By Shawn MacWha
Local Journalism Initiative
Over the course of the past four months we have witnessed the most serious challenge to the international order since the start of the Second World War. The current American administration has unapologetically turned its back on the very economic and security institutions that it helped to create and in doing so has undermined global relationships and trading patterns that have taken generations to establish. So profound are these changes that on March 27, Prime Minister Mark Carney remarked that Canada’s old relationship with the United States, one based upon the integration of our economies and close security and military cooperation was over.
But this is not merely a bi-lateral problem between Canada and the United States. The most recent issue of Foreign Affairs (March/April 2025), one of the world’s leading political journals, focused almost entirely on examining threats to the prevailing liberal order. Across the world freedom is in decline and in 2024 there were more authoritarian states than democracies for the first time in over 20 years. While this may seem jarring to some people such a reversal is not without precedent and perhaps should not come as too much of a surprise. The long slow march towards liberal democracy and free market economics has been halting at times and there has been more than one period of sharp and painful regression. So integrated were the economic and political structures of Europe in the first decade of the 20th century, for example, that most people thought a war between the region’s major powers unthinkable. That system unravelled with remarkable speed during the summer of 1914 and twenty million people died. We forget such things at our peril.
Throughout most of the last century, from the end of the First World War in 1918 until the end of the Cold War in 1989, the world’s economic and political order was centred around the struggle between capitalism and communism with a brief interlude of fascism thrown in for good measure. This era essentially saw the world divided into ideological camps that were very often at odds with one another. The collapse of the Soviet Union saw this system come to an abrupt and somewhat unexpected end, leaving the United States as the sole superpower on the planet.
In the face of this new reality two major books came out in the 1990s that offered insights into what the new world order would look like. Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 The End of History and the Last Man argued that following a series of failed experiments with fascism and communism free-market liberal democracies had proven themselves to the be only viable means of organizing society. Secure in this knowledge Fukuyama proclaimed that history was over, at least as far as political models were concerned, as it had reached its natural pinnacle. Contrasting with this worldview, Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington offered a more dismal future in his book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order.According to Huntington the post-Soviet world would be characterized once again by competing power blocks largely organized along cultural lines that would struggle for regional and global dominance.
Roughly speaking these two books can be seen as popular expressions of two of the main theories underpinning the study of international relations. The first of these approaches, neoliberalism, envisions a world where international agreements, often but not always based upon economic integration, establish clearly understood rules and expectations. These calming forces increase cooperation and reduce the threat of conflict between nations. The second worldview is based on the theory of realism (or more precisely neorealism) and the belief that notwithstanding any unifying factors that may exist between states they will ultimately only follow rules if the outcomes meet their own narrowly defined self-interests. Such a world is much more liable to conflict when states choose to withdraw from international arrangements when they perceive them to be working against their interests.
On the surface, this appears to be what is now happening. The United State is turning its back on long-established mechanisms such as the United Nations, NATO, and the World Trade Organization as well as newer ones like the United States-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) free trade agreement. We are returning to the world of great power politics where a few blocks dominated by powerful states and their vassals (they’re not really allies anymore) seek to maximize their economic, political and economic status in a zero-sum game with their rivals. In such a world any gain by one must be seen as a loss by the other. And that is partially true, but there are other, darker forces at play in Washington that suggest that the current trend in American politics is not just a return to a Cold War outlook but is rather an outright challenge to the idea of liberal democracy.
In 2007 Chris Hedges, one of the most important but underappreciated thinkers in modern Western society, wrote an eerily prophetic book called American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. Hedges saw an America where a generation of workers left behind by globalization had turned to evangelical Christianity to ease the pain of their economic loss. Opportunistic church leaders, and later politicians, picked up on their despair in order to further their own agendas, pulling much of American society towards a conservative and religious worldview not seen anywhere else in the Western world. It is this fundamentalism that gives licence to today’s attacks on such things as minority rights, reproductive freedoms, and immigration. To paraphrase American comedian Jon Stewart what these people are trying to do is force a “factory reset” of American society to the point where the baseline measure of value, competency, and authority is a white male at the centre of a nuclear family.
With the presumed authority of God behind them, right-wing politicians then tapped into nationalist sentiments and a nostalgia for a “simpler” America in order to establish the Make America Great Again narrative. This, coupled with a Huntington-esque perspective on international politics, has led to the fervour by which the current administration is seeking to dismantle the internal and external structures that have formed the basis of both the American and global order for the last 80 years.
Maybe. If we are lucky that is all it is. But it could be worse. Much worse.
Starting around 2007 a new anti-democratic movement known as “The Dark Enlightenment” began to quietly emerge in the United States. Led by American software engineer Curtis Yarvin and British philosopher Nick Land this worldview argued that democracy itself was a failed experiment that needed to be replaced. Proponents of this ideology, sometimes called neoreactionaries, favour a return to authoritarianism wherein political leaders seek to privatize the mechanisms of the state in order to run it like a corporation. There is even a term for this in their thinking – the “gov-corp.” Rather than having an elected political leader supporters of this approach envision the appointment of a national CEO chosen by a board of influential, but unelected, business and thought leaders. Unsurprisingly, most of these would-be King makers are white male elites.
This would be silly if it not so serious, but the idea of such a structure has taken root amongst several influential technology leaders in Silicon Valley and at the highest levels of the modern Republican party. The Vice-President himself has stated that he is sympathetic to Yarvin’s plans to “deconstruct the administrative state” and many argue that the President too is guided by this thinking. It certainly appears that the current administration is implementing some of the ideas behind “The Dark Enlightenment.” One of Yarvin’s key suggestions is the removal of an independent public service that could oppose the corporate vision of a leader through a process that he termed “Retire All Government Employees” or RAGE. Sound familiar?
It would be alarmist to say that America today is becoming like Nazi Germany, although what we are seeing does very much have a 1934 feel to it. In March of this year the head of the Sweden-based Varieties of Democracy Project, Staffan Lindberg, announced that by as early as next year the United States may no longer qualify as a democracy. Similarly, a recent article entitled “The Path to American Authoritarianism” by Harvard’s Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way of the University of Toronto warned that “democracy is in greater peril today than at any time in modern U.S. history.” Even if these are minority opinions the risk of ignoring them completely is significant.
It may be that America will correct itself, and in doing so will return some predictability to the international order. Surely Fukuyama was right when he suggested that the world had often flirted with alternatives to liberal democracy only to return to it when the new models failed. But current events likewise show that he was wrong in assuming that history was over. It is just repeating itself. Hold on.