My column last weekend made some pretty sweeping historical claims: that the re-election of Donald Trump proved that we have definitively exited the post-Cold War era; that the phase of history that began in 1989 terminated somewhere in between the early days of the pandemic and Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine; that wherever we are going now, we are definitely going, not just paddling in circles or in place.
To these stark claims, let me add two supplementary comments that qualify the scale and nature of the shift that I’m describing.
First, the end of the post-1989 era doesn’t mean the end of liberalism. British writer John Gray, the mordantly brilliant prophet of liberalism’s doom, has an essay for The New Statesman arguing that the transition from one era to another will also be a transition out of liberalism entirely — that Trump and perhaps after him JD Vance could put in place “a systematically constructed and deeply embedded illiberal democracy,” while a Europe abandoned by the United States collapses into a “gruesome” stew of nationalism and antisemitism, and authoritarianism sweeps the wider world.
Well, maybe. But before going all the way to that conclusion, consider first how many people inside the Trump-Vance coalition still consider themselves partisans of liberal values — defenders of free speech and other liberties they deem most threatened by the left, not the right. And then consider the recent argument from Gray’s fellow critic of liberal overreach, Aris Roussinos, that the version of the liberal order that bestrode the world after 1989 was quite different from the post-World War II liberal order that preceded it: It was more utopian in its ambition, more culturally comprehensive in its claims, more imperious and imperial and hubristic and therefore, yes, foredoomed.
Whereas the worldview that governed Europe and America after 1945 was more pragmatic and cold-eyed, much less ambitious and revolutionary — while remaining a form of liberalism nonetheless. Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan all, in various ways, fell short of post-1989 ideals of how the United States and the “liberal international order” should be governed. But none of them were “illiberal” in the way that an everyday person might use the term. They just operated within a more bounded context than their post-Cold War successors, had more pre-liberal and non-liberal instincts mixed in with their liberal commitments, and generally related to the world in a less fully ideological way than the post-Cold War elite.
With this past in mind, Roussinos argued, the liberals of the early 21st century may be better off in the long run for entering a more bounded future, in which they no longer preside seemingly unchallenged over the globe:
Just as the bipolar order of the Cold War world, by restraining liberalism’s inherent tendencies to radicalisation and hubris, made the Western world safe for a tempered and moderate liberalism, so may the multipolar world we have entered save liberals from their own excesses. Beset by confident rivals abroad, and by the disenchantment of their own voters at home, liberals will once again have to learn restraint. The post-Cold War order ultimately proved disastrous for American liberalism: a return to the actually existing order of 1945 may prove more congenial.
To this theory of partial continuity rather than complete rupture, I’ll add a second observation: Even in a changed world order, American democracy looks reasonably robust.
I’ve always been a profound skeptic of full-scale authoritarianism-in-America scenarios, for reasons usefully expounded by Julian Waller in a 2022 essay for American Affairs. But after the 2016 election, there was a milder and somewhat more plausible form of democratic pessimism among US progressives, which held that the country’s archaic constitutional institutions could allow right-wing populism to instantiate minority rule over an extended period. Combine the Trumpian advantage in the Electoral College with the small-state and rural-state advantage in the Senate, and you could imagine a country defined by a thwarted majority, in which Republicans governed steadily without ever getting close to 50 per cent support, and either the Constitution or democracy itself gradually lost all legitimacy.
Meanwhile, there were different but related fears on the right, both the kind of fears I wrote about before the election — fears of a progressive “cathedral” uniting public and private power to throttle free debate and make democracy irrelevant — and the long-standing fears that mass immigration and demographic change would make national elections as unwinnable for the GOP as, say, statewide elections in California are today.
But simply by getting around 50 per cent of the popular vote in 2024, Trump substantially undermined these perspectives — both the liberal conceit that his style of populism couldn’t win enough votes to claim democratic legitimacy and the mirror-image conservative anxiety that the collusion of elite institutions would shut the populist right out of power.
More than that, the nature of his winning coalition showed how the US electoral order tends to rebalance itself with time and competition, in ways that aren’t always perfectly majoritarian but that make both permanent-minority-rule or one-party-state scenarios seem extremely implausible.
The question of Trump’s full destiny and legacy — whether he can be something more than a destroyer of the old order, whether his fragile new majority can expand into a governing coalition — has not been answered yet. And his second term will tell us more about whether history’s wheel is bringing us into an era that will be defined by some nationalist or populist synthesis the way the post-1989 world was defined by a triumphant liberalism, or whether we’re just entering a kind of ideological interregnum, a warring-states period in which post-Cold War liberalism has no clear or certain heir.
But for now, the weirder, stranger future that we’re entering still looks like a democratic future, with close contests for power, notwithstanding the widening field of ideological debate, in which America’s elections will remain the clearest ink in which providence’s intentions are written. — The New York Times
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