The End of History All Over Again…
When I was living in Moscow in 2003, I couldn’t help thinking, “This must be what Weimar Germany felt like. These people don’t know that they lost the Cold War. They think their leaders betrayed them and surrendered. They will try to dominate again.” At the time, I wondered if I was being a bit alarmist. Today, it’s clear that I was not.
I had come to Moscow with the perspective of having spent more than 6 years in the region, most of it in Poland, where the country was rapidly modernizing and westernizing. The fall of the Soviet Union was seen as unambiguously positive there. In Moscow though, you could deeply feel its sense of loss of imperial identity and its visceral desire to restore its national pride.
It seemed, as Francis Fukuyama famously wrote, like the end of history. The conflict between communism and capitalism had come to an abrupt end. Just one model remained. But, as Fukuyama also noted—and as I saw firsthand in Moscow—the human urge to assert identity remained. What we were witnessing wasn’t an end, but the beginning of a major realignment.
The Washington Consensus
When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the West was triumphant. Communism was exposed as a corrupt system bereft of any real legitimacy. A new neoliberal ideology took hold, often called the Washington Consensus, that preached fiscal discipline, free trade, privatization and deregulation. The world, it seemed, would be remade in capitalism’s image.
Yet for anyone paying attention, communism had long been discredited. As far back as the 1930s, Stalin’s failed collectivization and industrialization campaigns had led to mass starvation. By the 1970s, Soviet total factor productivity growth had gone negative, meaning more investment actually brought less output. Systemic collapse was just a matter of time.
At the same time, there were early signs of serious problems with the Washington Consensus. Many complained that bureaucrats at the World Bank and the IMF were imposing policies on developing nations that citizens in their own countries would not accept. So-called “austerity programs” led to human costs that were both significant and real. In a sense, the Soviets’ error was repeating itself: ideology was being placed before people.
In developed countries, the objections were different but no less serious. Economists such as MIT’s David Autor began to see evidence that free trade with China was hollowing out local economies. Meanwhile, populist politicians highlighted growing inequality between cosmopolitan elites and the working class in struggling rural towns.
Over time resentment grew and, increasingly, it was focused on foreigners. When the Syrian civil war created a massive refugee crisis, politicians like Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Donald Trump in the United States used the issue of immigration to gain political favor. For many, globalism became a code word for betrayal—an elite-driven international order that had left ordinary people behind.
An Explosion Of Identity
When Marshall McLuhan predicted that electronic media would bring about a global village, he didn’t see it as a peaceful place. In fact, he thought it would lead to a new form of tribalism and result in a “release of human power and aggressive violence” greater than ever in human history, as long separated—and emotionally charged—cultural norms would now constantly intermingle, clash… and explode.
I first began to see evidence of this during my time in Moscow. Russians, I found, were intensely curious about Americans. For example, when they saw me do something a certain way, they would often ask, “Do all Americans do it like that?” It was as if they were trying to decode American culture, searching for some secret hidden within.
But they had a strong desire—much stronger than I’d seen living in places like Poland and Ukraine—to assert their own national identity and to protect it from external threats. Vladimir Putin, in an essay published just months before his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, asserted that this identity survived, essentially unchanged, since the late 9th century and the founding of the Kyivan Rus.
In the ensuing years, as the backlash to globalization intensified and confidence in a liberal world order eroded, the nationalism I had witnessed in Russia became a global trend. Far-right parties gained traction across Europe. Donald Trump rose to power in the United States. As Anne Applebaum has noted, authoritarians began to weave together a collaborative network in opposition to what they saw as the American led global order.
It was, as Francis Fukuyama described in his essay, a reassertion of the need for recognition—one that would overshadow rational economic ideologies or systems. From the steppes of Eastern Ukraine to the steps of the United States Capitol, the struggle between systems would become a battle between competing identities.
The New Messiahs
As frustration with the neoliberal globalist order grew, people began looking for alternatives. At first, these came in familiar packages, such as Bernie Sanders’ calls for the United States to adopt Scandinavian-style democratic socialism in opposition to Paul Ryan’s libertarian conservative orthodoxy. Christian nationalists openly call for theocratic rule.
Yet a new cadre of theorists began to emerge whose ideas don’t fit the traditional right-left paradigm. Patrick Deneen believes that the neoliberal order and its worship of progress have undermined communities. He calls for a post-liberal order rooted in moral clarity, family bonds, and community life. Curtis Yarvin, for his part, calls for CEO-like monarchs to rule a network of independent regional states as if they were tech startups.
On the more technocratic side, a new school of thought is emerging that is associated with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance, although they aren’t its true originators. The basic idea is that bureaucracies—government especially—are failing and we need to fix them. Key thinkers include people like Jennifer Pahlka, Marc Dunkelman, Bob Sutton, and Huggy Rao. Instead of revolution, they are looking to redesign.
The key dividing line seems to be that so-called New Right thinkers such as Yarvin and Deneen, as well as the Christian nationalists, believe in some form of Eden narrative—that society has been hopelessly corrupted and we need to start over in some way. The abundance-inspired thinkers, on the other hand, believe in more technocratic fixes.
The New Right has powerful backers, such as tech billionaires Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, as well as politicians like J.D. Vance, and institutions like the Claremont Institute and Compact Magazine. By contrast, there is no formal financing or political movement behind the abundance agenda. While actively discussed in Democratic policy circles, it remains a decentralized network of reform-minded technocrats.
A Fundamental Realignment
Before 1789 the world was ruled by the divine right of kings and the feudal system. Yet that year would prove to be an inflection point. The American Constitution the French Revolution and the first Industrial Revolution, already underway since the introduction of the steam engine in 1776, together created a fundamental realignment of power.
Another came in 1919, with the end of World War I, the rise of the United States as a global superpower, and the second Industrial Revolution, driven by electricity and the internal combustion engine. The next half century would not be defined by empires, but ideologies, as capitalism, communism and, briefly, fascism, vied for supremacy.
That era ended with the Cold War in 1989 and what comes next remains unclear. The neoliberal global order, if not completely discredited, has been found grossly inadequate. Today, we’re undergoing four major shifts in demography, technology, resources, and migration that are straining the global system towards a breaking point.
Our institutions—governmental, educational, scientific, religious and economic—have been under siege for decades and have lost credibility. The main debate now is whether the current system needs to be completely torn down and replaced with some new order or redesigned, streamlined and strengthened.
The one constant through it all is the basic need for recognition. That’s been our fundamental mistake over the past half century. We believed we could transcend human nature and build a society on purely rational economic foundations. We were wrong. Whatever comes next will have to begin by acknowledging the visceral human yearning for dignity and meaning.
Greg Satell is Co-Founder of ChangeOS, a transformation & change advisory, an international keynote speaker, host of the Changemaker Mindset podcast, bestselling author of Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change and Mapping Innovation, as well as over 50 articles in Harvard Business Review. You can learn more about Greg on his website, GregSatell.com, follow him on Twitter @DigitalTonto, his YouTube Channel and connect on LinkedIn.
Like this article? Join thousands of changemakers and sign up to receive weekly insights from Greg’s DigitalTonto newsletter!
Image generated by DALL-E
