How Fear Killed Liberalism

How Fear Killed Liberalism

Political anxieties have piled up and put an end to an era of public optimism.

President Donald Trump talks with a child dressed as a skeleton with a "Make America Great Again" hat while hosting Halloween at the White House on the South Lawn October 30, 2017 in Washington. September 2, 2025, 10:20 AM Comment icon View Comments ( )

Scholars, pundits, and politicians make bad predictions all the time, and some of the mistakes are real doozies. For what it’s worth, my nominee for the worst geopolitical forecast of the past 50 years was the post-Cold War belief that the world was being inexorably swept toward a peaceful and increasingly prosperous liberal future. This view—expressed in Francis Fukuyama’s famous claim that humankind had reached the “end