Twenty-five years ago—December 1991—communism died, the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union disappeared. It was the largest breakup of an empire in modern history and not a shot was fired. It was an event of biblical proportions that my generation thought it would never live to see. As Wordsworth famously rhapsodized (about the French Revolution), “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very heaven!”
That dawn marked the ultimate triumph of the liberal democratic idea. It promised an era of Western dominance led by a preeminent America, the world’s last remaining superpower.
And so it was for a decade as the community of democracies expanded, first into Eastern Europe and former Soviet colonies. The US was so dominant that when, on December 31, 1999, it gave up one of the most prized geostrategic assets on the globe—the Panama Canal—no one even noticed.
That era is over. The autocracies are back and rising; democracy is on the defensive; the US is in retreat. Look no further than Aleppo. A Western-backed resistance to a local tyrant—he backed by a resurgent Russia, an expanding Iran and an array of proxy Shiite militias—is on the brink of annihilation. Russia drops bombs; America issues statements.
What better symbol for the end of that heady liberal-democratic historical moment. The West is turning inward and going home, leaving the field to the rising authoritarians—Russia, China and Iran. In France, the conservative party’s newly nominated presidential contender is fashionably conservative and populist and soft on Vladimir Putin. As are several of the newer Eastern Europe democracies—Hungary, Bulgaria, even Poland—themselves showing authoritarian tendencies.
And even as Europe tires of the sanctions imposed on Russia for its rape of Ukraine, President Obama’s much-touted “isolation” of Russia has ignominiously dissolved, as our secretary of state repeatedly goes cap in hand to Russia to beg for mercy in Syria.
The European Union, the largest democratic club on earth, could itself soon break up as Brexit-like movements spread across the continent. At the same time, its members dash with unseemly haste to reopen economic ties with a tyrannical and aggressive Iran.
As for China, the other great challenger to the post–Cold War order, the administration’s “pivot” has turned into an abject failure. The Philippines openly defected to the Chinese side. Malaysia then followed. And the rest of our Asian allies are beginning to hedge their bets. When the president of China addressed the Pacific Rim countries in Peru last month, he suggested that China was prepared to pick up the pieces of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, now abandoned by both political parties in the United States.
The West’s retreat began with Obama, who reacted to (perceived) post-9/11 overreach by abandoning Iraq, offering appeasement (“reset”) to Russia and accommodating Iran. In 2009, he refused even rhetorical support to the popular revolt against the rule of the ayatollahs.
Donald Trump wants to continue the pullback, though for entirely different reasons. Obama ordered retreat because he’s always felt the US was not good enough for the world, too flawed to have earned the moral right to be the world hegemon. Trump would follow suit, disdaining allies and avoiding conflict, because the world is not good enough for us—undeserving, ungrateful, parasitic foreigners living safely under our protection and off our sacrifices. Time to look after our own American interests.
Trump’s is not a new argument. As the Cold War was ending in 1990, Jeane Kirkpatrick, the quintessential neoconservative, argued that we should now become “a normal country in a normal time.” It was time to give up the 20th-century burden of maintaining world order and of making superhuman exertions on behalf of universal values. Two generations of fighting fascism and communism were quite enough. Had we not earned a restful retirement?
At the time, I argued that we had earned it indeed, but a cruel history would not allow us to enjoy it. Repose presupposes a fantasy world in which stability is self-sustaining without the United States. It is not. We would incur not respite but chaos.
A quarter-century later, we face the same temptation, but this time under more challenging circumstances. Worldwide jihadism has been added to the fight, and we enjoy nothing like the dominance we exercised over conventional adversaries during our 1990s holiday from history.
We may choose repose, but we won’t get it.
The Washington Post, December 2, 2016
In the euphoria, it is easy to forget that liberation is often the beginning of human folly, not the end. (The book of Exodus is a useful text on the subject.) Liberty is an invitation to folly. In the zones of Eastern Europe newly liberated from the Soviet Union, the invitation is being accepted.
Bulgarians have been free for about a month. What is the first great cause they have taken up with their newfound freedoms of assembly, petition and speech? Chanting “Bulgaria for Bulgarians,” they demand the repression of the Muslim minority. The country is racked with civil disorder protesting the repeal by the new Communist regime of oppressive anti-Turkish decrees.
At the first whiff of glasnost, Armenians and Azerbaijanis, Georgians and Ossetians, Uzbeks and Meskhetians marked the lifting of the yoke of the Soviet imperium by taking to the streets to beat each other bloody. The newest riots in southern Azerbaijan, however, have progressed beyond mere ethnic quarreling. The local citizenry, Shiite Muslims, are near insurrection, attacking authorities and tearing down border posts. Their demand? Reunification with Iran.
To my recollection, Paul Johnson was the first (August 1988) to warn of the coming Balkanization of East Europe and the rekindling of ancient ethnic strife as the Soviet empire broke up. By now everyone is familiar with the fact—though few anticipated the fury—of intolerant nationalism as the great bane and potential ruin of the newly liberated Soviet zone.
Another source of potential ruin is now equally obvious: the economic costs of de-communization. A report from Poland last weekend spoke of people losing patience with Solidarity’s program of radical economic reform. Polish capitalism was all of six days old at the time.
There is, however, one other bane facing liberated Europe, less obvious than ethnic and economic disillusionment but equally preordained. It is the coming political disillusionment. Democracy in the abstract is a glory second to none. But liberated Europe is about to experience the first half of Churchill’s famous quip that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.
Not just that it is messy and corrupt. A friend of mine, an adviser to one of Hungary’s new democratic parties, brought a group of aspiring Hungarian politicians over to the United States last fall to imbibe democracy at the wellspring. They were treated to a tour of the New York mayoralty and the Virginia gubernatorial campaigns. During their 40 years of jail and repression, of samizdat and secret police, did they dream, could they have imagined, that at the end of the tunnel lay Jackie Mason?
It is not just that Hungary and the rest are headed for party squabbling and backroom deals, tracking polls and campaign lies. The disillusionment with democracy will involve something far deeper.
First, the realization that real democracy actually establishes limits to popular will. Under constitutionalism, not everything is permitted even if the people will it. In one of the liberation’s more remarkable twists, Bulgaria’s government last week rejected calls in the street for a referendum. The demonstrators demanded a referendum on ethnic rights—in order to deny them to the 15% Turkish minority. A statement pointing out that fundamental human rights cannot be subject to popular vote was issued jointly by the democratic opposition and—how rich our history—the Communist Party.
The second and more deeply disillusioning truth about democracy is that it is designed at its core to be spiritually empty. As Isaiah Berlin wrote 30 years ago in his essay “John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life,” the defining proposition of liberal democracy is that it mandates means (elections, parliaments, markets) but not ends. Democracy leaves the goals of life entirely up to the individual. Where the totalitarian state decrees life’s purposes—Deng’s Four Modernizations, Castro’s Rectification Campaigns, the generic exhortation to “Build Socialism”—democracy leaves the public square naked.
What a shock for those whose lives have been so infused with purpose by the struggle against totalitarianism. That is why the original East German oppositionists looked with dismay at the post-Wall revelers, those content to see the revolution “drowned in West Berlin chocolate.” That is why the victory, the miracle, of 1989 will be as disillusioning as it is now exhilarating. The fruit of that victory is bourgeois democracy—the most free, most humane, most decent political system ever invented by man, and the most banal. Dying for it is far more ennobling than living it. Liberated Europe is just getting to the living part.
The Washington Post, January 12, 1990
A quarter-century ago, the impending death of the Soviet Union occasioned a delirium. I was one of the first to succumb. “Political philosophy is over,” I wrote even before the Berlin Wall came down. “Finished. Solved. The perennial question that has preoccupied every political philosopher since Plato—what is the best form of governance—has been answered.” History had spoken: “liberal, pluralist, capitalist democracy.”
The sequence of events that followed seemed to justify the euphoria. First, the fall of the Berlin Wall—marking the dissolution of the external Soviet empire—as the conquered lands of Eastern Europe, forced for decades into communist rule and the Warsaw Pact, threw off Soviet subjugation one by one.
But the fall of empires is nothing new. The next and truly fantastical world-historical event was the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself. On Christmas Day 1991, the internal empire dissolved as well. The 14 non-Russian constituent “republics” that had been ruled by Moscow were turned into independent nations. It marked the disappearance of the world’s leading communist state, the end of communism as an actual form of government and the end of the very idea of communism as a plausible system of social and political organization. And the end of six decades of existential struggle between a democratic West and the totalitarianisms of the left and right that had defined world politics since the rise of fascism in the 1930s.
With a whimper, the enemy vanished. The Cold War wasn’t just over; it was won. For a generation that never imagined it would live to see that day, this was an event of biblical proportions. It was possible in that dawn to believe, briefly, that we had reached the peak of mankind’s political development. The more extravagant romantics among us called it the end of History—the capital “H” being homage to the triumph of the transcendent, self-conscious History of 19th-century German philosophy. I saw it as the endpoint of 2,500 years of Western political theory. It was the vindication of Churchill’s aphorism that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others. The others having been tried and failed, what was left standing was a political system—the modern capitalist democracy of universal suffrage, the rule of law, guaranteed rights and the peaceful and regular transfer of governmental power—that balanced and satisfied individual, communal and national needs.
Twenty-five years later, the landscape has changed radically. The great dawn turns out to have been a mirage; the great hope, an act of self-delusion. The slide back away from liberal democracy is well underway. In retrospect, that was perhaps to be expected. History has been unkind to every stripe of utopian thinking. What’s been remarkable, however, is how far in a mere 25 years the pendulum has swung the other way. Not only is it not advancing. It is now in retreat. It’s not just that we have failed to achieve the messianic future. It’s that even the democratic present is under widespread assault. As Freedom House’s “Nations in Transit 2017” report noted dryly, we had assumed “that once a country had achieved democracy, it would stay at that end of the scale. Current conditions present a very different picture.”
In the first decade, the signs of a democratic flourishing were everywhere. After all, what were the alternatives? A Russian model? Russia was shrinking physically, disordered socially, bleeding economically and caught in a mass of corruption. China? The Chinese communists had learned from Mikhail Gorbachev’s example to yield economic but not political space, thereby fostering rapid economic growth while retaining ironfisted political control. To Third World countries with emerging economies and political choice, Beijing’s model was more attractive than Moscow’s, but hardly competitive with the Western democratic-capitalist model. Nor was Islamism much of a competitor. In 2001, it made its mark, showing itself capable of much destruction. But as a nihilistic offshoot of one particular religious faith, it garnered a decidedly narrow, if fanatical, following.
A democratic future, gradually expanding throughout the globe, seemed assured. After all, the spread of democracy had already been underway when the Soviet Union collapsed. Throughout the ’80s, the number of democracies had been increasing inexorably. In Latin America, the recruits were coming from the right. Argentina’s military yielded control to civilians in 1983; Brazil’s in 1985. In Chile, General Augusto Pinochet lost first a plebiscite (1988), then a presidential election (1989), setting off a momentous return to democratic government.
In East Asia, the trend had also begun when the military in two of the major economic tigers, South Korea and Taiwan, ceded power in 1987.
The trickle turned into a flood in the 1990s as former Warsaw Pact Soviet satellites and former Soviet republics enlisted in the democratic club. By 2007, most had joined NATO and/or the European Union as emblems of their new status.
It was a rout, on the ground and in the zeitgeist. In the realm of ideas, the international left was reeling, too shocked by the relegation of socialism to the ash heap of history to mount anything more than a halfhearted defense of its political philosophy.
Then came the disappointments. The great rush stalled. History turned yet again.
The most spectacular failure of the leap forward toward democracy was the Arab Spring. Begun in December 2010, it was a generalized revolt against two generations of postcolonial dictatorial rule in the Arab Middle East that had yielded an astonishing harvest of economic, political, social and military disaster (especially vis-à-vis Israel). These were peoples with proud histories and immense latent talent held down and held back by grotesquely dysfunctional politics.
The revolt charmed the West and inspired the young. It ended in tears. In Egypt, it produced little more than an exchange of military dictatorships, sandwiched around a year of Muslim Brotherhood misrule. In Syria, it has led to a merciless multi-sided civil war. And in Iraq, an American invasion that toppled the traditional postcolonial strongman gave way to a brittle, formally democratic regime overwhelmed by bloody sectarian strife and undermined by growing Iranian domination.
There were similar hopes in Africa. Nelson Mandela’s South Africa provided the model for a dignified, democratic transition to self-rule. But for most of the continent, the promising starts ended badly—from Zimbabwe, which from independence degenerated rapidly into self-destructive one-man rule, to South Sudan, which collapsed into civil war, to Libya, liberated from Qaddafi only to fall into a countrywide war of all against all.
This was one level of democratic failure, the inability to forge stable democratic regimes out of collapsed dictatorships. For all its disappointments, the failure was nonetheless understandable given how difficult and prolonged the transition to democracy has proved even in the West. More dispiriting, therefore, was the second level of democratic failure: regression and rollback where the foundations of democracy had already been laid. These are functioning democracies that have been systematically undone and effectively transformed into dictatorships—most prominently Turkey and Venezuela.
One might have added Russia to that list, if the post-Soviet regime that emerged in the 1990s had not been so unstable and dysfunctional to begin with. Consigned to the tender hands of Vladimir Putin at the turn of the millennium, its democratic superstructure was methodically dismantled, year by year, institution by institution. It’s a bitter history. Once again, Russia had a chance at democracy and ended up with yet another repressive dictatorship, this time KGB rule stripped of the ideological pretensions of communism.
Russia qualifies, therefore, as a might-have-been. Venezuela and Turkey actually were—democracies, that is—before embarking on their projects of constitutional demolition. These are the greater blow to the democratic faith. Venezuela had a proud democratic tradition going back half a century, then allowed itself to succumb to a Cuba-inspired caudillo who emasculated every rival center of power. His successor has proven even more incompetent and authoritarian. The result is a dictatorship of unusual malice and spectacular ineptitude.
Meanwhile, in 2003 Turkey elected an Islamist prime minister who was at the time held out as a model of moderation for the rest of the Muslim world. Hardly. Recep Erdogan proceeded to remorselessly tighten his grip on power through systematic intimidation, incarceration and infiltration of rival centers of power, most especially the pillars of the traditional constitutional structures—the courts, the military, the legislature, the press.
Since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded modern Turkey as a secular republic a century ago, the military had guaranteed the openness and secularism of its quasi-democratic system. These guarantees are gone. More journalists are in jail in Turkey than in any other country, China included. Tens of thousands are now imprisoned following the shadowy abortive coup of 2016. The April 2017 referendum made it official. It abolished Turkey’s parliamentary system, vastly expanded the powers of the presidency and essentially marked the end of Turkish democracy. Erdogan is famously reported to have said that “democracy is a bus ride; once I get to my stop, I’m getting off.” The bus has arrived. Turkish democracy is done.
So far we’ve dealt with two categories of democratic reversal: traditional dictatorships that have failed to transform into democracies, and formerly successful Third World democracies that have regressed. Most dispiriting of all, however, is the third phenomenon beginning to unfold, which more than any other makes a mockery of the democratic hopes of the post–Cold War dawn: an authoritarian temptation now rising in the heart of the West, the world’s most established, entrenched, seemingly secure repository of liberal democracy.
In what would have been unimaginable 25 years ago, mature Western democracies are experiencing a surge of ethno-nationalism, a blood-and-soil patriotism tinged with xenophobia, a weariness with parliamentary dysfunction and an attraction—still only an attraction, not yet a commitment—to strongman rule.
Its most conspicuous symptom is a curious and growing affinity for Vladimir Putin, Czar of all the Russias. Remarkably, this tendency is most pronounced on the right. The reversal is head-snapping. Throughout the 20th century and the early 21st, Western conservatives had viewed Russia with revulsion, fear and contempt. This was particularly pronounced during the half-century of Cold War, during which opposition to Russian communist ideology and expansionism was a pillar of conservative faith. Today, some on the right have begun to profess a certain admiration of and attraction to Putinism and his brand of Russian authoritarianism.
The result is jarring. After decades of left-wing apologists for Russia, it is now lifelong conservatives who are asking: What’s so bad about Putin anyway? Upholder of traditional values (he is a particular scourge of homosexuality), defender of the faith (Orthodox in his case, but any variant of Christianity will do), restorer of order through ruthlessly centralized power that dispenses with the niceties of checks and balances (federalism, free elections, an independent press), he took a basket case of a country and made Russia great again, has he not?
Sure he emasculated the political opposition, shut down independent media and regularly kills political opponents and journalists. But he’s got omelets to make. Moreover, as President Donald Trump said when asked about the killings, “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, you think our country is so innocent?”
Moral equivalence so shocking, emanating from the elected leader of the United States, is not to be ignored. And the willingness to overlook authoritarian excesses is accompanied by an open admiration of strongman rule and a barely concealed envy for the willfulness and freedom of action that enables it.
Contrast that with the decline and decay of the West. Paralyzed by process and grown decadent, it cannot rouse itself to defend its values—sacrificing civilizational pride to a thin gruel of multicultural mediocrity; to defend its borders—supinely permitting an invasion of the unwanted and uninvited; and to defend its history—allowing its once-proud nation-states to be constrained by transnational institutions and, in the case of Europe, absorbed into a soulless superstate run from Brussels by cosmopolitan bureaucrats. All this, as the West passively watches the debasement of its foundational institutions of family, church and community.
European fascination with Putin-style authoritarianism is far more developed than the American variety. Marine Le Pen of the National Front, runner-up for the French presidency who garnered 40% of the vote and supplanted the two major establishment parties that had alternated power for half a century, has expressed support and admiration for Putin, promised to drop post-Crimea sanctions and went so far as to pay him the homage of a visit to the Kremlin just weeks before France’s presidential election.
Not surprising. The distance between Putin and Le Pen is not all that great. All the characteristics of Putinism—blood-and-soil nationalism, reimposition of traditional values, narrowly redefined national interests, a longing for powerful central government—are to be found in the ideology of the National Front, which called, for example, for repealing same-sex marriage. It’s part of a wider trend sweeping Europe, a rising populism attracted to a new model of governance—traditional, reactionary and, above all, unapologetically nationalist.
The victory of the centrist Emmanuel Macron showed that there is nothing inevitable about the rising populism. But his very victory is rightly seen as a singular and therefore crucial challenge for the centrist politics he represents. Should he fail—and his plans to reform French labor and tax law are highly ambitious and therefore problematic—the crisis of the establishment center will become all the more acute, leaving an opening for a radical populism of the right or left.
Note that the far left and arguably communist Jean-Luc Mélenchon ran only two points behind Le Pen in the first round of the 2017 presidential elections. This is almost as dismaying as the showing of Jeremy Corbyn of the British Labour Party in Britain’s general election, which occurred only one month later. Here too was an essentially unreconstructed communist who, though not winning the election, was clearly the biggest winner. Corbyn increased his party’s representation in Parliament by 32, leaving it not only the principal opposition party but the leading candidate to defeat the Conservatives in the next elections.
Nor is the tug of the populist extremes confined to Western Europe. Indeed, its most alarming manifestation is to be found in two leading post-Soviet democracies, once the herald of the post–Cold War dawn: Hungary and Poland.
In Hungary, the highly nationalist, anti-immigrant government has given the president effective control of the courts while suppressing opposition media. In Poland, the executive has similarly taken over the Constitutional Tribunal and captured the public media. The “spectacular breakdown of democracy” (to quote Freedom House) in these linchpin post-communist states is a reminder of the fragility and the reversibility of democratic gains everywhere.
How to account for the retreat? In the immediate post–World War II era, the same question arose in trying to explain that period’s totalitarian temptation: the rising, powerful communist parties of the West. At the time, conventional wisdom described it as a flight from freedom. The burdens of freedom were too heavy, the attractions of security too many.
A byproduct was the vogue for a new set of economic and social “rights.” Traditional rights—the “negative liberty” of being left alone by others, especially the state—were derided as bourgeois. True human rights were the more concrete and material—the right to sustenance, to work, to shelter, to physical protection. Note that these were not freedoms from the state, but benefits that could only be conferred by the state. The resulting dependency is the very antithesis of freedom.
That new vocabulary of rights generated a linguistic sleight-of-hand that allowed the complete overturning of the very notion of freedom. The most ruthless dictatorships took to calling themselves democracies, as in the “Democratic Republic of” this or that—the German Democratic Republic and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea being the most notorious of these frauds until the rise of Democratic Kampuchea (Cambodia) in the 1970s. Its specialty was genocide.
But the argument found many takers. After all, went the cliché, what was free speech to people with empty stomachs?
The choice was presented as binary. Millions chose security (often, ironically, in free elections). Psychologically, they preferred not to bear the burdens, the responsibilities, the risks of freedom. They preferred a state that gave them their daily bread.
Given the abject destitution and privation that Europe was suffering amid the rubble of World War II, that may be an adequate explanation for the attraction of the totalitarian parties in the ’40s and ’50s. It is not, however, an adequate explanation for the flight from freedom today. After all, it’s been well and widely demonstrated that liberal democracy is infinitely superior in producing not just freedom but prosperity as well. The economic security promised by socialism and the various collectivisms has turned out to be a fraud. The wreckage wrought by socialism on a wealthy country with the largest oil reserves in the Western Hemisphere—Venezuela—is only the latest empirical evidence. This follows three Cold War social experiments that demonstrated unequivocally the superiority of democratic capitalism in providing for physical wants: North vs. South Korea, East vs. West Germany, China (pre-Deng Xiaoping) vs. Taiwan.
No. What drives people away today from the classic liberal democratic model are considerations not economic but cultural. The hunger is not for bread but for ethnic and nationalist validation. For strength, respect, recognition.
The most dramatic manifestation of this nationalist revival is growing resistance to the European idea and, most especially, the European Union. And no wonder. It was founded with the very aim to dilute the nationalism that was seen as the toxic fuel that led to the two great wars. The whole purpose of the European Coal and Steel Community (that ultimately evolved into the European Union) was to create a structure—at the beginning merely economic but with political aspirations—to attenuate national sentiments in order to render unthinkable the very idea of war between European peoples.
And it worked. Half a millennium of near-continuous intra-European war gave way to a 70-year interlude of intra-European peace. Unfortunately, one of the side effects was a distasteful hubris among the cosmopolitan elites that helped engineer the entire project. They came to ignore repeated popular expressions—often by referendum—of resistance to the remorseless integration that submerged and suppressed national habits and feelings. Britons, for example, did not like being told by Brussels the proper size of pomegranates. They especially resented being deprived of full say over immigration from the 27 other EU countries, the most powerful issue in propelling the Brexit victory of 2016. Turns out that a flag flying no symbols, an anthem stirring no memory, a ruling body commanding no allegiance leaves a void—and, amid the void, a renewed longing for the symbols, memories and allegiances of tribe and nation.
Like the Marxists before them, the Europeanists grossly underestimated the enduring power of ethnic nationalism. Add to that the sudden influx of a mass migration of culturally alien Muslims—and the apparent indifference of the ruling elites to the social and economic upheavals that followed—and you have the ingredients for a revolt against the ultimate expression of the post–Cold War liberal ideal: a European Union increasingly integrated into a transnational superstate.
To be sure, we should be careful not to identify anti-EU feelings necessarily with authoritarianism or with a kind of hyper-nationalism that prefers non-democratic norms. In fact, those who oppose the European project often paint themselves as the real democrats. Brexit proponents presented themselves as champions of a return to traditional British democracy where British subjects get to decide their own fate. They made a cogent case that they were resisting an increasingly antidemocratic regime under which half of Britain’s laws and regulations are issued from Brussels, not Westminster.
Nonetheless, it is certainly true that there is often an affinity between anti-EU and antidemocratic tendencies. It’s no accident that Nigel Farage embraces Julian Assange (at the Embassy of Ecuador, no less, leftist stepchild of Chavez’s Bolivarian revolution); that Marine Le Pen, aside from paying homage to Putin, advocates withdrawal from the EU and escape from the grip of the “globalists,” accusing her Europeanist challenger, Emmanuel Macron, of treason; and that the most vociferous enemies of globalization—on both sides of the Atlantic—are the greatest advocates of national “strength” and self-assertion with the most minimal regard for constitutional restraint.
Strength is the operative word. National, ethnic, tribal. Betrayed by globalist elites, pettifogging democrats, politically correct politicians, what attracts Westerners to authority is this image of strength. It’s an appeal that more than anything carried Trump to the White House.
Trump’s admiration for strength is not limited to his one-time bromance with Putin. It extends, amazingly, to the butchers of Tiananmen Square. In Trump’s reading, the Chinese leadership flinched until it was almost too late: “When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength.”
In contrast, “our country is right now perceived as weak…as being spit on by the rest of the world.” He said all that 30 years ago—and has never wavered since. Indeed, he conducted a 17-month presidential campaign on the promise to return us to a time of national strength, when America was—but presumably is no longer—great.
The good news of the early Trump presidency is that America’s political institutions, so decried as weak and pliant, have proved a resilient and powerful check on antidemocratic tendencies in the executive. The courts, the states, the Congress, and the media have provided a resistance few would have predicted to Trump’s appeal to ethnonationalism, authoritarianism, protectionism (which is state control of trade). Moreover, the exigencies of American interests—interests are permanent, ideologies come and go—have, by and large, bent even the Trump foreign policy from insurgency to postwar normalcy.
The ringing promises of “America First,” the call for a more insular and inward, more narrow and self-interested, more ethnic and nationalist America that permeated the inaugural address, remain for the most part merely rhetorical. As the imperatives of national interest and geopolitical reality inexorably assert themselves, Trump’s presidency appears to have been, at least for now, effectively “normalized.”
And Le Pen lost. As did Geert Wilders in Holland. As will the extreme right in Germany. The EU still survives. And in the United States, the tentpole of the democratic world, the forebodings about an assault on democracy itself that so permeated the 2016 campaign have largely abated.
And Macron won. To be slightly perverse about it, one could say that you know the West is in trouble when its greatest hope lies in France. Macron will indeed be a test of whether the traditional democratic center can maintain itself against the populist authoritarian challenge.
It’s far too soon to declare the populist wave crested. The demagoguery of 2016 did carry the day. We may be in a period of equilibrium, but equilibria are inherently unstable. The danger remains. That the traditional left-right political divide of the last two centuries is increasingly being surpassed by the nationalist-globalist and authoritarian-democratic divide is disturbing and potentially ominous.
Left vs. right we learned how to manage, if after a century and a half. Authoritarian vs. democratic may be more difficult. It’s not just new; it’s coming at a time of profound civilizational self-doubt. In such circumstances, the unimaginable often becomes imaginable.
We have traveled far in the last 25 years. In precisely the wrong direction. Wrote Wordsworth in the romantic rapture that was the promise of 1789: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/But to be young was very heaven!” We know how that ended. How does the End of History end?
Washington, DC, July 3, 2017