THE WORLD OF THE NINETIES
It was in the early-1990s.
It was very dark and pouring. The taxi picked me up from the hotel past midnight. I was visiting a communist country behind the Iron Curtain on behalf of an international financial institution and was about to fly back to the United States. My suitcase did not fit in the trunk, full of old tires. So, I had to carry it with me. The driver told me he would avoid taking the highway to the airport because of an accident. He would take small roads through some poor city areas. I said yes but then repented when I could not do anything. It was a very dark place, with potholes full of dirty water and sinister-looking small wooden constructions. When the taxi entered the potholes, its bodywork was deformed, and one of the doors opened, so I had to continuously hold it with my hand while with the other hand I had to keep my suitcase in place.
Advancing slowly through such a sinister place, I thought I had made a big mistake. I would never arrive at the airport. I felt isolated in a place that could turn out to be dangerous. Faraway from civilization. The car's lights were so weak that he could barely see the puddles of water. I thought I would miss my flight.
Deep in these thoughts, I suddenly saw three powerful lights approaching me from my left. They illuminated everything around me: the taxi, the driver looking wide-eyed at the light, the wooden frames that surrounded us, the potholes, the decayed road, and then, with a tremendous roar, I saw that one of the lights was attached to a landing gear and the other two to gigantic wings, and seconds later, a line of illuminated windows passed in front of me, and at the rear end, an also enormous vertical rudder, and on it, illuminated by a special light, an American flag and the name Panam. The plane passed on top of us, just a few meters above, and landed gently on the runway on my right.
I know I could not have seen the flight attendants. Still, I imagined them inside the brightly illuminated cabin, standing like rods in front of the passengers, projecting that calm security I had identified with the United States and the West for my entire life. It was my plane. I would soon be flying back to the United States and freedom. The roar, the power of the engines, and the clean order were symbols of might used for the good, the right, justice, and creativity.
This feeling, embodied in the memory of that 747 landing far away on a rainy dawn in the territory of a terrible tyranny, projecting the mature power of the West, would accompany me for years on my trips to Asia, the Middle East, the Soviet Union, and the then communist Eastern Europe. The feeling of landing in Finland, Sweden, Germany, or New York after weeks inside the oppressing atmosphere behind the Iron Curtain was always exhilarating, as was the feeling that communism was falling and that those countries would finally be liberated. I associated this liberation with an evening in the steppes, visiting a grain elevator surrounded by snow, far away from the city, below a dome of incredibly bright stars. The snow reflected the light of the stars as if in a rebirth of those lands.
The fall of the Soviet Union was around the corner. It would bring about the end of the Cold War. The West had assured Gorbachev that it would not take advantage of its economic and political collapse. On the contrary, all Western countries were helping the country carry out a peaceful transition. From then on, the United States would preside alone over a continuation of the Pax Americana, which had started after World War II. Francis Fukuyama thought that history had ended in the sense that no more discussions were needed to decide which ideology was best. He wrote a book saying this, and the world applauded.
Thirty years later, the world is entirely different. Something went amiss. The future has turned out to be different from what we thought. What was bright has turned dark. We are living in the worst crisis that liberal democracy has suffered, comparable only to that of the 1930s, when communism and Nazi-fascism were expanding worldwide and World War II loomed in the future. Those were the years Churchill called The Gathering Storm.
THE WORLD OF TODAY
This reversal is not the result of a decay from the material conditions of the 1990s to the level of the 1930s. On the contrary, the West is doing much better than at the turn of the century and is in incomparably better shape than ninety years ago. In the 1930s, the world faced the worst economic depression in history, which worsened a worldwide problem of poverty that included the industrial countries. Those problems, combined with the destructiveness of World War I, had elicited the escalation to power of the communist party in Russia, which, in turn, threatened to unleash revolutions all over the industrial countries. This threat, plus resentments carried from World War I, caused the emergence of communism and Nazi-fascism. These two ideologies threatened the social and political order of liberal democracies.
The reversal of the last thirty years did not happen because the bright material world we expected in the 1990s did not arrive. What we expected came and went. Communism collapsed in theory and practice, the Soviet Union dismembered, and China progressed fast after allowing the development of capitalism. The Cold War ended, and the West enjoyed the dividends of peace—a large portion of the resources previously spent on weapons was invested in physical and human capital to improve living standards. China became one of the kingpins of the globalization of trade and production. Technology increasingly multiplies the power of the mind, accelerating progress in all fields of knowledge. Artificial Intelligence promises to mark the most radical scientific advance in history. The world suffered two grave economic crises in this new century but recovered so that today, world production is the highest and poverty the lowest in history.
Looking just at the materialistic side of life, we are living in the best period humankind has ever lived. The pretexts that the conditions of the 19th and 20th centuries gave Marxists to call for revolutions disappeared in the developed liberal democracies, showing developing countries that liberal democracy is the road to economic progress. This provided a credible path for their development as well. Even Herbert Marcuse, a top Marxist of the 20th century, expressed his frustration regarding the prospects of engineering a revolution in modern liberal democracies:
As to today and our own situation, I think we are faced with a novel situation in history, because today we have to be liberated from a relatively well functioning, rich, powerful society…The problem we are facing is the need for liberation from a society which develops to a great extent the material and even cultural needs of man—a society which, to use a slogan, delivers the goods to an ever larger part of the population. And that implies, we are facing liberation from a society where liberation is apparently without a mass basis.[1]
Marcuse wrote these words in the late 1960s. They were truer in the 1980s and 1990s when communism was collapsing.
More recently, Nellie Bowles, former star journalist of The New York Times and darling of the Left until she said something that contradicted the Left’s doctrine, wrote the following words in a book published in 2024,
“When it comes to the rage and indignation, some of it might seen bizarre—how could everyone have been this angry all the time? But I think a lot about allergy science: When the area around a child is very well disinfected, her immune system will keep searching for a fight. It doesn’t relax and call it a day. It keeps hunting. If finds peach fuzz and fresh-cut grass, strawberries and pollen. The allergy that develops to those is not fake. The throat tightening and the rash are very real….
So, yes, many Americans are insulated and rich, comfortable and healthy, with plenty of food…But I also know that the immune system looking for new battles can do strange things. It can turn inward and kill its own body.”[2]
The attack on the own body has been terribly destructive. Even if all the visions of the future we had in the 1990s have come true, liberal democracy is facing the worst existential crisis in its history. The discontent is not with the material conditions.
Even if the Cold War ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, we are now entering a second one. The enemies of the West include Russia and China, which we all thought would become allies after the fall of communism, and Iran, which seemed to be incapable of growing into a global enemy. And, even if the West has become much stronger, it appears to be weakening in what matters the most: it is losing its fiber. The West is becoming ashamed of being the West.
Although Westerners are fine materially, they are not satisfied with themselves. Their dissatisfaction, however, is not with their present condition but with their past—their past actions and those of their ancestors. Their dissatisfaction with their past is such that they are ashamed of being what they are. They despise themselves. It is as if the bricks are still there, but the cement is eroding every day.
The West has replaced its mature assertiveness with a timid attitude of asking forgiveness for being wealthy, cultured, and democratic…in fact, for being the West. The countries that were among the worst tyrannies ever, Russia and China, have returned to their old ways and have become assertive world powers, daring to pose themselves as models of morality and good behavior even if they committed the worst crimes of the twentieth century (communism in the two countries left 100 million deaths) and even if Russia is massacring Ukrainians just for the sake of a vain desire to conquer the world.
THE SOURCES OF DECAY
How did the world of the 1980s turn into the worst crisis of liberal democracy since the 1930s?
Periods of decay have not been uncommon in history. Ancient Greece, Rome, and various incarnations in China's long history decayed. In all cases, except those destroyed by foreign invasions, civilizations collapsed because they turned against themselves. Yet, they did it in power struggles, not in auto immolation as the West is doing today: systematically destroying its legitimacy, disqualifying the foundational values and the people who dedicated their lives to put them into practice, and leaving no reason for anybody to want to become a part of the threatened civilization. In just a few years, social cohesion has snapped in the leading Western society, the United States, splitting the country into myriads of conflicting fragments. The discontent is not with the material conditions. As I have often pointed out in these articles, the problem is of the soul. Strangely, what divides the country is not the future but the past.
Indeed, there are power struggles beneath this fragmentation. A country famous for the liberal democratic accord of its politicians of every party is now renowned for the hatred poured on each other in day-to-day politics. But at the core of the race and gender conflicts is a demand for the United States to surrender its moral foundation and reason to exist.
As Marcuse recognized, revolutionaries could not use current conditions to justify a revolution. So, they turned to the past. One side looks only at horrible things there, and the other wants to return to a distorted version of it, one that, with its intolerance, seems to give reason to those who see only bad things there. If the current trend is not stopped, democracy will end in the United States. The conflict is at the center of the 2024 presidential elections.
THE TWO SIDES OF THE COIN
It seems easier to see an end to liberal democracy through the figure of Donald Trump. His deeds during and about January 6th and his words since those days have made plain his despise for democracy and the interests of those who disagree with him. In his recent interview with Time Magazine, he described in advance the authoritarian government he would preside over if he won the 2024 elections and issued dark threats about what would happen if he lost.[3] The possibility of violence would increase if he wins and also if he loses.
Given his character, it is easy to imagine that if we are talking about a return to the 1930s and the rise of a dictatorship, we are talking about Trump. However, just as we would make a mistake if we thought the Nazis were the only threat in the 1930s, forgetting about the communists who were killing more than 20 million people in the Soviet Union in that decade, we would be making the same mistake if we believe that Trump is the only threat to democracy in the United States.
We cannot ignore the danger presented by the so-called Left, which wants to impose a uniform view of everything in the United States. This view seeks to destroy democracy by undermining its fundamental freedoms and by imposing racist tribalism as the main principle of social organization. Rather than equality before the law, the Left wants to impose a system of discrimination against white persons, especially white men. It also intends to filter every activity in the country’s social order through the idea that all of them are manifestations of racism. In the process, it attacks freedom of thought and speech. Even mathematics is seen as racist. This seems banal, but it is not because refusing to ply to the exigencies leads to severe chastisements. The destruction of historical figures, such as Abraham Lincoln, who is attacked as racist even if he liberated the slaves, erodes the basis of democracy and leads to the creation of a tyranny.
Thus, even if the Left does not have a charismatic figure like Trump leading its attacks against democracy, the threat comes from the two sides, and it involves most of the country’s population in a terrible conflict fueled by a measure of hatred that never existed in the country except in some small groups of extremists.
Just a decade ago, predicting the end of democracy in the United States would have been seen as madness. Today, even a respected intellectual, Robert Kagan, has written a book (just released in 2024) predicting a possible breakdown of the Union:
“The idea that all Americans share a commitment to the nation’s founding principles has always been a pleasing myth, or perhaps a noble lie. We prefer to believe we all share the same fundamental goals and only disagree on the means to achieve them. But, in fact, large numbers of Americans have always rejected the founders’ claim that all men are created equal, with “unalienable” rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and they have persistently struggled against the imposition of those liberal values on their lives. Great numbers of Americans, from the time of the Revolution onward, have wished to see America in ethnoreligious terms, as fundamentally a white, Protestant nation whose character is an outgrowth of white, Christian, European civilization. Their goal has been to preserve a white, Christian supremacy, contrary to the founders’ vision, and they have tolerated the founders’ liberalism, and the workings of a the democratic system, only when it has not undermined that cause. When it has, they have repeatedly rebelled against it.
A straight line runs from the slaveholding South in the early to mid-nineteenth century to the post-Reconstruction South of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the second Ku-Klux-Klan of the 1920s, to the Dixiecrats of the 1940s and ‘50s, to Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society of the 1950s and ‘60s, to the burgeoning Christian nationalist movement of recent decades, to the New Right of the Reagan Era, to the Republican Party of today.[4]
Kagan is right when he says that a certain group he describes has always existed. Yet, he doesn’t say that its size has fluctuated through time, with a tendency to diminish, and that if this were not so, the country's history would be impossible to explain because the country has moved from slavery to discrimination to less discrimination and from rights in certain areas denied to African Americans to rights enforced in the entire region. It gives the impression that the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society controlled the country from the 1920s to the ‘60s, when it is clear they were never massive in the country and declined with time.
But this language is currently used, contributing to widening the gap separating Americans.
LOOKING BACKWARDS
Thus, each party in the presidential election has grounds to attack the other as anti-democratic, and both are pointing toward the past in their campaigns. In an unprecedented way, Americans look in the rear-view mirror to decide on their future. And, more alarmingly, they are viewing distorted versions of the past—the Left denigrating every good thing that happened in the country and the Right idolizing an idealized version of the materialistic dimension of its history. Trump has never focused on recovering the authentic sources of the country`s greatness—the liberal principles that made it a land of democracy and individual rights. He thinks the United States was great because it produced Harley-Davidson motorcycles and similar iconic things that can no longer be made with the country's high salaries. He does not realize that greatness came from the Founding Fathers’ principles and values. In the process, he wants to eliminate the democrats. On the other hand, the Left seeks to eradicate the Republicans and, especially, the white male ones. This is not a way to build a country.
Focused on trying to destroy each other, they are destroying the country without realizing what they are doing. People are paying attention to nothing else. That is why the United States, even if remaining as powerful as it was in the 1990s and even more so, has lost the magic it had, the projection of power for good, the solidity needed to guarantee the world order. That is why it is leaving a power vacuum that China, Russia, and Iran want to fill.
Focusing on its domestic conflicts, the United States is losing sight of what is happening in the rest of the world. The country sees what is happening and is not reacting to save the Union. It looks as if what Søren Kierkegaard wrote several decades ago is happening.
“A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it’s a joke.” —[5]
This is the biggest threat to the United States. They will destroy the country without noticing what they are doing.
The bricks are still there, but the cement tying them together is eroded daily. Eventually, the building may collapse—even if production is still high and poverty low, even if the country`s armed forces remain the most powerful in the world.
The danger to the United States is not a lack of material goods but the erosion of the ties that bind them. Fighting over their past, they are going to lose their future.
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Manuel Hinds is a Fellow at The Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise at Johns Hopkins University. He shared the Manhattan Institute's 2010 Hayek Prize. He is the author of four books, the last being In Defense of Liberal Democracy: What We Need to Do to Heal a Divided America. His website is manuelhinds.com
[1] Herbert Marcuse, ‘Liberation from the affluent society’, Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, ed. Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 277.
[2] Nellie Bowles, Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History, PenguinRandomHouse, New York, 2024, Kindle edition, pp. xxix.
[3] Eric Cortellessa, How Far Trump Would Go, Time, April 30, 2024, https://time.com/6972021/donald-trump-2024-election-interview/?...&utm_content=+++20240501+++body&et_rid=240703056&lctg=240703056
[4] Robert Kagan, How Antiliberalism is Tearing America Apart—Again, New York, Alfred Al Knopf, 2024, Kindle Edition, pp. 7.
[5] Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, New York, Anchor Books, 1959, pp. 30.