The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, combined with illiberal developments in Europe, shows that the West is facing the great crisis of progressivism. The idea that everyone would become more liberal, and more open-minded with the slogan of Diversity, Equality and Inclusion has come to a sudden halt. It has been a long time in the making.

Our troubles started at our time of greatest hope, when the Cold War came to an end in 1989. The Brave New World of the so-called ‘end of history’ and the peace dividend seemed assured. This period, the end of the 1980s and the early 1990s, coincided with the invention of the internet, the end of exchange controls, the Big Bang of deregulated banking, the start of globalisation and the rapid decline of the deferential society and collective loyalties, embodied by trade unions and school and military associations. I think it will take contemporary historians some time to work out which of these were interlinked and which were coincidental in the massive changes that followed.

An astonishing flexibility was achieved through globalisation. Both products and people for employment, whether cheap labour or high-flyers, could be obtained from anywhere in the world. This revolution, social, economic and technological, accompanied the geopolitical change that came with the fall of Soviet Communism, and it was far deeper and broader than we could possibly have imagined at the time. Released from the straitjacket of the Cold War, many other controls fell away, creating vulnerabilities in the future. Nationalist and ethnic rivalries and hatreds, which had been suppressed for decades by the Cold War, re-emerged in the Balkans and former Soviet satellites elsewhere.

On the whole, we welcomed the opportunities for social change that opened up. In Britain, the ending of Crown Immunity meant that for the first time in history the Crown or Government could be sued. This opened the door for social justice activists to infiltrate and influence key institutions. It offered the opportunity of imposing new norms from certain commanding heights in the employment sector.

We all want to extend equality and opportunity into every area of society, but imposing it on long-established complex institutions has consequences that are hard to predict. President Truman forced racial integration onto the US Army just after the Second World War, and this was a great example of how healthy change can be imposed from above. But in the 1990s, activists for racial, gender and gay rights, and, much more recently, the transgender lobby, set out to impose their ideals on national life, in many cases via the universities.

This was all well and good, especially in times of peace and prosperity such as the first decade of this century. But human society can only digest so much change at a time. As we saw with the disaster of the Russian Revolution and Civil War, the Bolshevik attempt to create homo sovieticus as speedily and ruthlessly as possible, produced an even more brutal counter-reaction in the 1930s. I am definitely not trying to create a historical parallel with what we are seeing now, just observing that attempts to produce an over-rapid social, work-life and political change from traditional beliefs are liable to create a counter-reaction. Fear of change, confusion and resentment creates a dangerous kickback.

Trump’s victory came as a shock to many people; but as the Atlantic magazine argues, the college-educated liberal left never realised how badly it had misread vast swathes of the American electorate. The imposition by activists of woke issues, of DEI principles in employment, transgender equality in sport, Black Lives Matter demonstrations, calls to defund the police and the chaos in liberal heartlands like San Francisco, all contributed to the counter-revolution. And then of course there was the surge in immigration, which Kamala Harris utterly failed to grasp, let alone reduce. This significantly accelerated the swing to Trump among socially conservative Latino voters, who were already doubtful about abortion, as well as opposed to trans ideology and illegal immigrants. The idea that the ethnic minority vote would more than make up for the lost white working class vote proved a major political mistake from a Democratic Party perspective.

For most of the campaign, Trump and his team concentrated on immigration, where Harris was vulnerable, and inflation, which in fact was not her or Biden’s fault since, as in all other countries, that was the result of the Covid pandemic and then the shock rise in energy prices with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. But then in their final push, Trump’s team changed its line of attack with devastating effect. They zeroed in on Harris’s support in 2019 for taxpayer-funded sex-change surgeries for transgender prison inmates. ‘Every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access,’ she was filmed stating. This film clip was turned into TV advertisements, with the tagline: ‘Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.’ The Democrats’ own research showed that its repetition in 15,000 screenings, especially in the swing states, shifted voting support for Trump by at least 2.7 points. Culture war ideology on its own proved enough to secure Harris’s defeat. In the last few days it has been reported that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, that crusading congresswoman has removed the she/her pronoun from her profile on X. In the UK, the Transgender Day of Remembrance was not even promoted by Stonewall, its greatest supporter.

The Harris campaign had assumed, wrongly, that although they knew that Trump was winning greater support among men, the Democrats thought they would make up for it by attracting more women voters. It is true that back in the last century more women voted Republican, but that has now changed dramatically, even with the abortion issue. The Democrat campaign utterly failed to foresee the cumulative effect of both culture war and gender war.

Trump’s MAGA slogan, Make America Great Again, meant to many males ‘Make American Men Great Again’. ‘MAGA makes you manly’, was the implication, and ‘the Bro effect’ meant that this was a great tribe to join for all men from the kick-ass macho to the embittered incel, or involuntary celibate misogynist who hated women because of their own lack of sexual success. It seems that even many college kids who should have been sympathetic to feminist issues were secretly attracted by the Trump appeal to male power. In any case, within days of Trump’s victory, misogynistic slurs have exploded in the US. They include: ‘Get back in the kitchen!’ and, horrifically, the new cry of ‘Your body, my choice’ is even being picked up in school playgrounds.

The swing to Trump was greatest among young males. One analysis of AP VoteCast data, for instance, showed that 56 per cent of all American men aged 18 to 29 supported Trump this year, up 15 points from the 2020 election. A higher and higher proportion of young women have masters degrees while more and more young males are dropping out of high school. The fact that they tend to hate better educated women of the liberal elite should not be surprising, depressing though it is.

The growing gender conflict is also a contributing factor to population decline in western nations, where young women, not surprisingly, are more interested in careers, and reluctant to bring children into an increasingly unstable and unpredictable world. This in turn feeds the great replacement conspiracy theory, fomented by the extreme right, that the drop in the birthrate is drawing in increasing numbers of immigrants.

Ever since the financial crisis of 2008, changes in employment, such as net-zero contracts and non-unionised low-paid jobs in vast warehouses, like those of Amazon, have been a key factor in the growth of frustration and resentment. This has especially affected young men, who feel they have lost any control over their own lives. The slogan in the Brexit campaign in Britain, ‘Take Back Control’, was an absolute winner, but untrue. It appealed to the same resentments and frustrations which Trump’s slogans targeted so effectively, and again dishonestly.

But can anyone Make America Great Again, or Europe for that matter? The decline of the West, as Oswald Spengler prematurely prophesied in his book published just after the First World War as Der Untergang des Abendlandes, appears inevitable in retrospect. Even though democracies have in the past managed eventually to win wars over dictatorships, a liberal and more humane society is far more vulnerable when it comes to commercial competition. Increasing calls for a four-day working week, the insistence since Covid of working from home, now known as ‘Shirking from home’, and an increasing attitude among the young that success at work should no longer be your main goal in life, means that western productivity is falling disastrously behind South-East Asia.

In the last 40 years the EU share of global GDP has halved from 31 per cent to 16 per cent and is likely to diminish much further. Mario Draghi was absolutely right in his call to ease the regulatory burden, but the EU’s inherent problem and fundamental flaw always came from the paradox that to integrate politically you had to integrate economically. Yet that in turn meant a vast increase in regulation, which eventually provoked the very nationalist resentment which the EU was trying to get rid of. Driven by the first law of buro-dynamics, officials in Brussels felt compelled to regulate more and more with the best possible intentions to improve humanity. This was bound to produce its own backlash, which we are seeing across Europe as well as the United States. Not surprisingly, Trump wants Elon Musk to deregulate by decimating the American civil service.

So why are an increasing number of young people, especially male, disappointed by democratic politics and attracted to autocrats and dictatorial systems? In France a recent poll shows that almost a third of those under 35 in France have lost faith in democracy. This is twice as high as those over 70. Altogether 51 per cent of respondents agreed with the statement: ‘I think that only a strong and centralised authority can guarantee order and security.’ Another poll suggested that 24 per cent wanted the French army to take over.

France is far from alone. The AfD in Germany is gaining most of its support among young males and there are worrying signs in Britain, too. Of course, the young more than any other age group are sick of politicians’ breezy promises which are never fulfilled. The fact is that, in a globalised world democratic politicians have little control over events. Biden was blamed for inflation in the US election when it was a worldwide phenomenon largely caused by Covid and energy prices as a result of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Social media fans the flames of fury, outrage and resentment. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, is horrified how a medium designed for better communication between human beings turned so rapidly into a vehicle for division and hatred. Others are horrified by the collapse of the younger generation’s attention span from Tik-Tok, YouTube and other social media. Professors everywhere are appalled that fewer and fewer of their students are able to read a whole book. How can students absorb complex ideas and develop their critical thinking if they can’t read long books, if they cannot track the plot or grasp the complexities of characters in literature? I thought it was mainly a British and American problem, but some ten years ago the Spanish novelist Javier Marías told me that his brother, a professor of philosophy in Madrid, was finding that his students just wanted excerpts. The trouble with the internet was that, by providing instant information, it completely undermined the assembly of knowledge.

It is hardly surprising that Putin believes the West is unable and unwilling to defend itself. Trump is absolutely right that Europe took it for granted that America would always underwrite the defence of Europe. This gave European politicians the excuse to ignore investing in defence, to the point that it cannot even find the personnel for its armies and navies. It lacks the forces that are fit enough to fight, or willing enough culturally to serve. The cult of the individual, of self-belief and self-identification has completely undermined any sense of collective duty. We certainly cannot find citizens sufficiently strong physically or psychologically, to serve. In Britain the annual cost of disability and incapacity benefits is rising to more than £100 billion pounds, nearly twice the size of the annual defence budget.

All this comes at a time when we have never been closer to the danger of war. Cyber attacks and asymmetric warfare operations are already taking place in the Baltic and Scandinavia. The Norwegian government’s Directorate for Civilian Protection, the DSB, is telling its civilian population to prepare at least a week’s  emergency supplies for warlike dislocation and stockpile iodine tablets in case of nuclear war.

World wars are a combination of different conflicts. Right now we have a crisis in the Middle East, with Israel and Iran. We still have Syria, which has exploded again, we have the Russian war on Ukraine, China is still determined to seize Taiwan, and now there is a greatly increased tension between North and South Korea, which is even feeding into the war in Ukraine.

How did we fail to see this coming? Let’s go back quickly and see where we have repeated the mistakes of the past. In 1909, just before the First World War, Norman Angell wrote a huge international bestseller, The Great Illusion. Its basic argument was  that ‘the economic cost of war was so great that no one could possibly hope to gain by starting a war, the consequences of which would be so disastrous’. He assumed that modern communications and trade relationships made war unthinkable. Well, that idea persisted right up to 1914 and beyond. In the 1930s the British and the French could not believe that Hitler would want to go to war after the horrors of trench warfare. Who in their right mind would ever want another conflict like the First World War? The answer was, Hitler did.

After the horrors of the Second World War nobody could imagine that anyone would be crazy enough to unleash another war on the Eurasian landmass. Surely the world had learned its lesson? Again, after the end of the Cold War we saw the return of the Angell illusion, with an Ostpolitik in Germany, embraced by both Gerhard Schröder and Angela Merkel. Trade closely with Russia and there will never be another armed conflict. Embrace your former enemy so closely that he will never be able to draw back to strike you. Wrong again.

Why have we been so blind? It is because we suffer from democratic confirmation bias. Proper democracies do not fight each other. Read Anne Applebaum’s new book Autocracy Inc. Autocrats do not always act out of self-interest. They suffer from a narcissistic delusion, usually brought on by resentment from real or perceived slights in the past. Vladimir Putin certainly does. In February 2020, Putin urged Anatoly Sobchak, his mentor and the man who had given him the chance to take over from Boris Yeltsin, to go to Kaliningrad to support his presidential campaign. Sobchak went and on 20 February, he and his bodyguards were killed within minutes of each other, supposedly from heart attacks, but almost certainly by Novichok. Putin’s hits even then were carried out by the GRU. Putin is the gangster chief of a gangster state. How do you negotiate with somebody you cannot possibly trust? In the Cold War, we could be reasonably certain that Communist leaders in the Soviet Union and China would keep their word. That is no longer the case.

In any case, let’s face it, neither the EU nor the UK, nor the United States under Trump, possess a grand strategy, whether military, diplomatic, or economic. Scandinavia and Poland have a clear idea of defence priorities, yet France and Germany and the UK and Spain are all still incapable of acting on the threat we face to the survival of democracy and progressive ideals. At this very moment Romania may be swinging away from NATO.

I fear that it all comes back to the point that impatient attempts to impose change on society, create fear and resentment and thus become counter-productive to the point of destruction. We have become the victims of our own idealistic illusions.