Notes on the long, twilight struggle
And yet, by 1989, it was all over but the dancing. The Berlin Wall had come down. The Warsaw Pact was in retreat. Russia was in freefall.
I will write about the gross mistakes we made in the aftermath of the Cold War. But I wish now to return to that phrase, "the long, twilight struggle".
After 1989, many of the good and the great opined that it was "the end of history". (The person who coined that phrase, Francis Fukuyama, has ruefully regretted it.) Western liberal capitalist democracy had triumphed. All was clear sailing from here on out.
Of course, 1989 also saw a contrary statement to that hubris: Tienanmen Square. The Chinese Communists didn't get the memo that they were in history's dustbin. That should have been a warning that history was far from over.
The West's victory in World War II saw vast social changes among the survivors. Even the US, which arguably saw less change economically and socially, was a different society than the one which went into the war. The West's victory in the Cold War saw a shabby triumphalism which neglected the lessons of World War II. The Cold War's end was more akin to the end of World War I, with outstanding matters not settled, and a victor's vengeance enacted.
Instead of cementing the West's victory, it all soon disintegrated, as the West just assumed that the world would fall in line. Soon we had Yugoslavia, and the first war on European soil in 40 years. Soon we had the birth of Al Qaeda, after the West's intervention in the Middle East against Iraqi aggression. History was far from over.
But the most dangerous cloud was from within. It turned out that many of the West's citizens didn't feel any particular glee at its victory over Communism. Not because they were communists, but because they felt left out by the liberal democratic world order. They were offended by the increasing freedoms which traduced their long-held beliefs. They were the unheard, the dispossessed, and they were looking for a voice.
Anno Domini MMXVI was when it all came to a head. After eight years of Clinton, eight years of Bush II, and eight years of Obama, the rebellion against the march to Utopia erupted. This was endemic on both the right and the left. And it can be said safely that we will have to deal with the consequences of this irruption for the foreseeable future.
People who felt they had no place in this Brave New World put the brakes on the entire project. What did they have to lose?
We've seen this across Eastern Europe. We've seen this in Russia. China is hell-bent on making autocratic capitalism the wave of the future. And we are again in a long, twilight struggle for liberal democratic values.
The thing about liberal democracy is that it operates on consensus. With a lack of such, it's untenable. That it didn't take root—with no real material help from the West—in regions which had never truly known democracy is not that much of a shock. But that it's now being questioned in democracy's heartland is something to fear. The reason that so many around the world look aghast at what's happening in the US is that, imperfect as this country is, those yearning for a more just political order have always held the US as an exemplar. Even when it was roiled with unrest, as during the 1960s, this was evidence that it could remake itself when injustice became too much to bear. But when you have a significant minority willing to throw in their lot with autocracy in the image of the regime currently occupying the White House, this gives pause to many around the world, and engenders despair.
A victory in the November elections will be far from the end of it. I hope that, in his inaugural address, President Biden will make starkly clear to the American people and its allies around the world just what faces us. The West dropped the ball after 1989. And now it will have to convince the world's people that liberal democracy is the only form of government which, however imperfect it is, posits the person as the central actor in history. That calls to the Volk do nothing but lead us to the catastrophes of the mid-20th century. They lead to nothing but war, death, and injustice. The West squandered much of its moral capital by dancing over the ashes of its defeated communist enemies, forgetting the lessons of both Versailles and the Marshall Plan. Now we must do what we should have done in 1989, but with thirty years of failure behind us. We are in a new long, twilight struggle, against those who bray about "the people", while knowing full well they use the people only as props for their own power. As I keep saying: We dare not fail in this struggle.