The moment has arrived. President Donald Trump will now be both the 45th and 47th president of the United States. Impossible as it was to predict the events of the 98 months and one week that have passed since the November night Trump first shocked the world, there were signs from before it even happened that pointed to what was to come. These warnings were virtually everywhere in the Western world, and virtually everywhere, they were imperiously ignored by the ruling elites. On this snowy January day, they reap it.
It’s hard to overstate just how tumultuous a year 2016 was for the global order. Trump’s shock victory capped a year that had already seen British voters vote to leave the European Union, tearing at the very heart of a grand liberal experiment in the repression of national sovereignty under continental commissions and bureaucracy, to the benefit of finance and trade.
Today might mark a new beginning, but more certain than anything, this day, Monday, Jan. 20, 2025, marks the liberal order’s end. And how sweet it is.
The connection between Trump’s election and the popular vote to leave the European Union failed to resonate with elites in either Europe or America. While their initial reactions included some confusion and occasional moments of self-reflection, it ultimately did little to shift their perspectives.
The overwhelming response was to write off the U.K.’s Nigel Farage and New York’s brash orange man as ugly aberrations from the long march of history. They weren’t treated as visionaries. They weren’t even understood as having tapped into legitimate mass frustrations. Rather, they were written off as irritable reactionaries, ugly echoes of an ugly past. “England is part of a global community,” they said. “America was never great.”
Those among the elites who did actually blame themselves didn’t do so for failing their people or betraying the national interest. Instead, they blamed themselves for giving too much airtime to the victors’ grievances and for not adequately explaining their own virtues.
As with Brexit, few took a step back and wondered whether the same anger that nearly catapulted a cantankerous 75-year-old Vermont socialist to the top of the blue ticket might be tied to the frustrations felt by blue-collar Democrats defecting to the Republican nominee. On this they failed as well. Today, former Bernie Sanders supporters from Joe Rogan to your next-door neighbor are bona fide Trump supporters. While some were dyed-in-the-wool socialists, most were simply sick of business as usual.
It was clear by the time the 2020 elections came around that the pressure these two seemingly disparate septuagenarians had tapped into had found no release. Society was as tense as at any time since the 1960s. Still, few altered course. Even before COVID, Western politicians had busied themselves with suppressing the revolt instead of dealing with its causes. From 2017 to 2021, far from passing any meaningful reforms, the U.S. Congress did everything in its power to persecute its new president and his few loyal allies.
Then, in early 2020, COVID-19 exposed just how far they’d go. While few other Western states followed Australia’s internment-camp model, across the world, the rulers divided families and villainized Christians and other dissenting voices — all hand in glove with Big Business and Big Tech.
Then, in January 2021, America’s top corporations took the mask off, smashing the myth of a free internet, crippling the Parler social media app, and banning the outgoing president from his social media platforms. American dissidents lost their jobs and their bank accounts. Heavy-handed federal raids targeted aged trespassers alongside young rioters. In Europe and the larger British Commonwealth too, the pressure from on high continued.
In Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a longtime liberal icon, brutally suppressed truckers protesting his vaccine mandates.
By the end of 2023, Europe’s farmers too were in rebellion. Tractors blocked roads, products were dumped, and bonfires were set.
In Britain, the long-cherished rights of Englishmen were swept aside with impunity. While you’re far less likely to mysteriously die in a British prison than in a Russian one, you’re far more likely to find the police at your door for a social media post in England or Scotland than in Vladimir Putin’s homeland.
For years, police, newspapers, and politicians ignored rape gangs. Still today, few among the elites are willing to address the scourge honestly, never mind act decisively to make sure it ends and never happens again. While Conservative governments have faltered and fallen, it’s not because the Labour Party was a popular alternative — it’s because the Tories resisted the British voters’ will at nearly every turn, continuing merrily along as if Brexit had never actually happened.
In France and Germany, the trends were much the same — all while immigrant crime, attacks, and general disorder soared. As was
prophesized in 1968, “the sense of alarm and of resentment lies not with the immigrant population, but with those among whom they have come and are still coming.” Across the world, these concerns were (and are) ignored or worse: written off as the irritable reactions of racist nativists.
This smear was echoed on every front, from Fleet Street to Hollywood and from the Bundestag to the White House. And ever still, the pressure built.
In 2024, the eruption so long foretold by its tremors finally poured forth. And not just in the United States.
The previous fall had seen the toppling of the Dutch government and the near-ascension of longtime backbench provocateur Geert Wilders. It was called the biggest challenge to the Dutch status quo since the Second World War, and around the world, the upsets would continue.
In Britain, Labour swept back into tenuous power on the backs of voters enraged by the Tories’ hollow promises and feckless governance.
In France, liberal icon Emmanuel Macron’s government collapsed after a vote of no confidence.
Twelve days later in Germany, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government collapsed after a vote of no confidence.
Three weeks after that, Justin Trudeau announced his coming resignation as his own government followed suit.
Like the fires that have burned swaths of Los Angeles to the ground, the end results of decades of neglectful misrule can no longer be blamed on Republicans or global warming or Russian interference or any other shadowy, distant evil. These are fruits of the liberal order’s own sowing. It did this. It set the conditions. All it took were sparks carried on a hard wind.
None of this is to say the future is conservative. In Washington, a goodly number of professional Republicans are actively on the liberal order’s side — and are actively fighting against any real changes to its systems. Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party in Canada more closely resembles these Republicans than it does Trump’s people or those of the populist conservative movements of Europe. The same is true in Westminster. In France, Germany, and elsewhere in mainland Europe, conservative opposition is fractured, unsure, and eager for infighting. On the continent, socialists and Green Party types are as likely (or more) to reap the benefits of this collapse as those on the right are.
All this is to say, however, that the postwar liberal order is dead. Dead, but not by Trump’s hand or by Wilders’ or Farage’s or Marine Le Pen’s in France. None but its own. It was killed by its decadence, its own condescension.
The founders of this order had been restrained from excesses. They’d seen the League of Nations founder and fail under the weight of its own utopianism. Theirs was a clear-eyed order, promising to establish safe trade routes and roundtables for bipolar dialogue and de-escalation. Their goal was to prevent a third world war.
Their successors took the hard-won peace and prosperity they’d inherited and spent it on adventurism, free trade, deindustrialization, outsourcing, unrestricted immigration from the undeveloped world, the breaking down of national sovereignties, and global crusades for democracy and gay rights. They spent credit they had not earned on priorities that actively hurt their own countries, and they did it with the moral fervor of a secular Awakening. Anyone who questioned them was “on the wrong side of history.” Theirs was the throne given them by their fathers. No more.
The blinders are off, the rulers exposed. Ironically, the trauma of their responses to COVID did more than anyone to wake the people up, even if drowsily. Some blessings come in painful packages.
The future is unknown, but it’s undeniably here. In November, Americans voted in the majority for the return of the man the world order elites had rejected. At every turn, they resisted both the realities around them and the change those realities demanded. Trump’s inauguration is their reckoning.
Today might mark a new beginning, but more certain than anything, this day, Monday, Jan. 20, 2025, marks the liberal order’s end. And how sweet it is.
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