U.S. President Donald Trump is disrupting so many institutions and norms, it’s hard to keep track of what matters and what doesn’t.
Is the chaos merely performative (befitting a celebrity who got his big break on reality television)? Or does it amount to a historic rupture? Much suggests the latter, because Trump is well on the way to burying a large idea: that of "the West.”
Like the Global South, the West is not primarily a geographical notion, for its European and North American trunks have antipodean, Asian and other branches. It is instead, as the German historian Heinrich August Winkler defines it, a "normative” project — an evolving, sometimes vague but nonetheless coherent bundle of values.
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