The End Of The End of History?

What the actual hell is going on?

we’ve officially reached Near Future Aesthetics

A week ago, an assassin age shot the CEO of a healthcare company in New York City. This week, we found out who it was, and it was a fairly normal and successful guy who approximately 6 months ago got “blackpilled” and decided to commit the lowest stake magnicide attempt he could. While the fact that a guy with Tech Bro Politics killed someone for completely inscrutable reasons lent itself to a lot of fairly funny jokes, the truth is that many people had already chosen to use the occasion to celebrate and gloat.

I think this tracks with everything we’ve been seeing: political upheaval all over the world, with attempted coups in South Korea, the United States, and Brazil, and leaders who only a few years ago would have been considered fringe or extreme being embraced by larger and larger majorities. People just seem to be embracing their worst instincts and their worst selves, all over the political spectrum. What happened?

♫ Sing along to some America First rap country song ♫

One of the more common trends in Latin American and global politics is that people are just very dissatisfied. Parties that had been outside the mainstream for decades suddenly burst back into life. Since 2020, incumbent parties have lost elections more often than won them, and usually lost them by wide margins; just in 2024, every governing party in developed countries has lost vote share versus the prior election. Only two incumbent parties in all of Latin America (Paraguay’s Liberal Party and Mexico’s MORENA) have secured follow-up terms.

So overall, generalized anti-incumbent trends seem to be due to inflation: after the COVID pandemic reopening and the post-Ukraine invasion commodity shock, prices shot up, and in basically all cases haven’t declined. While the relationship between economics and voting patterns is complicated, the uniformity and widespread nature of the anti-incumbent swing seems to point to a widespread and uniform phenomenon, in this case post-COVID inflation. Voters do not like higher prices, for a variety of reasons, leading with declining purchasing power and frictions at work, and do not seem to accept that lowering price growth would have other costs.

Back in the 90s, Francis Fukuyama gained notoriety for his belief that History, the contestation between ideologies, was over, and liberal democracy had triumphed. Beyond the errors in his book and occasional conservative hackishness, Fukuyama makes a solid point in his election postmortem: Trump’s victory marks a decisive defeat for liberalism itself, as people are mad as hell, scared, and restless. A quote by Fukuyama making the rounds on social media makes a clear case: “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”.

During the original crisis of liberalism in the 1930s, Friedrich Hayek sought to revive the liberal creed, which had become stuffy and old-fashioned; while the liberal vision of John Maynard Keynes was (at least initially) more successful. Back in 2016, when Trump first won, an excerpt by Richard Rorty made the rounds - describing how the working class would lose faith in liberal democratic capitalism and demand a reactionary authoritarian to put everything where it belonged. The excerpt seemed eerily prescient because Rorty was thinking about a moment like our own: one in which the then-evident weaknesses of the neoliberal order resulted in its loss of credibility. This notion is not especially unique: times of political and economic crisis happen when the “national vision” is under crisis - featuring intense contestation for the future of this vision. This is what political theorist Antonio Gramsci would call a “crisis of hegemony” - a moment when the ruling elites lose their prestige and thus their control over the culture, and a “brawl” breaks out to replace them. Likewise, the (generally reactionary) political scientist Samuel Huntington described a moment of “creedal passion”, where the fundamental role of institutions comes under discussion after their loss of prestige - featuring social upheaval, political participation and division, and economic troubles.

This all has opened the door to, I think, the most dangerous political movement in history: fascism. What is fascism could fill an entire newsletter, but let’s just sum it up by saying that it’s an ideology that rejects democratic pluralism in favor of “technocracy” and top-down authoritarianism, and which proposes rejecting artificial liberal “meritocracy” of women and minorities in favor of a return to the traditional national hierarchy of the nation. It also embraces political violence and a variety of procedural and minoritarian “tricks” to lock its oponents out of power. I don’t think that looking inside the hearts of men is very useful, so we can just take the Friedmanite approach and say that someone is fascist if describing them as such helps actually anticipate their actions. If, for whatever reason, you thought “hey this is kind of fascist” about Donald Trump in 2016, then you would have guessed that he would attempt to steal an election with force. So it’s at least minimally useful to describe him. So Trump also marks the introduction of a dangerous fascist movement in American politics. Therefore, the real question is why the Trumpreich enthusiasts managed to goose-step to the White House twice over in just a decade - when other similar movements in recent American history just didn’t take.

It’s the economy, stupid

In the last decade there has been a global political realignment of the left/right axis. In the old world, voters would be aligned between “statist” and laissez faire on economics, and progressive or conservative on culture. The new world, in my view, is polarized between cosmopolitan versus nativist on the cultural axis, and high and low social trust on the other, such that the “economically anxious” working class has cozied up to the hard right, while the high education “Brahmins” have Gone Woke. This means that, in the US, polarization shoukd decrease by age and race, and increase by gender and education. The Democrats have become the educated party of the technocratic establishment, and 2024 was not a good year for that.

Trumpism and similar such movements emerged due to the crisis of the “neoliberal” order over the last 30 years or so, but especially since the global financial crisis. Obviously, “neoliberalism” is murky and ill-defined, so I’ll just drop discussion of the term, but will note that however one describes the way we’ve been doing economic policy, it hasn’t delivered on crucial aspects: growing income inequality, declining socioeconomic mobility, soaring housing costs, a variety of social ills like loneliness and isolation, and most importantly, most of the world, in general never really recovered from the Great Recession returned to its pre-Recession growth path.

Research finds that democracies can remain successful as long as they result in economic growth, quality public services, and stability, so a generalized authoritarian turn in response to economic conditions should not surprise.Poor economic performance is also linked with lower political trust and more political upheaval. In general, weak, corrupt, politically polarized democracies are likely to underperform economically and to have significant democratic backsliding. Additionally, voters exposed to NAFTA-related unemployment shifted right as long as they had socially conservative views.

In a broader sense, the shift is usually to the right: in the United States and Europe, rising inequality and slowing growth are linked to support of far-right parties. In Brazil, economic liberalization led to higher unemployment, which resulted in higher affiliation with pentecostal churches - which coupled with tax policy, increased vote shares for far-right candidates. Likewise, in the Weimar Era, areas more closely harmed by the “hunger Chancellor’s” austerity programs turned to supporting Hitler in later years. And if government performance has affected perceptions of democracy, it should be no surprise that countries with lower approval ratings on COVID management also have lower support for democracy. Men, additionally, both swung to the right and were the hardest hit by “the post-recession economy” and by cuts to public programs and services.

6’5, blue eyes, no-trust, no-funds

There’s also an indirect effect of economic conditions on trust: individuals exposed to lower economic growth during their formative years are more likely to have a “zero sum” mentality, where economic gains have to be matched to economic losses. These “zero sum” voters are both more supportive of redistribution, but more opposed to immigration, a combination of stances particularly harmful for the Democrats given the party’s rhetoric and current voter preferences. Zero-sum thinking impacts political beliefs: those who score high on this metric are disproportionately likely to vote Republican, and are overall highly likely to be anti-immigration, and are highly likely to be conservative on gender. Zero sum polarization, where people who have been exposed to hardship are more “us-or-them”, whilst those coming from prosperity have higher trust in others explains voter shifts: older voters and educated voters are moving left because of their higher levels of trust as past and present economic winners, whereas younger voters and less educated voters are moving right because of the opposite, lower job market success and thus levels of trust.

Generally, zero-sum beliefs are closely linked with lower social trust in general, which is particularly damaging for the center left: lower social trust also impacts future values and attitudes towards government, and trust is broadly correlated with socially liberal and economically left wing beliefs. This is due to the fact that more individualistic and more particularist moral values are linked with Trump vote shares. For example, opinions on COVID policy were driven by social trust, and not by a standard left/right ideology.

The zero sum mindset is sustained by uncoordinated expectations: sexist views, in men, are less common than we think, and keep men back from expressing their real beliefs. Being exposed to people who are different than you helps you become more respectful and accepting of them: exposure to immigrants raises generosity to others like the immigrant, class prejudices in Indian schools declined when exposed to other-caste students, and being exposed to talented female coworkers increases approval of working women among men. Social media, in particular the website formerly known as Twitter, acts as a sort of counter: negativity bias, echo chambers, and selective algorithmic boosting aside, the whole thing is performing a sort of “reverse CBT” as Jonathan Haidt calls it, which promotes attitudes of negativity and helplessness, which in fact are highly correlated with zero-sum mindsets.

There is a strong feedback loop, where angry and alienated members of the Trumpenproletariat become even angrier after seeing incendiary, viral posts about drag queen story hour. In the “Bowling Alone” sense, loneliness is worse than ever: being what in less kind and less gentle times would be called “a loser” is being mainstreamed and normalized for the youth, as men and women date less, party less, and have less sex than ever - leading to much distress. This “Blackpill”, as it is known in the incel community, is both analogous to and linked with Trump support: social media makes starkly clear what some have and others don’t, breeding resentment.

To address this resentment, people not only want to be better off, they want those with slightly more and slightly less to be worse off, and it is not always driven by concern about distribution itself. Desire for redistribution is highly dependent on values and culture whether “luck” plays a moral role, and is particularly driven by whether one is motivated by principled egalitarianism, principles of fairness, or resentment. People as a whole feel entitled to what they have but believe others in their position don’t deserve it (actual UBI recipients swerved hard against redistribution), and American voters seem more interested in predistribution (i.e. redistributing between capital and labor) than redistribution, as they dislike “handouts”.

Conclusion

Look, I’m a liberal, and it’s obvious that liberalism is on the losing side so far. Like the original fascism that emerged during the post-Great Depression era, the current incarnation channels anger and the Great Recession, and the underlying issues it worsened, compounding with various other social resentments and the negative effects of social media on social lives to produce a world full of authoritarianism, mistrust, and scarcity brain. So what do we do about it?

Well, Daron Acemoglu has an article out (based on an astoundingly poorly formatted tweet), basically saying what I’ve been saying on social media for a bit: that we need to come up with a new liberalism. To paraphrase Chappell Roan, we can either take it like a taker, or give it like a giver - we need liberalism to check itself out of the nursing home (or, in the US, out of hospice care), puts its boxing gloves on, and hop back into the ring. Like Hayek back in the 1930s, we ought to come up with a new, superior vision of what a liberal social, political, and economic order will be like.

Exactly what this has to be like is a bit beyond my pay grade, and while there are some alternatives floating around, in general we should build a proposal for society founded on common, historically grounded values, and have a proactive and not reactive political outlook. Rather than pitting economic, social, and political reform against each other, we should see them as a unified whole. In this sense, positive experiences with democracy are linked with both of those through more universalist value systems, positive interactions in the marketplace shape a more universalist, high-trust, non zero-sum mindset, and positive economic performance was linked with higher support for democracy during the Russian Revolution - but only when democracy was actually strengthened.

Throughout the world, liberals have to put liberalism on the right track: transforming our societies from fragile and mistrustful into abundant and secure. As long as that task is put off, the looming authoritarian threat will be able to continue gathering strength. Liberalism won history the last time around, but this time is not guaranteed.

Also disclaimer that The Subway is by far the better unreleased Chappell Roan song.