Grand Governance: Post-Cold War era over but democracy will thrive

BY ROSS DOUTHAT

My column last weekend made some pretty sweeping historical claims: that the reelection of Donald Trump proved that we have definitively exited the post-Cold War era; that the phase of history that began in 1989 terminated somewhere in between the early days of the pandemic and Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine; that wherever we are going now, we are definitely going, not just paddling in circles or in place.

To these stark claims, let me add two supplementary comments that qualify the scale and nature of the shift that I’m describing.

First, the end of the post-1989 era doesn’t mean the end of liberalism. British writer John Gray, the mordantly brilliant prophet of liberalism’s doom, has an essay for The New Statesman arguing that the transition from one era to another will also be a transition out of liberalism entirely — that Trump and perhaps after him JD Vance could put in place “a systematically constructed and deeply embedded illiberal democracy,” while a Europe abandoned by the United States collapses into a “gruesome” stew of nationalism and antisemitism, and authoritarianism sweeps the wider world.

Well, maybe. But before going all the way to that conclusion, consider first how many people inside the Trump-Vance coalition still consider themselves partisans of liberal values — defenders of free speech and other liberties they deem most threatened by the left, not the right. And then consider the recent argument from Gray’s fellow critic of liberal overreach, Aris Roussinos, that the version of the liberal order that bestrode the world after 1989 was quite different from the post-World War II liberal order that preceded it: It was more utopian in its ambition, more culturally comprehensive in its claims, more imperious and imperial and hubristic and therefore, yes, foredoomed.

Whereas the worldview that governed Europe and America after 1945 was more pragmatic and cold-eyed, much less ambitious and revolutionary — while remaining a form of liberalism nonetheless. Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan all, in various ways, fell short of post-1989 ideals of how the US and the “liberal international order” should be governed. But none of them were “illiberal” in the way that an everyday person might use the term. They just operated within a more bounded context than their post-Cold War successors, had more preliberal and nonliberal instincts mixed in with their liberal commitments, and generally related to the world in a less fully ideological way than the post-Cold War elite.

With this past in mind, Roussinos argued, the liberals of the early 21st century may be better off in the long run for entering a more bounded future, in which they no longer preside seemingly unchallenged over the globe:

Just as the bipolar order of the Cold War world, by restraining liberalism’s inherent tendencies to radicalization and hubris, made the Western world safe for a tempered and moderate liberalism, so may the multipolar world we have entered save liberals from their own excesses. Beset by confident rivals abroad, and by the disenchantment of their own voters at home, liberals will once again have to learn restraint. The post-Cold War order ultimately proved disastrous for American liberalism: a return to the actually existing order of 1945 may prove more congenial.

To this theory of partial continuity rather than complete rupture, I’ll add a second observation: Even in a changed world order, American democracy looks reasonably robust.

I’ve always been a profound skeptic of full-scale authoritarianism-in-America scenarios, for reasons usefully expounded by Julian Waller in a 2022 essay for American Affairs. But after the 2016 election, there was a milder and somewhat more plausible form of democratic pessimism among US progressives, which held that the country’s archaic constitutional institutions could allow right-wing populism to instantiate minority rule over an extended period. Combine the Trumpian advantage in the Electoral College with the small-state and rural-state advantage in the Senate, and you could imagine a country defined by a thwarted majority, in which Republicans governed steadily without ever getting close to 50% support, and either the Constitution or democracy itself gradually lost all legitimacy.

Meanwhile, there were different but related fears on the right, both the kind of fears I wrote about before the election — fears of a progressive “cathedral” uniting public and private power to throttle free debate and make democracy irrelevant — and the long-standing fears that mass immigration and demographic change would make national elections as unwinnable for the GOP as, say, statewide elections in California are today.

But simply by getting around 50% of the popular vote in 2024, Trump substantially undermined these perspectives — both the liberal conceit that his style of populism couldn’t win enough votes to claim democratic legitimacy and the mirror-image conservative anxiety that the collusion of elite institutions would shut the populist right out of power.

More than that, the nature of his winning coalition showed how the US electoral order tends to rebalance itself with time and competition, in ways that aren’t always perfectly majoritarian but that make both permanent-minority-rule or one-party-state scenarios seem extremely implausible.

Its Senate advantage has also shrunk. And in the House, the Republicans are now winning smaller majorities than their advantage in the total House popular vote would arguably imply — suggesting a plausible future where the next Democratic House majority is functionally countermajoritarian, with a slight majority of seats based on a minority of votes. This doesn’t necessarily bode well for American governance, since for all the useful clarity of Trump’s victory, it was still narrow enough to call this a 50-50 country and to set us up for a potential return to gridlock in just two years’ time. But a 50-50 country where the House and the Senate and the presidency are all consistently up for grabs is not a country teetering on the brink of long-term minority rule, or a country that’s about to become a one-party pseudo-democracy.

Maybe four more years of Trump will change those realities.