OpinionRoss Douthat
Credit...Jamie Chung for The New York Times
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By Ross Douthat
Opinion Columnist
Kamala Harris lost the presidential election, but one of her campaign slogans was vindicated in defeat. “We’re not going back!” the Democratic nominee insisted on the campaign trail, and she was unintentionally correct: Donald Trump’s return to power is proof that we have lived through a real turning point in history, an irrevocable shift from one era to the next.
In Trump’s first term, he did not look like a historically transformative president. His victory was narrow, he lacked real majority support, he was swiftly unpopular and stymied and harassed.
Even if his 2016 upset proved that discontent with the official consensus of the Western world ran unexpectedly deep, the way he governed made it easy to regard his presidency as accidental and aberrant — a break from a “normal” world of politics that some set of authority figures could successfully reimpose.
Much of the opposition to his presidency was organized around this hope, and the election of Joe Biden seemed like vindication: Here was the restoration, the return of the grown-ups, normality restored.
But somewhere in this drama, probably somewhere between the first reports of a deadly flu in Wuhan, China, and Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, one of history’s wheels turned irrevocably, and the normal that Trump’s opponents aspired to recover slipped definitively into the past.
A restoration? No: The post-Cold War era has ended, and we’re not going back.
This may sound a bit like the most alarmist interpretations of the Trump era — that we are exiting the liberal democratic age and entering an autocratic, or at least authoritarian, American future.
But the new future is much more open and uncertain than that dark vision. While many people voted against Trump because they felt that liberalism or democracy was under threat, many other people moved rightward for the same reason — because they felt that was the way to defend liberal norms against the speech police, or democratic power against control by technocratic elites.
We don’t know which perspective, if either, will be vindicated. All we know is that right now our core political categories are contested — with vigorous disagreement about what both democracy and liberalism mean, unstable realignments on both the left and the right, and “post-liberal” elements at work in right-wing populism and woke progressivism and managerial technocracy alike.
All this indicates the first way that we are not going back: We are not returning to the narrowing of political debate that characterized the world after 1989, the converging worldviews of the Reaganite center-right and the Clinton-Blairite center-left, the ruling-out of radical and reactionary possibilities.
This narrowing suggested a sense that the desired end state of politics was a world where two like-minded political parties debated budgeting and not much else, where culture wars were settled on whatever terms the liberal professional class deemed suitable and where ideology retreated to academic monasteries and religion to the private sphere.
Describing this narrowed post-Cold War order in 2014, Columbia’s Mark Lilla wrote that trying to convey to his students “the grand drama of political and intellectual life from 1789 to 1989” often left him “feeling like a blind poet singing of lost Atlantis.”
But a decade later some of that lost drama........