Kamala Harris lost the presidential election, but one of her campaign slogans was vindicated in defeat. “We’re not going back!” the Democratic nominee insisted on the campaign trail, and she was unintentionally correct: Donald Trump’s return to power is proof that we have lived through a real turning point in history, an irrevocable shift from one era to the next.
In Trump’s first term, he did not look like a historically transformative president. His victory was narrow, he lacked real majority support, he was swiftly unpopular and stymied and harassed.
Even if his 2016 upset proved that discontent with the official consensus of the Western world ran unexpectedly deep, the way he governed made it easy to regard his presidency as accidental and aberrant — a break from a “normal” world of politics that some set of authority figures could successfully reimpose.
Much of the opposition to his presidency was organized around this hope, and the election of Joe Biden seemed like vindication: Here was the restoration, the return of the grown-ups, normality restored.
But somewhere in this drama, probably somewhere between the first reports of a deadly flu in Wuhan, China, and Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, one of history’s wheels turned irrevocably, and the normal that Trump’s opponents aspired to recover slipped definitively into the past.
A restoration? No: The post-Cold War era has ended, and we’re not going back.
This may sound a bit like the most alarmist interpretations of the Trump era — that we are exiting the liberal democratic age and entering an autocratic, or at least authoritarian, American future.
But the new future is much more open and uncertain than that dark vision. While many people voted against Trump because they felt that liberalism or democracy was under threat, many other people moved rightward for the same reason — because they felt that was the way to defend liberal norms against the speech police, or democratic power against control by technocratic elites.
We don’t know which perspective, if either, will be vindicated. All we know is that right now our core political categories are contested — with vigorous disagreement about what both democracy and liberalism mean, unstable realignments on both the left and the right, and “post-liberal” elements at work in right-wing populism and woke progressivism and managerial technocracy alike.
All this indicates the first way that we are not going back: We are not returning to the narrowing of political debate that characterized the world after 1989, the converging worldviews of the Reaganite center-right and the Clinton-Blairite center-left, the ruling-out of radical and reactionary possibilities.
This narrowing suggested a sense that the desired end state of politics was a world where two like-minded political parties debated budgeting and not much else, where culture wars were settled on whatever terms the liberal professional class deemed suitable and where ideology retreated to academic monasteries and religion to the private sphere.
Describing this narrowed post-Cold War order in 2014, Columbia’s Mark Lilla wrote that trying to convey to his students “the grand drama of political and intellectual life from 1789 to 1989” often left him “feeling like a blind poet singing of lost Atlantis.”
But a decade later some of that lost drama has come back: Far-left ideology spilled out of the academy, far-right ideology colonized the marches of the internet, the Covid era revived all sorts of dormant paranoias, and people expecting normalcy are consistently ambushed by radicalism — whether they’re encountering Hamas apologists or groypers, transhumanists or tradwives, or philosophically minded students who think the only choice that matters is between Nietzsche and Latin-Mass Catholicism.
Some of these ideas are just a kind of playacting, influencing the liberal order from the fringes, not replacing it. But other changes are more fundamental. Democratic politicians may spend the next few years running away from wokeness, but the broad leftward shift will have a generational influence on academia and philanthropy and more. Populism may become a little less mercurial once Trump departs the stage, but in Europe and the United States the populist style has essentially replaced the prior center-right, with issues like mass immigration looming as permanent sources of political division, not temporary tempests that elites can hope to work through and escape.
And even the wilder influences are here to stay, because there is no cultural forcing mechanism to make the radical and reactionary go away — to rout the woke from their institutional redoubts, to exile racist or anti-Semitic figures from the discourse (or the podcast charts) or to establish a zone of respectability and marginalize everything else.
That’s because we are also not going back to a world where there is a set of trusted truth-mediating institutions, core sources of news and information that everyone recognizes and trusts, a “mainstream” of argument and opinion-shaping that sets the parameters of debate.
The decline of the mainstream has been evident since the internet began its disruptive work, but for a while it appeared that digital life might bring some kind of establishment consensus back around — because if there were just a few big tech companies responsible for stewarding most of online interaction, and they all shared a certain set of values, then a kind of new establishment could be regulated or willed into existence, with Google and Twitter and Facebook taking the place of CBS and ABC and NBC.
This was the hope of some “anti-disinformation” liberals and a source of anxiety for many populists and libertarians, especially during the last years of Trump’s first administration, when there was a strong alignment of elite institutions and some real attempts at pandemic-driven information control. But for now it appears that both the hopes and fears were overstated, that the internet remains an acid for trust in institutions and an enabler of rebellions in a way that makes consensus and conformism extremely difficult to sustain.
This reality brought us the informational landscape of the 2024 election, in which the two candidates were out chasing an array of niche audiences, foraging for votes in the wilderness of podcasts and the shifting sands of TikTok, while the remains of the mainstream media tried to impose narratives that ended up seemingly irrelevant to the actual results. (Think of the media furor around the racist joke about Puerto Ricans at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally — which ended up having zero apparent impact on how Puerto Ricans voted.)
The 2024 experience seems much more like a foretaste of our future than the more controlled environment of 2020. Forget partisan divisions in media consumption: We’re experiencing a more radical kind of informational fracture, with a variety of personalized info-bubbles and a much greater mystery to movements in public opinion and belief.
Then there is the global backdrop: After the past four years, it’s clear that we are not going back to a world of unchallenged American primacy or a liberal international order expanding to encompass more and more regions of the globe.
Again, here the Biden era briefly encouraged the opposite hope. When Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine failed in its initial thrusts and the United States rallied a sweeping and punitive economic response, it was briefly possible to believe that the slippage of American power was about to be reversed, that a muscular 1990s-era liberalism was about to have its day again.
But the two years since have demonstrated that even when our enemies stumble, American power has severe limits compared with the freedom of action we took for granted 15 years ago. Our economic warfare against Russia has failed to substantially undermine Putin’s regime, but it has helped forge a more coherent Sino-Russia economic bloc. The “global” alliance in support of Ukraine is functionally mostly an American and European coalition, with much of the non-Western world distinctly not on our side. Our own military stockpiles are being tested and depleted, with the specter of Chinese moves in the Pacific looming over our own strategic moves.
Just as the re-emergence of radicalism and reaction does not spell the end of liberalism, the re-emergence of real rivals doesn’t spell the end of the American empire. We have deep reserves of strength, and it’s entirely possible to imagine a world where we pass through a generation of great-power conflict and come out stronger in 2050 or 2075.
But an age of sustained conflict seems inescapable, in which the world of globalization under American leadership gives way to a world of competing economic blocs, regionally specific forms of authoritarianism, technological arms races with drones and robotics and A.I., and distinctly unsalubrious choices facing American policymakers.
And these choices will be made especially difficult by the declining power of our present allies in Europe and the Pacific Rim, whose demographic crisis has worsened markedly since 2016, with old age and economic decline looming up sooner than expected.
In the steep decline of birthrates, linked somehow to the experience of digital life and downstream from a decline in marriages, relationships and sex, you can see one grim terminus of the modern trend toward consumerist individualism. And this is the final pattern of the post-Cold War era to which we are not going back: We are leaving behind a world where social liberalism is always at the vanguard, where the expansion of cultural individualism is assumed to be identical with human progress.
Again, this doesn’t mean that social liberalism or individualism are about to disappear. But when birthrates fall toward half of replacement level, when some of the most advanced societies on earth face demographic collapse within a couple of generations, there is going to be a strong demand for alternative visions and strong selection pressure favoring communities that figure out some kind of hack or adaptation or escape from the individualist cul-de-sac.
These hacks will include a turn to some form of religious tradition: The dynamics of the 21st century will favor belief over secularism, Orthodox Jews over their modernized coreligionists, the Amish over their modern neighbors, “trads” of all kinds over more lukewarm kinds of spirituality.
But the search for adaptation will take other forms as well, depending on technological possibilities and political pressures. For instance, one can imagine new forms of authoritarian bio-politics, the inverse of the 20th-century antecedents that sought to control population growth, which attempt to enforce reproduction or achieve through biotechnology what Aldous Huxley prophesied in “Brave New World” — lab-grown human beings, repopulation via artificial wombs.
In freer societies, you should expect traditionalism to be in competition with transhumanism — the quest for radical life extension as an answer to societal aging; the escape into virtual reality as a substitute for lost possibilities of sex, love and family; a world of eternally youthful A.I. companions as an alternative to an aging world of flesh and blood.
These are strange visions, but like the more radical political possibilities, they exist already on the fringes of our common culture, and they have special potency among the people (in Silicon Valley and elsewhere) trying to engineer our technological future. How they take shape will depend on the pace of change in biotech, A.I. and virtual reality. But the demand for them is built into social and demographic trends that are now too far advanced for us to simply hit rewind.
At the outset of the post-Cold War era, Francis Fukuyama announced “the End of History”; in its later years there was talk of a “great stagnation” (from the economist Tyler Cowen) and an age of “decadence” (from, well, me). Combine those ideas and you have a sense of recent history as a comfortable parenthesis, a period of repetition and complacency, a peak of power and relative stability but with horizons narrowed and possibilities foreclosed.
I don’t think anything so confident can be prophesied about the world of the later 2020s and beyond. Is History back? In some ways, in some places, even as elements of the Fukuyama diagnosis still hold; likewise decadence is deepening in some ways even as it lifts in others.
Is liberalism finished? No, just beset and contested in new ways, and no longer a clear vanguard force in human history. Is the American age over? Almost certainly not, but if it continues, it will be as a New America of some kind, in a global order very different from the world of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
That sense of movement is the essential thing. We have not entered fully into whatever dispensation awaits us; we can see its outlines and possibilities but not its defining features.
What we have, for now, is just the sense of an ending, the realization that the former world has passed away.
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