There is a particular kind of political failure that is especially dangerous because it wears the mask of success. The Western alliance experienced precisely this failure in the decades after the Cold War. Having won the most consequential geopolitical contest in modern history, the democracies of the liberal world made a natural but catastrophic error: they concluded that winning meant the contest was over.
It was not.
It never was. And the price of that delusion is now being paid in the ballot
boxes of nearly every major Western democracy.
The rise of
Donald Trump in the United States, the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany,
Reform in the United Kingdom, the National Rally in France, and their
counterparts across the Western world are not separate or anomalous phenomena.
They are not the products of unique national pathologies or the idiosyncratic
grievances of one people or another. They are a single wave, driven by a single
underlying failure: the refusal of the post-Cold War political establishment to
tell its citizens the truth about the world they actually inhabited, and its
persistent unwillingness to do so even now.
To secure
the Western alliance's future, and the liberal order it sustains, that refusal
must end.
