Opinion: Trump's Resurrection: The Final Blow to the Liberal World?

Trump’s infamous photo of defiance after getting shot at a rally. (Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

The election of Donald Trump on Nov. 5, 2024, was a crushing defeat for the Democratic Party and ideal in America. To those of us who assumed the ideological long-term arc bends towards liberalism, it was also an unsettling revelation. But the downfall should not have come as a surprise. 

Over the past several years, there has been ample data exhibiting that the majority of Americans were frustrated with the status quo, it was the general consensus to explain Trump’s 2016 victory. Americans wanted something new and did not yet know what they were getting themselves into with Trump. And yet, once Biden took office, very little succeeded in change for the average citizen. The liberal left made promises to increase welfare for decades and has consistently fallen short to this day. Now, instead of vowing for change, they continue to commit to the status quo, which absolutely no one is happy about. 

However, US liberals are not the only ones who need reckoning. Trump’s dramatic return is indicative of a global shift away from the status quo of Western liberalism in the post-Cold War world order and towards radical change in the form of the far-right and authoritarianism. We see the tendency in countries and domestic constituencies – autocratic governments using fear and anger at the status quo to gain momentum and shift political power. The end of the post-Cold War era has left people feeling like the liberal promises have fallen flat and the Western global order has failed the vast majority of the world’s population. The gap between liberal’s claims about reality and the lived experience of average citizens is now so wide that there is no reconciling it in the current order. This has left the liberal parties and countries scrambling to hold onto the existing state of affairs, attempting to prove that they are still deserving of power and can still improve lives. While far-right nationalist and autocratic parties and countries are promising radical change, that might not be perfect, but at least it’s new. And for those feeling left behind, that’s enough. 

The end of the Cold War came with the distinct rise of democratic institutions and the power of Western states. This stage was defined by the assumption that a capitalist-democratic model was incontestable and ultimately inevitable. By some, this model was considered the end of history or the best humanity could achieve, leading to both international and domestic power being held by liberals. However, current times reveal widespread global discontent with this assessment of the world and its prevailing international system. The post-post-Cold War era is characterized by the stalling, and often reversal, of the democratic capitalistic advance coupled with a rise in authoritarian challengers to the status quo. For those of us in the United States, this is most obviously seen with Donald Trump.

Trump’s consequential win in 2016 was a significant sign of democratic backsliding. While democracies have been under attack for almost as long as the post-Cold War era, the major shift within the Western powers started in 2016 and has increased as Trump’s first win sent shock waves throughout the world, and the January 6th insurrection legitimized anti-democratic actions. From Argentinian President Javier Milei, a self-described “anarcho-capitalist,” to the Austrian Freedom Party founded by Nazis, to the concerning authoritarian rhetoric and actions of the U.S. elections since 2016, the far-right has become mainstream and influential in countries worldwide, and the distress of democracies has become a global phenomenon. There has been steady advancement of populist and autocratic figures in Chile, Paraguay and El Salvador, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Finland and Sweden, Portugal, Romania, and Spain, to name a few. This is often explained as a backlash to liberal policies and is tied to the overall frustration with the failure of liberal governing and the state of the world. However, most saw this backlash as a step in the destined progression towards liberalism. Starting with the global financial crisis of 2007-08 and the 2015 spike in migration into Europe, and then fueled by wars and unrest across the Middle East, North Africa, and Eastern Europe, trust in liberal governments has shrunk significantly throughout the past decade. A tumultuous world allowed the voices of conservative nationalist parties to pander to worried citizens, declaring that left-wing politics created these perilous global conditions in order to convince populations that a drastic overhaul in leadership was necessary. 

The rise of far-right political parties in Europe is taking over mainstream politics. (Photo: James Ferguson/The Financial Times)

This trend is parallel to the international order. The current era is witnessing the fall of the Pax Americana, with the resurgence of Russia, rise of China, and the alliance of authoritarian regimes swaying non-western countries away from liberal influence. The realization by many emerging countries that the Western-led liberal order is primarily a tool for promoting Western interests and dismissing the interests of others has caused fundamental shifts away from the Western liberal democracies, fueling the rise of autocrats and demagogues. With ideological battles happening around the globe, the liberal West made a catastrophic error by assuming the inevitability of their models, and thus left plenty of space for discontentment to grow. This dissatisfaction with the West has been continuously exploited by autocratic countries looking to rise on the world stage. Countries, such as China, have put their money where their mouths are, something the West has failed to do. China has committed hundreds of billions of dollars to creating China-centric global institutions, such as the Belt and Road Initiative, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and Global Development Initiative, in an effort to compete with the current, outdated Western counterparts. With 1.2 billion people residing in what is considered the world’s liberal democracies, and 6.3 billion residing everywhere else, the authoritarian pushes to gain influence easily resonate with global populations. In the new age of global competition and ideological shifts, the “Global South” tends to be opposed to the international Western-centric rules and norms, which emphasize the built-in hierarchies and inequalities of liberal order. Capitalist democracy may have won the Cold War, but it didn’t secure its place at the top. 

Now, none of this would be as catastrophic if the West could shift away from the status quo and deliver on the idealistic promises of liberalism. However, as any state or leader does when they’re threatened, Western liberal parties and countries have fought back against the shifting tide by engaging more resources to maintain the status quo, in a desperate struggle to hold on to power. Investing more in keeping the state of politics and the world the same robbed the world of the progressive policies promised, including the betterment of welfare. This is a wholly ineffective way to convince people that your system is not failing. Instead, it has pushed citizens and states to search for an alternative, which has only arisen in the form of the far-right. 

The only groups providing inspiration for radical (and desperately called for) change is the far, autocratic, authoritarian, right. The fear of the loss of rights is outweighed by the desire and curiosity for change that the liberal Western order is unable  – no, unwilling – to provide. The shift in both the political and international balance away from freedom challenges the assumption that history trends toward liberalism.

Just because the world is rapidly, and dangerously, embracing demagogues and authoritarians doesn’t mean the liberal West has been vanquished. Democracies still hold a lot of power, and the liberal parties among nations keep fighting. However, the West needs to take responsibility for a less-than-perfect world and realize the only way to survive is to change. Ultimately, the American hegemonic system of capitalist democracy is not the end-all-be-all of political order. People and countries are desperately calling for something new, a world that embraces authentic progression over ideological liberalism. Refusing to accept this and change this will be the demise of liberalism, and it will be a self-inflicted death. Authoritarians are making a comeback by stoking uncertainty and the fear of stagnation in an unequal world. If we, as liberals, want to make progressive change, we need to rekindle determination and hope for a future we have yet to envision.