Analysis

By 1940, serious analysts — not hysterics, serious people — believed they were watching the permanent end of liberal democratic governance in Europe. Hannah Arendt was fleeing Germany. Churchill was widely considered a crank for believing liberal institutions could survive the decade. Serious historians were writing serious books about why the democratic experiment had failed as a form of governance and what would replace it. The evidence for this conclusion was not ambiguous: the interwar period had produced a systematic collapse of democratic governments across the continent, one after another, replaced by strongmen who — and this was the uncomfortable part — appeared to have the genuine support of their populations.

They were wrong. Not just about the specific outcome — about the nature of what they were watching. They were watching a pendulum at its furthest point of swing, which is exactly when a pendulum looks most like it has stopped moving.

That’s the model. Everything that follows is a variation on that observation.