Dawn of a new era

By Bruce Abramson
Real Clear Wire

The world is in flux. Our much-discussed national vibe shift suggests that Americans are beginning to feel the change, but it understates what’s happening by a very large margin. What we’re experiencing is of global significance: the dawn of a new era.

Between 1989 and 1991, the Communist bloc collapsed. The United States stood bestride the world, history’s first truly global hegemon. Perhaps unsurprisingly in retrospect, that dominance wreaked havoc on our national psyche.

The most popular idea of that moment, summarized in Francis Fukuyama’s provocative title, “The End of History,” shaped the reconstruction and expansion of the “liberal international order.”

Fukuyama’s theory stated that history’s most vexing question – how best to organize society – had been answered definitively. The Washington Consensus preached that free markets and free trade would set every society on an inexorable glide path toward civil liberties and self-governance. Liberal Democracy and its faithful companion Free Market Economics were on the march.

Though adoption might be uneven, every nation, every culture, every society, would inevitably find its way into the community of liberal, democratic nations. Sensitive to the possibility that some might resent these Western models, Western leadership embraced self-deracination, severing “liberal democracy” from every cultural root that had contributed to its development. In their zeal to globalize their preferred modes of political and economic organization, they devalued and defamed every cultural, religious, and ethical underpinning that had made those modes possible.

There is, however, nothing new under the sun. Though few (or even any) appreciated it at the time, the end-of-history crowd had merely updated an ancient message: We have won a surprisingly bloodless victory over a fearsome foe. Now all the peoples of the world will see the glory of our gods and bend themselves to our faith.

Three decades later, our efforts to universalize the bounties of liberal democracy have proved as fruitless as all prior efforts to universalize faith, belief, societal organization, and human behavior. We re-learned that there is genuine variability among cultures, priorities, and value systems. We very emphatically do not all want the same things.

Disastrous American misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan made the point clearly: Overthrowing an odious, militarily inferior regime is easy. Restructuring an alien society in your own image is far harder.

Other lessons were subtler. Bill Clinton had led the charge to open trade with China, arguing that prosperity was the key to liberty. The Chinese leadership, however, understood something its Western counterparts had apparently forgotten: A large and growing middle class is the key to regime stability.

Westerners once understood that lesson well. The welfare state was introduced to anchor newly enfranchised peasants to the regime granting them regular benefits – thereby deterring bloody revolution. Socialist opponents screamed – correctly – that the wealthy were merely bribing the poor to keep themselves in power.

China parlayed its wealth to develop a competing model of governance: an authoritarian surveillance state that monitors and enforces strict rules in selected spheres of social behavior while encouraging robust commercial activity.

Meanwhile, sizable majorities of every Western country fell out of love with the program their leadership was peddling. Some ran hard to the left, reviving and inventing revolutionary doctrines that would upend what remained of the West. Others leaned rightward, yearning for a restoration of the cultural and religious norms that had once animated their societies.

Western leadership preferred the forces of “progressive” revolution to those of “reactionary” tradition. The twin shocks of Brexit and Trump pushed them into overdrive. They waged war against their own citizens, declaring any longing for tradition as hateful, dangerous, and insurrectionist.

The matter came to a head in 2020. Klaus Schwab, head of the globalist confab at Davos, put the matter clearly in The Great Reset and The Great Narrative: The variants of the Chinese model that had emerged to shut the world down during COVID exemplified global good governance at its very finest. They needed to become permanent, truly international, and focused on future crises – specifically, the looming climate crisis.

We had come full circle: Only widespread surveillance and enforced social conditioning could ensure the survival of liberal democracy. Echoes of “you will learn to love your neighbor if we have to beat it into you!” resonated loudly.

Our mid-2023 emergence from COVID found the world in a state that many recognized as superficially familiar but somehow, not quite right. Internal governance, individual rights, alliance structures, and the international order were suddenly all up for grabs. An era had ended; a new one was dawning.

When the history of our American hegemonic era is written, it will reflect a toxic combination of unrivaled innovation, prosperity, and technological advancement with a shocking and near total collapse of morality, faith, and community.

The defining question of the present moment is which new directions will define the future. The Chinese model remains immensely popular among the Western elite. Its strongest advocates, no longer sufficiently popular to govern on their own, have allied with the revolutionary left – in Canada, France, the UK, and a growing number of Western countries.

The U.S. has chosen a very different path – at least for the moment. The new Trump administration seeks to restore traditions and norms while disempowering the elite organizations that have supplanted them. A new web of allies with similar preferences – Argentina, Hungary, Israel, the UAE, India, and others – are cheering the move.

The next few years will prove critical. Which direction will define our future? For the sake of our children, we should all hope that the new team arriving in Washington chooses far more wisely than did its recent predecessors. We are indeed living through the dawn of a new era.

Bruce Abramson is the director of New Student & Graduate Admissions at New College of Florida and a fellow of the Coalition for America. His recent books include “The New Civil War” (RealClear Publishing, 2021) on the corruption of higher education and “American Spirit or Great Awokening?” (Academica Press, 2024) on America’s spiritual crisis and the new religion of Wokeism.