Donald Trump and the End of Post-History
Rebuild the Berlin Wall and Make Mexico Pay for It
I came of age in the 1990s, after the end of history. I hadn’t yet read Francis Fukuyama’s essay on the topic, but that was the vibe. The Cold War was over. The Soviet Union had fallen. Free trade, liberal democracy, and transnationalism were on the rise. Acronyms like NAFTA, WTO, NATO, EU, and UN signaled an interconnected world of ever-increasing peace and prosperity. A UN-sanctioned, American-led “new world order” drove Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, proving that territorial aggression would not stand. Even the most intractable of conflicts within borders now seemed tractable. Apartheid ended in South Africa, resulting in a multiracial democracy. The Good Friday Agreement resolved the Troubles between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. In the Middle East, the Oslo Accords augured an eventual peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Bloodlettings like the Rwandan genocide and the Yugoslav wars seemed like atavistic exceptions to the zeitgeist. Thomas Friedman opined that no countries that both had a McDonald’s would fight a war with each other. And since the arc of history bent toward McWorld—or what Fukuyama (borrowing a phrase from Alexandre Kojève) called the universal homogenous state—ultimate harmony was assured.
The 9/11 attacks in 2001 didn’t shatter this post-historical dream. In an alternate universe, perhaps they would have strengthened it. After all, NATO immediately invoked Article 5, which states that an attack against one member is an attack against all. Even Russia and China, which had their own problems with Islamists, initially supported the war in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda, and terrorists more broadly, were seen as hostis humani generis (enemies of humanity), capable of uniting the civilized world in opposition. But the decision to invade Iraq fractured a transient global consensus. Faith in the inevitable spread of democracy fueled a hubristic drive to immanentize the eschaton. A war against terrorism became a crusade for Western liberalism, which foundered against the superior staying power of tribalism, cousin marriage, and religious fanaticism. Elsewhere in the world, instead of China liberalizing and becoming more like Hong Kong, Hong Kong was assimilated into an ever-more totalitarian China. And whereas it once seemed plausible that Russia would Westernize—perhaps even join the EU and NATO—instead Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and fully broke with the West.
Contra Friedman’s Golden Arches theory, both Russia and Ukraine are home to McDonald’s (or at least they were; the fast-food chain left Russia after its invasion). So are other warring countries like Armenia and Azerbaijan. And while an international coalition—including the Soviet Union—upheld the principle of established borders during the Gulf War, Ukraine will likely lose territory due to Russian aggression. The end of history was never supposed to include a war of conquest in Europe. Rather, Europe was meant to be the post-historical political space par excellence. A common if highly regulated market, the free movement of people, rule by supranational bureaucracy: this was the direction all continents were heading. Europe, drained of its history-making energy after two world wars, was the symbol of perpetual peace. Of course, the war in Ukraine is being fought outside the bounds of the EU. And Russia invaded, in large part, to prevent Ukrainians from joining the EU and the West more broadly. Perhaps a victorious Ukraine will rejuvenate Europe with its martial energy.
Perhaps, but if there is a future for Europe as a common project, it is within, not beyond history. An intra-historical Europe would be able to defend itself instead of relying on an American security umbrella. An intra-historical Europe would also take the populist reaction against mass migration seriously. An underlying premise of the universal homogenous state is the interchangeability of people, in addition to goods: that Syrians transplanted into Germany will become like the Germans, not that they’ll make Germany more like Syria. But instead, mass migration has reintroduced aspects of history that Europe thought it had overcome, like religiously motivated violence, the subjugation of women, and gutter antisemitism. If the world is inevitably turning WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic), then it makes sense to bring the world into WEIRD countries and accelerate the process. But if WEIRD countries are the products of a singular civilization, then doing so puts that civilization at risk. The West failed to impose its values on Afghanistan and Iraq; why then import Afghans and Iraqis to repeat the failure at home?
In an interconnected world, the self-evident success of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism must lead to their eventual ubiquity. That was the feeling, if not faith, of the 1990s. But globalization also allows for a homogenizing, Salafist interpretation of Islam to spread in both the Islamic world and the West. China is able to harness state capitalism without democracy, potentially conquering Taiwan by force and young Western minds by TikTok. Despite Western efforts to isolate Putin, he recently hosted the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) group, showcasing Russia’s deepening ties with a potential new new world order—or disorder—representing nearly half the world’s population. In the Middle East, prosperous autocracies like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are regional models, not Iraq’s $3 trillion-dollar dysfunctional democracy. Liberal democracy did spread after the end of the Cold War, notably in Eastern Europe. But the prospect of a Westernized world—of Chinese democracy and an Islamic Reformation, of a Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok and an EU for every continent —has receded into an ever-dimmer messianic era.
Whether seen as Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” or Jean Baudrillard’s “finished form of the future catastrophe,” America looms large in any vision of humanity’s fate. If globalization is terraforming our planet into McWorld, then it is of utmost importance where the fast-food chain is headquartered. But though America’s past and future (and always?) president Donald Trump has a prodigious love of Big Macs, his reelection marks the terminus of the post-historical illusion. Here is the man who stood on a Republican primary debate stage and, to a chorus of boos, declared that the Iraq war was a mistake—then won total dominance of the party. Here is the man who stands for tariffs over free trade, “America First” over international alliances, aspirations to greatness over Nietzsche’s last man. Even if Trump is more style than substance, what matters is that his style sells—”bigly,” in the case of his convincing 2024 victory—and is accelerating a bipartisan post-neoliberal consensus. There is no end of history, no inexorable liberal march toward a predictable global monoculture. If the post-historical era started with the fall of the Berlin Wall, it ends with the raising of a “big, beautiful,” metaphorical wall along America’s southern border. Will that wall ever actually be built? Will Mexico really pay for it? The history of the future has yet to be written.