time around it could have a harder edge. Quarantini-sipping professionals spending the crisis on Zoom have had, and will continue to have, a profoundly different experience from the left-behind workers who have, essentially, kept the show on the road.

In the first phase of the crisis, our social isolation was compulsory. Now it is voluntary. And that means that over the longer-term it will become an economic luxury. Excluding ethnic minorities, the groups that are being hit hardest by the economic and health crises are the very same groups that were swapping the mainstream for populists before the crisis. Will they suddenly have a change of heart? Perhaps. But I just don’t find that very convincing.

They could stop voting altogether, of course. Or they could turn to even more radical parties. One recent development that few people appear to have noticed is that whereas national populists overall have had a mixed or bleak crisis, in states such as Netherlands, Italy and Denmark, there are signs that new movements are on the rise. Italy’s Brothers of Italy, the Forum for Democracy in the Netherlands, the New Right in Denmark are a few examples.

If, as Voltaire said, the present is pregnant with the future then there is no guarantee that the populists of tomorrow will look the same as the populists of today. But, either way, even if the rollercoaster might be about to slow down it looks certain to me at least that we will not be getting off the ride anytime soon.

Suggested reading

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.

Suggested reading

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.

Suggested reading

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.

Suggested reading

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).

Suggested reading

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.

Rather than unleashing an era of liberal democratic orthodoxy, as many predicted, the end of the Cold War produced a world where grand narratives ceased to exist. The disappearance of these narratives has led to an erosion in the value of truth and objectivity.

This is one of the arguments put forward in This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, a new book by the journalist and author Peter Pomerantsev. As Pomerantsev writes:

“If the need for facts is predicated on a vision of a concrete future that you are trying to achieve, then when that future disappears, what is the point of facts?”

Many articles have been written about how the internet has encouraged us to create our own ‘filter bubbles’. However Pomerantsev’s book delves much deeper than similar accounts. It is not merely ‘information abundance’ that is screwing with our politics. The root of the current crisis also rests in our loss of faith in the future and, with it, the Enlightenment notion of objective truth.

One hundred and thirty-seven years ago Nietzsche declared God to be dead. Yet while the Enlightenment ‘killed’ the possibility of belief in a deity, religious faith persisted under avowedly secular guises. During the 20th century communism partially filled the void left by the retreat of religion. The materialist conception of history held out an answer to every question just as the Gospels once had.

Suggested reading

Don’t believe what those idiots are telling you about echo chambers

By Peter Franklin

In time the communist God failed, and the future was viewed as one of liberal progress, an ‘end of history’ as Francis Fukuyama termed it. Yet the global financial crash – and arguably the Iraq war with it – destroyed faith in this narrative too.

If the 20th century was the age of ideology, it has been replaced by an era of subjectivity and competing truths. A few on the extreme fringes still cling to grand narratives – the Islamic State for example – but most big ideas have slipped away. Today we each shape our own narrative. We choose what is true based on our own solipsistic inclinations. The result is a hyper-individualised political climate where concepts such as objectivity and impartiality have passed out of fashion.

The proliferation of information produced by the internet has made it easier to blur the distinction between truth and falsehood. Conspiracy theories increasingly fill the void where ideology – and certainty about the future – used to be. When there are so many competing truths that few individuals have the time to adequately parse, we are inclined to accept the narrative (however far-fetched) that chimes with our emotional predispositions.

Suggested reading

Why I welcome our post-Truth era

By Giles Fraser

The triumph of contemporary identity politics has helped to turbocharge this notion that feelings are more important than facts. The ethos of the Sixties trumpeted “feelings as an antidote to corporate and bureaucratic rationality”, as Pomerantsev puts it. Objectivity is merely subjectivity in disguise, according to the purveyors of this identitarian creed.

Of course, this great transformation in our politics would not be possible without the highly specific model of laissez-faire capitalism that triumphed 40 years ago. It is within this framework that identity has become a marketable commodity. We each choose our own ‘truth’ – our sacred cause to rally behind – just as we choose from ten different brands of soda in the supermarket.

This “future-less present” arrived first in Russia in the 1990s. During this chaotic decade, people behaved according to rules they made up for themselves. “The image of a common mankind is impossible, and no alternative has emerged,” writes Gleb Pavlovsky, one of Vladimir Putin’s early spin-doctors. “Everyone invents their own ‘normal’ humanity, their own ‘right’ history.”

Suggested reading

Don't trust third parties or courts or fact-checkers to give voters the 'truth'. They're all puppet masters.

By Graeme Archer

It isn’t hard to see how this personalised, identity-specific (and highly subjective) notion of reality has ignited increasing political polarisation across the developed world. Individuals are no longer the vehicles through which political ideas are transmitted. Instead, ideas are interwoven with identity. To disagree is increasingly a personal affront – a ‘microaggression’ – rather than a mere argument over competing visions of the future.

Social media amplifies this trend by encouraging individuals to stake out extreme positions in order to stay relevant and boost their personal brand. As Pomerantsev writes, “Social media is a sort of major-narcissism engine that can never quite be satisfied, leading us to take up more radical positions to get more attention”.

A highly subjective version of reality has been adopted by states too. In the contemporary era states make up their own rules and “murder people and indeed whole peoples according to their own ‘sovereign’ logic,” Pomerantsev writes, drawing on the work of the Russian historian of the Holocaust Mikhail Gefter. We can see this logic play out everywhere from Syria to China to Myanmar.

Suggested reading

Antifa's attack on the truth

By Douglas Murray

The success of political leaders such as Trump, Erdoğan and Orbán rests on the “anarchic liberation” from constraint they provide to their followers. That crude rejection of civility is comparable to the “suicidal escape from reality” Hannah Arendt wrote about in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Yet unlike the tyrannical regimes of the 20th century, authoritarian governments no longer strive for omnipotence. Instead they pretend there is no objective reality, only competing visions.

In depicting one man’s struggle against a totalitarian state, George Orwell wrote that freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. Unlike Orwell’s protagonist Winston Smith, the danger we face is not centralisation. We are slipping into a world not of a single truth set down by an infallible one-party state, but of an infinite number of truths that are impossible for the ordinary citizen to navigate.

Suggested reading

When did victimhood culture trump truth?

By Justin Webb

To counter this, we must become better as individuals at distinguishing between information that is accurate and information that merely confirms our biases.

But ‘the West’ – for want of a better term – must also rediscover a sense of purpose if it is to combat the threat of disinformation. Liberal democracies are more amenable places to live than societies that have come before and are likely to come after. We live longer, are freer, and however mediocre the current political crop of political leaders are, we do at least have a realistic chance of removing them.

This is not mere propaganda, to paraphrase the title of Pomerantsev’s brilliant and unsettling book. The threat to democracy may have changed since Orwell’s time but it is nevertheless real. Freedom is still the freedom to point out that objective reality exists – regardless of how you or I or Vladimir Putin may feel about it.