The world is changing…

The old rules based order is falling down. America, the hegemon that it depended on abandoned the self-restraint with which it exercised its power. Trump is crass in its exploitation, but he’s not alone. MAGA won’t always be dominant, but it will be with us for some time.

Even if America returns to normal foreign relations, it’s deeply divided at home, and will be too weak to re-assume its former role.

What will this mean for freedom and democracy? Every week, you can read my analysis here.

Concert of the Atlantic

The old transatlantic alliance will never be the same. The common Soviet enemy is gone. Russia, though an enemy is not strong enough; and China is too far away from Europe. Jacksonian MAGA America wonders what’s in it from them. Gaullists in Europe fantasise about an anti-Americanism that even de Gaulle himself never quite shared. Nationalist Europeans hope nationalist Americans will help, but get betrayed.

There are rival powers in Western civilisation, but also splits within them. There isn’t just an American-European dimension, but also a divide between liberals and authoritarians, we might say between NATO and MAGA.

We had this complexity before in mid 19th century Europe, where the great powers checked each other, while contending with emerging democratic societies, industrial transformation and an international contest between liberalism and reaction.

Two way globalisation

The West enjoyed globalisation when we were globalising outwards. We sent our money, people, armies and ideas across the globe. Now that the rest of the world has, partly by learning from us, been globalising back at us, sending us Chinese technology, Islamic political ideas, Russian money, and people from everywhere, we don’t like it so much.

The nationalists have a supposed answer: to put up walls; but these are expensive and eventually lead to war. We tried this before at the end of the 19th century, and it didn’t end well. We even had a crazy nationalist monarch in charge of one of the powers, whose institutions couldn’t restrain him…

The Liberal Right

In a democracy, the right is a curious part of society. It usually possesses enough power to destroy democratic institutions, but in places where it survives, it chooses not to. There are plenty of reasons for this, but one of them is ideological. At least some of the right should be liberal, and from time to time I’ll write about what this should mean.

The Software-Industrial Revolution

Finally there’s tech. I’m also building a media tech startup, Kronkite, a broadsheet social media platform. Behind the AI hype, there’s a real Industrial Revolution going on, in the provision of services to the world, at almost zero marginal cost.

With extraordinary small amounts of capital, it’s possible to carve out a global niche for a product. The number of things you can sell to a million people for $10 a month is large indeed. We’re only at the very beginning of this transformation, which will create massive wealth, and social and economic tensions that go with it.