The Post-Cold War Era Is Finished. Liberalism and Democracy Will Go On.

Opinion|The Post-Cold War Era Is Finished. Liberalism and Democracy Will Go On.

My column last weekend made some pretty sweeping historical claims: that the re-election 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. The 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.

Well, maybe. But before going all the way to that conclusion, consider first how many people inside the Trump-Vance coalition still consider themselves partisans of liberal values — defenders of free speech and other liberties they deem most threatened by the left, not the right. And then consider the recent argument from Gray’s fellow critic of liberal overreach, Aris Roussinos, pointing out that the version of the liberal order that bestrode the world after 1989 was quite different from the post-World War II liberal order that preceded it — more utopian in its ambition, more culturally comprehensive in its claims, more imperious and imperial and hubristic and therefore, yes, foredoomed.

Whereas the worldview that governed Europe and America after 1945 was more pragmatic and cold-eyed, much less ambitious and revolutionary — while remaining a form of liberalism nonetheless. Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan all, in various ways, fell short of post-1989 ideals of how America and the “liberal international order” should be governed. But none of them were “illiberal” in the way that an everyday person might use the term. They just operated within a more bounded context than their post-Cold War successors, had more preliberal and nonliberal instincts mixed in with their liberal commitments and generally related to the world in a less fully ideological way than the post-Cold War elite.

With this past in mind, Roussinos argued, the liberals of the early 21st century may be better off in the long run for entering a more bounded future, in which they no longer preside seemingly unchallenged over the globe:

Just as the bipolar order of the Cold War world, by restraining liberalism’s inherent tendencies to radicalization and hubris, made the Western world safe for a tempered and moderate liberalism, so may the multipolar world we have entered save liberals from their own excesses. Beset by confident rivals abroad, and by the disenchantment of their own voters at home, liberals will once again have to learn restraint. The post-Cold War order ultimately proved disastrous for American liberalism: a return to the actually existing order of 1945 may prove more congenial.

To this theory of partial continuity rather than complete rupture, I’ll add a second observation: Even in a changed world order, American democracy looks reasonably robust.