This article was originally posted on Slugger O’Toole…
This will be the first of many shattering weeks in 2025. Even the cleverest members of the establishment that is being routed have started to acknowledge publicly that the old order is dead. This isn’t a matter of a change in the personnel in charge, or even of long-standing diplomatic alliances, but of suddenly finding that the assumptions that most of us shared about how the world functions and how it should function are no longer correct. To think through what we might be about to experience, it might be useful to briefly explore the last time a world-historical shift of similar speed and scale took place.
On 7 October 1989, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorchbachëv visited East Berlin to help the incompetent geriatrics who ran the misnamed German Democratic Republic celebrate the 40th anniversary of their state. Although he was the leader of what was supposed to be their closest ally, East German security forces blocked streets to prevent their citizens from greeting the world’s most senior Communist—only vetted members of front organisations on planned demonstrationswere allowed near his cavalcade. Extra barricades were erected at Checkpoint Charlie, and day-trippers from West Berlin, normally welcomed for the hard Deutschmarks they spent in eastern shops and cafés, were turned away.
Nonetheless, a few East Berliners managed to find their way to vantage points overlooking the route, shouting “Gorbi help us!” in front of the world’s cameras. In private, away from the media, Gorbachëv warned Erich Honecker and his colleagues in the SED ruling party, bitter opponents of his economic and political liberalisation, that the USSR would not intervene to preserve their rule if their own people turned against them.
In October, power in the country still seemed to rest with its fearsome secret services, especially the widely-despised Stasi, far more competent than the SED’s gerontocracy. Many wondered if the Stasi would start shooting at the weekly Monday night demonstrations in the second city of Leipzig which grew into the tens of thousands after Gorbachëv’s visit. In the weeks that followed, events moved with such speed they were almost impossible to process at the time. By December, with the Berlin Wall open and the SED negotiating with the opposition, people wondered if the crowds that stormed Stasi regional headquarters across the country to prevent them shredding evidence of their crimes would lynch the occupants (they didn’t). A montage of West German TV evening news reports from the last three months of 1989 captures the blistering and often bewildering pace of events.
The situation was frequently misread as it developed, especially by the many in West Germany who, while despising the brutality of the SED and its secret police, saw at least some features of the Communist economic and cultural order as being superior to Western capitalism.
Very rarely has a video clip profoundly influenced me; an exception is a panel discussion on West German TV the night after the Wall fell on 9 November, which discussed the extraordinary events of the previous 24 hours. The right-wing journalist Gerhard Löwenthal, long a figure of ridicule on the Left for his televised rants about ‘Linksextremiste’, confidently predicted that reunification would soon follow. In Left-leaning West Berlin, his fellow panellists talked down to him and rolled their eyes; there had been no evidence over weeks of demonstrations, they told him, that East Germans wanted reunification rather than reform.
By February, the only question was how quickly the two Germanies would reunify. It was estimated that around 90% of East Germans favoured reunification. During the campaign for East Germany’s first and only free elections, centre-right parties led by Helmut Kohl’s CDU offered rapid reunification, the centre-left SPD offered reunification at more measured pace, and a slow reunification was proposed, ironically, by both the newly renamed former ruling party and the human rights activists who were the first to raise their heads above the parapet in early 1989 as a potential opposition. Commentators on both sides of the border expected the SPD to top the poll—surely, with democracy secure, East Germans would want to take the time to preserve the redeeming features of state socialism, it was reckoned, especially in this heavily working-class region. They were badly wrong. Kohl’s allies swept to victory, and by the first anniversary of Gorbachëv’s visit, the German Democratic Republic had ceased to exist.
2025—The End of an Era
February 2025 lies at the beginning of a period of destruction of existing structures, but more than that, the destruction of previously reliable political and even psychological assumptions about the way the world works. Trump is ripping up Europe’s post-1990 security architecture, as he promised in his successful election campaign. He is also ripping up the American domestic settlement on identity and race, also as he promised in his successful election campaign.
Donald Trump is undoubtedly unhinged. He may very well end up being unpopular among Americans—although I wouldn’t automatically assume that will happen, as he is doing what he was elected to do, and his domestic agenda is quite popular with Americans even as his foreign agenda is despised. Even if he ends up hated, however, it will be impossible to put what he has dismantled back together again. From the start, Trump-supporting intellectuals understood they might only have two years in control of a rare quadrifecta of presidency, both houses of Congress, and Supreme Court; hence they are moving quickly to make changes that will not be easily reversed.
As is evident from the speed with which the Trumpites are setting out to rip up not only government diversity initiatives, but those in business and education, this isn’t just a matter of political programmes or structures of governance. Trump is setting out to rip up a paradigm, an unspoken set of shared assumptions about how the world works, and one that was already in serious trouble worldwide, as his first election win showed.
This progressive vision of how to make a better world emerged in the 1960s in the richest Western countries out of an older and more collectivist progressive paradigm, and came to global predominance in the 1990s. It is now being ended, intentionally.
This paradigm was born among utopian visions of remaking the world through self-realisation and individual liberation in the late 1960s. When utopia proved elusive, it was the individualist that survived, morphing into credit card consumerism in the 1980s. The naked materialism of Boomer consumer capitalism sat, once one thinks about it, surprisingly comfortably with the naked materialism of the song that encapsulated the vision the post-1960s progressives longed for: John Lennon’s Imagine—a world without borders, gods, or even much in the way of beliefs, where there was nothing to kill or die for, just an eternity of stoned sex. It was never explained who would collect the bins or fix the drains.
It’s of note that John Lennon’s Imagine wasn’t written at the counterculture’s height, when many youth briefly did believe they could build a utopia, but in 1971, after the Manson Family and Altamont, when reality was reasserting itself. The wistful longing for a vision of the future everybody knew was a fantasy made it the perfect soundtrack for the crassly materialist consumerism that would actually define the lives of the children of 1968.
Oddly, once the counterculture took over the establishment, this once anti-authoritarian generation found the way to try to make their vision of earthly utopiamore fully realised was through laws and courts, then later social pressure to conform, and finally ostracizations and sackings. An ethic of deep commitment to racial and sexual equality sat alongside widening economic gaps between classes and generations which they could do nothing about—Blair, Clinton, and Schröder, the ultimate power-Boomers, all gutted their respective countries’ remaining welfare states and industrial bases in the years when history had supposedly ended. The working-class was very consciously abandoned by its supposed political champions, no longer as important as it shrank and became less capable with its most able members moving up in the world during the long boom between the 1980s recessions and the crisis of 2008. Much of what is happening this year is about it taking its revenge.
Whether or not this progressivism, paradoxically both universalist and individualistic, could have survived without the overreach of its truest believers in the 2010s and early 2020s will at some future point be debated by historians; but in any case they did overreach even as the far-right built in strength across the West, and with Trump’s re-election they have been defeated. Those who still claim allegiance to this vision, one that defined the entire adult existence of anyone aged under 55, seem to lack either the will or the means to defend it. Again, this is not just a matter of international power politics; in my social media bubble, apart from a few very mossbacked right-wingers and even fewer brutally realist liberal-lefties, there is a palpable retreat toward the private among those still not screaming pointlessly into the ether about Trump winning. Paradigms depend on faith; loss of faith kills them.
And if the old older is now doomed, what is Trumpism? Neo-Jacksonianism? Gay Space Fascism? A return of the Nietzcheian ‘strong gods’? Who knows! At the moment Trumpism is defined by what it’s against rather than what it’s for, and maybe that’s the point.
Henry Kissinger told the Financial Times in July 2018, “I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretenses.” That certainly happened in Europe this week. Europeans, including British Brexiteers, are having to confront the fact that their delusions to sovereignty and autonomy were always dependent on free-riding on the force of American arms. Kissinger went on to say, “It doesn’t necessarily mean that he knows this, or that he is considering any great alternative. It could just be an accident.” That may have been true in 2018 but is no longer – unlike in his first term, Trump an army of loyal, able, supporters entering government with the conscious desire to smash the old order, and since surviving two assassination attempts, he himself has taken a millenarian turn, believing he’s a man sent by God. They despise a NATO they see as emblematic of what the Trumpite intelligentsia actually despises and wishes to destroy—the values of a globalised ‘laptop class’, a cold-blooded technocracy which despises national differentiation and forbids dissent of from expert orthodoxies.
When Paradigms Collapse
Communism was more than just a system of economics; it was a paradigm, and a totalising one at that. It saw itself as scientific, the only way of understanding the world any reasonable person could hold unless they were bad, mad, or yet to be educated, and therefore saw its triumph as inevitable. That’s why Communist governments had a nasty tendency to lock up political dissidents in mental hospitals. Communism held to a vision of the future where each would contribute according to their abilities and receive according to their needs, ending the causes of human conflict. The ‘really existing’ Socialist states, like East Germany, were openly acknowledged to be a long way from that vision of the future, but their frequent lapses from decent behaviour were explained as potholes on the road to a future utopia, a future utopia that made the present sacrifices of their citizens worthwhile. Many people believed it for a substantial time. It’s easy to forget that. I remember my old Soviet politics lecturer at Queen’s talking about her granny in Leningrad, a victim of many years in the Gulag on no other grounds than that a quota needed to be filled, who still cried when Stalin died.
Then, even before the system collapsed, people stopped believing in it. Without an inspiring vision, a credible paradigm, Soviet citizens considered their existing condition, which was often dreadful, and the prospects of it ever improving, which were remote. Then they started drinking themselves to death, especially if they were middle-aged men. An almost identical phenomenon started happening in America in the early 21st Century.
Ultimately all societies are sustained by visions; when people lose faith in those visions, then politics and culture shifts, sometimes dramatically. For well over a decade now, people have been losing faith in the worldview that many progressives seem to assume is the only rational one, because they’re asked to believe in stuff that often doesn’t work as advertised and sometimes is literally unbelievable.
Along with the collapse of Communism, the other great collapse of a paradigm, a worldview, in my lifetime was the collapse of Irish Catholicism. This was a cultural continuum that thrived for 1,500 years, even during two centuries of serious attempts to crush it. Then it just imploded in the space of about a decade while seeming to be under no external pressure. Suddenly people stopped believing in it, to the extent that by 2021 Sally Rooney could write a novel where a character pops into a church and sees a midweek low Mass taking place and reflects:
Is it really possible I witnessed such a scene right in the middle of Dublin, only a few hours ago? Is it possible such things literally go on in the real world you and I both live in?
Yes, people really believed in it, including very clever and well-educated and well-travelled people – heaven and hell, angels and saints, the literal body and blood of Christ. And then they stopped.
This can happen to the things that progressives believe in too; I think it is happening, right now. So do the Trumpite intellectuals, full of brio and flush with cash. The loss of faith in the old order they detect is another reason why they are so keen to strike now, and strike hard. The wilting of the progressive narrative in the face of various belligerent nationalisms certainly didn’t start with Trump, was dominant in other countries long before America (Examples A B C) and continues to spread (Examples D E F).
Even as all this happened, progressives, and not just the most advanced elements, have seen themselves as somehow representing an inevitable future, one which their enemies could at most delay. They saw their vision of the future as inevitable because they had disappeared so deeply within their own paradigm they had convinced themselves that their political views, which were in reality highly contingent and situational, were based on science and learning and that only the wicked, mad, or ill-educated could fail to see the world as they did—something they shared with the Soviet Bloc’s Communists, although thankfully they abhorred the latter’s methods.
As Ian Leslie wrote in a post on Bud Light’s recent branding travails last week:
the flaw in the progressive movement has been that it doesn’t see itself as political, and can’t imagine why any of its prescriptions or language should be remotely controversial. All criticism or resistance is characterised as small-minded and belligerent. We are doing ‘diversity’; you are fighting a culture war. Progressives (who don’t even realise they are progressive, half the time) therefore get these unpleasant surprises, which confront them with the shocking reality of how the people they don’t mingle with actually think.
A Start to Self-Criticism
One thing that stands out among liberal and leftish friends and follows is their inability to offer self-critical analysis even in this hour of total defeat. So let me offer a brief moment of self-criticism.
In the early 2010s we started a Culture War, where an angry fundamentalism on identity issues was, I think, driven by the inability of those of us on the left and centre-left to deliver greater economic equality once we accepted there was no viable alternative to financialised capitalism. Despite supposedly representing progress, even more advanced centre-left governments couldn’t offer people something as basic as secure housing anymore. I was at times a partisan on our side of this Culture War. My own doubts about the durability of the progressive order started in 2014, and from 2016, even as my rhetoric became angrier as a partisan of the Remainer movement, it started becoming obvious to me that we had bitten off more than we could chew and that they were winning this Culture War in part through our arrogance and overreach, driven by a complacent certainty that time was on our side and that we were the inevitable future. So we never saw how desperately we needed to end this Culture War and sue for terms to protect our gains, which were very real.
But by then, the Culture War had developed many of the hallmarks of a religious crusade, and religious crusades that take place without their participants having any fear of divine judgement are often particularly cruel and stupid things, as the history of Communism shows. We finally lost it, I think, in 2020-21 when we were getting people sacked for refusing to say that men could give birth or for dissenting from critical race theory, when we were being petty and cruel and loving the power we had; when we were drunk with the idea that Trump had been defeated for ever and the young were on our side and Covid would encourage everyone to love the wisdom of the experts and the power of the state again.
In a moment of acute peril, we were captained in Western civilisation’s core state by a doddering old man whose evident senility the media lied about for years like they were in the position of East Germany’s state news agency. After that became untenable Biden was replaced by a transparently incompetent diversity hire. Such incompetence and self-delusion obviously deserved to be defeated. The problem is that what’s replacing us is something much worse than the petty cruelty and stupidity of our final years.
If anything is to plucked from the bonfire of our mental world, that curious mix of utopianism, universalism, and individualism that emerged in the 1960s, we will have to be ruthless in the issues we prioritise, unsparing in our criticism of our own past mistakes, and most of all agile in adapting to a new reality, because howling into the Internet won’t bring the old world back. Yet if we adapt, then when the dust settles on the chaos that Trumpism seeks to create, there is everything to play for in the creation of the new period of order that history tells us should follow.
As Gorbachëv warned the East German leadership in that October visit when their world started falling apart, “Life punishes those who arrive too late.” Adapt or die.
Top image — an area from Donald Trump’s official inauguration protrait, by Daniel Torok (public domain).
