The error of their mythology for 1989 matters, because today we face another such moment that separates two eras.
By Ivan KRASTEV
As I watched the despair of liberals around the world after Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election in November, I felt a sensation similar to something I have experienced before. The moment took me back to 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, marking the beginning of the end of Soviet communism and the lifting of the Iron Curtain that had divided Europe since World War II. The difference was that the world that collapsed in 1989 was theirs, the communists’. Now it is ours, the liberals’. In 1989, I was living in a Warsaw Pact country, and when the world turned upside down I was in my final year of philosophy studies at Sofia University in Bulgaria. The whole experience felt like an extended undergraduate course in French existentialism. Seeing the sudden end of something we had been told would last forever was a shocking feeling – both liberating and unsettling. We students were overwhelmed by a new sense of freedom, but we were also aware of the fragility of everything political. That radical split between two times proved to be a defining experience for my generation.
But that rupture was even broader—on a larger global scale—than we realized at the time. 1989 was indeed an annus mirabilis, but very different from the way Western liberals have portrayed it over the past three decades. The determination that the Chinese Communist Party showed in suppressing the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square proved to have a stronger impact than the fall of the Berlin Wall.
For Russians, the most important aspect of 1989 was not the end of communism, but the end of the Soviet empire, with the withdrawal of its troops from Afghanistan. It was, therefore, the year when Osama bin Laden declared the victory of the jihadists over the atheist USSR. And 1989 was also the year when nationalism began to regain political ascendancy in the former Yugoslavia.
Donald Trump’s return to power in the US could be yet another case of such a political divide on a grand scale. If liberals are to rise to the challenge of a new Trump administration, they need to reflect carefully on what happened in 1989 and reject the narrative they have told themselves up to now. The best way to overcome despair is to better understand what happened. From a liberal perspective, comparing the anti-Soviet revolutions of 1989 with the illiberal revolutions of today may seem scandalous. In Francis Fukuyama’s famous phrase, 1989 was “the end of history,” while Trump’s victory, according to many liberals, could herald the end of democracy. The year the Berlin Wall fell was seen as the triumph of the West; now the discourse of the West’s decline dominates. The collapse of communism was marked by a vision of a democratic and capitalist future; that future is now full of uncertainty.
In 1989, the atmosphere was international and optimistic; today it has turned to nationalism and, at times, even nihilism.
But to dwell on these differences between then and now is to miss the essence of their similarities. Living in such moments in history teaches you many things, but the most important of them is the speed of change: people can completely change their views and political identities overnight; what was considered unthinkable only yesterday seems self-evident today. The change is so profound that people quickly see as completely inconceivable what were once their assumptions and choices.
Trump captured the public imagination not because he had a better plan for winning the war in Ukraine or managing globalization, but because he understood that the world of yesterday could no longer exist. The postwar political identity of the United States has been lost in the abyss of the ballot box. This Trump administration may succeed or fail, depending on the circumstances, but the old world will not return. In fact, most liberals no longer want it. Few Americans today feel comfortable with the idea of “American exceptionalism.” After Trump’s victory, some political commentators turned their gaze to the 1930s, when fascism threatened the world. The problem is that the 1930s are beyond living memory, while the 1990s are still fresh in the minds of many of us. What I have learned from that decade is that a radical political rupture gives the winners a “blank check.” Understanding why people voted for Trump doesn’t help much in understanding what he will do in office. Such political ruptures are achieved by previously unimaginable coalitions, united more by intensity than by a common program. The politicians who belong to these coalitions usually have a chameleon-like ability to adapt to the moment – none more so, in our time, than Trump.
American liberals, who are puzzled by how people could possibly treat a billionaire playboy as the leader of an anti-establishment movement, might recall that Boris Yeltsin, the hero of the 1990s anti-communist revolution in Russia, had only a few years earlier been one of the leaders of the Communist Party.
Like the end of the Soviet era, Trump’s reelection will have global dimensions. It marks the end of the United States as a liberal empire. America remains the world’s leading power, yes, and will remain an empire of sorts, but it will not be a liberal empire. As Biden’s tainted record of mobilizing support for the defense of the “liberal international order” in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated, the very idea of such an order has, according to many critics, always been a Western fiction. It existed as long as the United States had the power and political will to impose it. Trump will not do that. In foreign policy, Trump is neither a realist nor an isolationist; he is a revisionist. Trump is convinced that the United States is the biggest loser in the world it has created. In his view, over the past three decades America has become a pawn, not a hegemon, of the liberal international order. In the postwar world, the US successfully integrated its defeated adversaries, Germany and Japan, into democratic governance, international trade, and economic prosperity. This did not apply to China: in Trump’s view, Beijing has been the real winner of the post-1989 changes.
Trump’s second coming will undoubtedly be different from the first. In 2016, Trump’s encounter with the American establishment was like one of those encounters between a couple who have never met before. He didn’t know exactly what he wanted, and the American establishment didn’t know exactly who Trump was. Not anymore.
America may remain a democracy, but it will become more savage. Under new leadership, its institutions will surely move away from the security of consensual politics and become useless. In times of rapid change, political leaders do not seek to manage the state, but to defeat it. They see the state and the “deep state” as synonymous. Illiberal leaders choose cabinet members the way emperors once chose governors of rebellious provinces: What matters most is the appointee’s loyalty, and his ability to resist co-option or corruption by others.
In Trump’s first administration, chaos reigned; his second administration will reign by using chaos as a weapon. This White House will overwhelm opponents by “flooding the field” with executive orders and statements. It will leave many opponents guessing why it is making the decisions it is making and will confuse others with their speed and volume. In 2020, Biden defeated Trump by promising normalcy. Normalcy will no longer help Democrats. In the most recent example of an anti-populist victory, Donald Tusk triumphed in Poland’s parliamentary elections in 2023 and returned as prime minister, not because he promised normalcy, but because his party, Civic Platform, was able to create a compelling new political identity. Tusk’s party adopted more progressive stances on such controversial issues as abortion rights and worker protections, but it also draped itself in flags and embraced patriotism. Tusk offered Poles a new and pompous narrative, not simply a different electoral strategy. Civic Platform’s success still depended on forming a coalition with other parties, a potentially fragile basis for governing, but it offers, at least, a model for how the liberal center can reshape itself and curb the advance of illiberal populism.
The stakes for the United States are high: in the coming years, American politics could easily descend into a vicious tit-for-tat retaliation, or worse. But it would be unwise for liberals to respond to this moment by acting as defenders of a disappearing status quo. That would simply mean reacting to everything Trump does. A mindset of resistance may be the best way to understand tyranny, but it is not the best way to handle a moment of radical political rupture, in which tyranny is possible but not inevitable.
In 1989, the political scientist Ken Jowitt, author of a fine study of the communist uprisings of that period, “The New World Chaos,” observed that such a rupture forces political leaders to forge a new political vocabulary. At such moments, words that once held magic no longer work. The slogan “Democracy in Danger” did not serve the Democrats well in the election because many voters did not see Trump himself as a threat. As the writer George Orwell observed, “it is a constant effort to see what is right in front of your nose.” The challenge of understanding the new, even when the fact of its arrival is undeniable, means that liberal sensibilities will be shocked to see how few tears will be shed over the end of the old order. Contrary to what seemed correct in 2016, the task of Trump’s opponents today is not to resist the political change he has brought, but to embrace it – and to use this moment to shape a new coalition, for a new society. (The Atlantic)
