A recent column of mine made some pretty sweeping historical claims: that the reelection 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 invasion of 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.
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