On Living Through the End of Something

Further thoughts on the dawning era of right-populist politics

Electoral posters of Rassemblement National (RN) party with the pictures of Marine Le Pen (L) and Jordan Bardella are seen pasted on in Henin-Beaumont on June 10, 2024, a day after the European elections. (Photo by DENIS CHARLET/AFP via Getty Images)

My previous post was an attempt to make analytical sense of our new political normal, in which right-wing populism is a consistent competitor for power. In this post I’m going to sketch on a broader canvas some thoughts about the same phenomenon, reflecting on where I think we are in the longer arc of history.

I’ll begin by being blunt: I think Donald Trump is probably going to beat Joe Biden in November. I also think the right-wing RN, led by Marine Le Pen and her protégé Jordan Bardella, is going to do quite well in the elections centrist French President Emmanuel Macron has (foolishly) called for late this month and early July—and that similar parties and movements around the world will continue to thrive over the short-to-medium term, winning electoral contests and setting the terms of political debate throughout much of the democratic world.

This doesn’t mean they’ll always prevail. Sometimes they’ll lose. At other times they’ll win and then lose the next time elections are called. My point, then, is simply to say, as I did in my last post, that right-wing populism is here to stay. It’s a part of our political reality now. A big part.    

A Melancholy, Long, Withdrawing Roar

Why do I think this? It’s not just election results and polling data. Something has shifted. The political world in which we live is not the same political world in which I grew up (in the late-Cold War 1970s and ’80s) or the one in which I learned how to orient myself intellectually and professionally (in the post-Cold War ’90s and ’00s). Those were decades close enough in time to the centrist-liberal consensus of the mid-20th-century postwar decades that its assumptions shaped the boundaries of the possible by default.

That is no longer the case. Having observed the rapid fading of the postwar consensus as a pundit over the past decade, I’m reminded of Matthew Arnold’s well-known line about the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of retreating religious faith in the mid-19th century. Like a receding wave yanking at my feet and ankles, forcing me to recalibrate my balance to avoid falling backward onto the wet sand, I’ve felt the pulling away of a presence that once surrounded me, something taken for granted that is no longer there as it once was, with the absence growing more obtrusive with every passing year.

I’ve written before about something analogous in the much narrower Straussian intellectual world—how students of Leo Strauss in the 1990s (I was one of them) nearly always ended up being center-right liberals, but how many of those coming out of Straussian graduate programs today gravitate to the populist right, with a few actively defending or advocating explicitly fascist or otherwise tyrannical forms of politics. In most cases, those different cohorts of students had the same teachers teaching them identical texts of political philosophy. Yet the lessons each cohort took from their educations are very different. Why? The answer, I think, is that the surrounding context—the subject of this post—has changed rather dramatically over the past 30 years. And that change has altered the way the same ideas are being received by today’s young people.

I sense the change every time one of my formerly Republican (Never Trump) friends launches into Reaganite formulations about the U.S. being the leader of the free world. Or starts asserting that we’re the indispensable nation, with a solemn duty to defend democracy abroad, starting (but not ending) with Ukraine. Or rhapsodizes about the importance of free trade, open markets, liberal immigration, and generous asylum policies.

I’ve taken all of those stances at various times in my life. I still support some of those policies now. But they hit the ear differently than they used to. Can you hear the change? Where they once sounded bold, confident, muscular, like they could bowl over anyone who stood in their way, inspiring multitudes to stand a little straighter and puff their chests out a little farther as they saluted the American flag and teared up at the earnest expression of American moral idealism—now they ring a little hollow, a little too pious, a little too self-satisfied, a little naive and stale, a little like a script handed down through the decades to be read by a frail, 81-year-old president who looks like he could fall and break a hip at any moment. It sounds like a dogma, a creed recited by rote, its doctrines grown tired from overuse and inadequate engagement with reality.