I’m a leftie, but still recognize that society needs some form of hierarchy (and attendant deference to expertise/leadership etc) in order to function. Where the current epidemic of incompetence will lead us is anyone’s guess.

He wakes from another fevered dream, a puddle of sweat mixing with the permanent stain of bronzer on the silk bedsheet. This one was a corker: a humiliating walk naked across the White House lawn, his ignominy (Melania calls it his “Little Trumpet”) exposed to a chafing wind.

Ahead, clamoring at the railings, mobs of millennials and Communists rain spit and rotten fruit down on him from the curbside. Hillary Clinton walks behind him, lashing his flabby back with a sheaf of emails, crying, “Shame!” — such a cursed woman — “Shame! Shame!”

Donald Trump shudders. Walks to the bathroom, twists the diamante-studded faucets Melania recently had installed in the gaudy en suite. He splashes a palm full of water onto his face and looks in the mirror, purses his lips into a self-regarding pout, extends his neck to uncrease the double chin. Pats the hair implants into their iconic frozen wave…puffs out his chest, sucks in the gut…then exhales, a long mournful sigh.

And says to himself: “What the fuck am I doing?”

No one has the foggiest idea what they’re doing.

This is my new overarching theory to explain Trump, the universe, and everything. Not you, not me. Neither that dribbling moron over there, nor that tenured professor over there; no one really has a clue.

One of the weirdest things about engaging with modern political discourse in the age of social media and 24-hour news is how little seems certain anymore. The more society polarizes, the hazier it all becomes, a snowball of sophistry and confusion growing in size every time Seb Gorka barks “fake news.”

We are 7.4 billion points of view, each one undermined by its owner’s hypocrisy, hubris, and bias. How have we reached a stage where everyone’s opinion is equally open to question?

In pursuit of some kind of answer, let’s start by visiting my own intemperate shores: Great Britain. During the debates that preceded last year’s Brexit vote, then–Justice Secretary Michael Gove, a prominent advocate for Britain leaving the European Union, gave a television interview in which he uttered a line that reverberated around the country.

The exchange went like this:

Faisal Islam (interviewer): “The leaders of the U.S., India, China, Australia, every single one of our allies, the Bank of England, the IFS, the IMF, the CBI, five former NATO secretary generals, the chief executive of the NHS, and most of the leaders of the trade unions in Britain all say that you, Boris and Nigel, are wrong. Why should the public trust you over them?”

Michael Gove (forthright, jowly, condescending, I hate him): “I’m not asking the public to trust me. I’m asking the public to trust themselves…I think the people of this country have had enough of experts.”

And lo, there it was: the origin story of the Brexit.

The people of Britain were done with experts, the people who studied stuff and knew about shit. For those who voted Remain, Gove’s words encapsulated the way democracy was being subverted by idiocracy — an admission of the unreasoned, economically illiterate emotion characterizing the Leave campaign.

On the surface, the verdict seems damning; it doesn’t require an extensive trawl through the archives to see that undercurrents of anti-intellectualism have attended some of modern history’s most aberrant social phenomena: Mao, Stalin, Nazis, WWE.

But then what, precisely, had our propensity to defer to the experts achieved? The economy was creaking. Wealth inequality was rocketing. Two centuries of fossil-fuel dependence had choked the skies. For the first time in generations, children were set to have worse prospects than their parents. Ordinary people, increasingly, were spending great swathes of their brief lifetimes staring at little oblongs of liquid crystal. Our Oxbridge-educated politicians were short-termist charlatans. Our democracy had turned into a faltering production line pumping out the same old people advocating the same increasingly discredited free-market principles.

The experts used big words like “quantitative easing” and “stakeholder engagement.” But their supposed wisdom hadn’t resulted in a nation of contentment and common purpose. Far from it, as the referendum laid bare.

People, generally, don’t indulge in this kind of cynicism for fun. To some extent, a society’s inherent stability stems from its population’s often delusional willingness to collude in the idea that things are under control. In his recent film HyperNormalisation, the documentarian Adam Curtis described this impulse in relation to the twilight years of the former Soviet Union, where people cleaved to their leaders’ illusory reassurances even as the country crumbled.

“The Soviet Union became a society where everyone knew that what their leaders said was not real because they could see with their own eyes that the economy was falling apart. But everybody had to play along and pretend that it WAS real because no one could imagine any alternative…You were so much a part of the system that it was impossible to see beyond it.”

Today we are starting to witness what happens when such illusions shatter.

One of the most remarkable things about modern life is the ambivalence many of us now feel toward public figures. In an age of all-pervasive media scrutiny, it’s getting harder to differentiate between good guys and bad. Yesterday’s heroes seem forever to be destined to become tomorrow’s villains, as former idols become tainted by mortal error. Multi-Oscar-winning film producers turn out to be serial sexual predators; iconic champion golfers mutate into puffy-eyed philanderers; former Nobel Peace Prize winners look at their feet as minorities fall victim to ethnic cleansing; queens, venerated for decades of selfless public service, become serial tax avoiders. We are wont to ask whether Ghandi would have stuck it out under today’s merciless public gaze, lest some rumor of historical impropriety sent him scuttling off to a Himalayan ashram in disgrace.

The tenet that underwrites representative democracy — that governance is best left to the grown-ups — looks forfeit when the grown-ups start to appear so irredeemably fallible. In this respect, the anti-elitism that was an animating force for Brexit, the Trump election, and the more general upsurge in political extremism that attended 2016 marks an understandable, if dangerous, response to the death of righteousness and all the moral authority that goes with it. Competence has begun to look like a performance art.

This precipitous collapse in trust in our political class and the vital institutions it oversees has arisen at an infelicitous time. Coupled with a global financial crisis that no one predicted, and amid the disorienting clamor of social media, it has surfaced an uncomfortable epiphany: the gathering realization that those who purport to be in control are, in fact, just powerless bystanders like the rest of us, beholden to their own personal knot of ignorance and bias.

We have come to know, in some visceral way, that the complexity of the modern world is so intractable that everyone — no matter their status in society — is more or less playing at being sober adults, when in reality we all exist in a state of permanent bewilderment. Like the inner child in the poet Ted Hughes’ famous letter to his son, each one of us has been exposed as “the wretchedly isolated undeveloped little being” we truly are.

“And that little creature is sitting there, behind the armour, peering through the slits. And in its own self, it is still unprotected, incapable, inexperienced.”

When a butterfly flaps its wings…who the fuck really knows?

The story of 2016 was in many ways the story of this awakening. As the fundamental social compact of the capitalist system — that if you work hard, you can have a home, family, a holiday each year and a pension in old age — starts to crumble, people everywhere have started wrestling with the idea that the promises that shaped their expectations were never guaranteed.

For some, the realization has yielded a sense of hopelessness and dread (and, given the scale of the challenges we face, one could argue that this response is the most rational one). For others, however, it has provoked an urge to suppress this realization, come what may.

Much of the recent political destabilization in the West can be ascribed to this reflexive denial — the replacement of one illusion with another. It is hard, after all, to accept that the world’s problems might be insoluble; much easier to believe that the challenges can be surmounted just as soon as we tear down the status quo.

In vying to wrestle some sense from our confounding times, people have retreated into whatever narrative most supports their preexisting prejudices.

Suddenly, global chaos no longer needs to be ascribed to a billion uncontrollable variables. Instead, it’s the Rothschilds. It’s the liberal elite. It’s the swamp. It’s the cucks. It’s Russia.

It’s the bots, the corpocracy, the deep state.

It’s a malignant nexus of the Kochs, Tea Party activists, and Fox News, with their 30-year project to infantilize the lumpen proles for their own avaricious ends. (Actually, I have some sympathy for this last one. But hey, I never claimed to be above this stuff myself.)

And, of course, it makes many of us beholden to the simple populist figure inured to introspection, who boils the multifaceted world down to simple binaries of good versus bad, us versus them. Whatever your political persuasion, most people would probably agree that there is an undefinable press about the modern world, an ineluctable crush of news, opinions, and information.

Donald Trump, the simplest man of all, is a cipher for all those millions of people straining to hit pause, or rewind, or any button that might repudiate this cacophonous, disorienting background noise. It is an atavistic urge so powerful that it even overrides all the obvious danger signs we see in Trump’s moral turpitude and our historical awareness of where divisive tribal politics can lead.

Because in a world where nothing is certain, we are all fools. And the people who think otherwise are the biggest fools of all.

Glad to see that this article struck a nerve.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Even Donald Trump occasionally hits the nail square-on.

On September 15, a man tried to blow up a Tube train at Parsons Green Station, West London. His homemade bomb (which was housed, with curious pathos, in a budget supermarket carrier bag) had failed to properly detonate, but still left 30 people injured and my home city reeling from the latest assault in a summer of atrocity.

As news of the incident spread, Trump clambered onto his bully pulpit on Twitter and chimed in with a sentiment we could all get behind.

He called the perpetrator a “loser.”

Trump, with accidental perspicacity, had latched onto a disease of our times, one that goes some way to explain not only the appeal of Islamist ideology to disaffected Muslim youth, but also Trump’s very own rise to the presidency. Because all around the world, we are witnessing the March of the Losers, and Donald Trump is their king.

Donald Trump, global celebrity and billionaire, with his tycoon swagger and supermodel wife, is the biggest fucking loser on God’s green earth. To New York society, he’s always been a caricature: the parvenu boor who drapes his house in gold and emblazons buildings with his capitalized name. A man without friends who yearns for the ratings that support the brittle delusion that he is adored. A man who doesn’t read, whose insecurities pour out of him unbidden, from the violence of his signature to the childlike assertion of his handshake.

When I think about Trump’s vandalistic rise to the White House, there is a moment, back when he was still a harmless parody of limp machismo, that’s burned into my mind. It was April 2011, around the time when Trump ramped up his engagement with U.S. politics by becoming a strident champion of the “birther movement,” casting doubt on Barack Obama’s country of origin.

At the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Obama used his customarily lighthearted keynote to rib Trump — who was present — about his role in fomenting this conspiracy theory that was gaining traction with America’s lunatic fringe. In a memorable coup de grâce, Obama declared it was time to put the speculation to rest by revealing his “birth video,” motioning to a giant screen, where the opening credits of The Lion King began to roll. And as the Swahili tenor rang out across the auditorium—“NAAAAAANTS INGONYAAAAAA” — it was as if the whole world of the slick and urbane were laughing at the cretin in their midst.

When the camera switched back to Trump, even under the dimmed lights, you could sense his ordinarily Fanta complexion burning red with rage.

How else should a man like Trump, with his titanic ego wrapped in the finest muslin, respond to such provocation? Quite simply, by attempting to destroy the gilded society to which he never managed to belong. Six years later, Trump kicked in the door to the Oval Office that his tormentor had just vacated. He had surfed a tidal wave of grievance and underdog disenchantment to the highest office in the land, his assault on American democracy the culmination of a long project to one day be able to turn to those who would mock him and say:

“Look who’s laughing now.”

To argue that many of Trump’s acolytes were drawn to him because they saw him as a standard-bearer for losers is not to dismiss their grievances out of hand. Many, or perhaps most, of those stubbornly cleaving to the Trump flag are just ordinary pissed-off Joes, susceptible to the exhortations of anyone offering simple, snake-oil scapegoats to explain away the complex origins of their precarity, their depression, their fury at the state of the world. But it is all too tempting to speculate that many of Trump’s most vociferous supporters — the ones who engage and propagandize, who hitch themselves to his toxic politics come what may — emit the whiff of loserdom. In Trump, they see themselves reflected: the outcast whose social approbation somehow doesn’t measure up to their self-regard.

All around the world, many of the foot soldiers of disruption, rebellion, and change fit into this trope — of the loser taking revenge on the world that spurned them.

It’s there in Julian Assange, once seen as a warrior for Truth, now just another risible provocateur happy to subordinate righteousness to his own narcissistic power game. It’s Nigel Farage, the blustering, beer-swilling little Englander incongruous among the multilingual technocrats of Brussels. It’s the ISIS proxies ploughing trucks into innocent bystanders, lured to its black banner out of wrath for the women they’ll never fuck and the adulthoods doomed never to fulfill the promise of their mother’s unflinching love.

It’s the Charlottesville marchers with their pitiful flags and tiki torches. “I hear stories of strict religious parents, sexual misadventures, a feeling of drifting in a world which has not offered them a clear way to be heroes,” wrote Laurie Penny earlier this year, describing her time with the “Lost Boys” of Milo Yiannapoulos’ teenage alt-right coterie. “A desperate longing for something to belong to, for adventure and friends and enemies to fight.” These aren’t the shock troops of white supremacy, but rather a phalanx of insecure children, their nihilism a malignant outgrowth of their social alienation.

The politicized loser is an instinctively right-wing animal, one whose sense of victimhood compels them toward reaction and a vindictive assault on some nebulous “other.” The left has its disruptors, too, of course. Yet while they seek to tear down the center to rebuild something for the sake of society at large, the right-wing loser seeks only the elevation of his own people to a position of preeminence over others.

In extolling his tribe, the loser compensates for his own mediocrity; in propounding his libertarianism, he expiates his failures. “I would flourish,” he insists, “if only I was left alone.”

Note: You seldom, if ever, hear right-wing agitators offer an alternative prescription to salvage the society they claim to lament. Instead, they just pour scorn on the world as it is. The idea of what might come after matters less than the bald act of sabotage.

The resulting causes are often insane, the losers’ foes exaggerated or manufactured altogether. Their rallying points are a ridiculous pick-n-mix of paranoia and exaggerated victimhood. They are men’s rights activists, anti-feminists, religious fanatics. They are conspiracy theorists battling to awaken the blinkered masses to the millenarian specter of “white genocide.” Penny writes of the alt-right that “they are wedded to a political analysis that might as well be written in fuzzy felt.”

In considering how the losers became the change agents of modern Western politics, it’s hard to avoid pointing an accusatory finger at cyberspace. It’s no mystery why the outcasts convene on social media. By making potential publishers out of anyone and everyone and providing audiences for the same, the internet has lent legitimacy for perspectives once considered outlandish, bigoted, or downright mad. Are you a tinfoil paranoiac convinced that the earth is ruled by lizard people from Neptune? There’s a Reddit for that. Do you suspect that the swarthy races are conspiring to overthrow white hegemony? Here are your people, peddling bullshit on 4chan.

The web has fundamentally altered the way we engage with politics, reducing discourse to vitriolic pantomime. It’s a virtual universe of trolls, cranks, and playground jibes, where a talent for casuistry and comic-book nerdery empowers a loser to win rhetorical victories against tenured professors. What easier way to wreak vengeance on the world than to sit at home in your pants spitting venom at “libtards” from behind the anonymity of your smirking frog avatar?

Meanwhile, the fetishization of celebrity that the internet has enabled and accelerated now clobbers us round the heads with the unattainable lifestyles of the rich and famous. While the loser engages in the everyday drudgery of a job he hates, looking on helpless as society changes in ways he doesn’t condone, the winners are taunting him with another Instagram of tanned washboard stomachs and deep-blue skies.

To feel like a loser has never been so easy, nor has it ever been less conscionable. The loser’s quest for scapegoats has seldom been so urgent.

But the truth is that the potency of the motivated loser is nothing new at all.

In the 1950s and ’60s, when the political philosopher Hannah Arendt was studying the personalities of the people who oiled the Nazi machine, she discovered that many of them shared a particular neurosis. She found that numerous case studies, in talking about their pasts and their path toward extremism, admitted to having fallen victim to a crushing alienation. Arendt called this forlorn prototype the “mass man.”

The mass man’s sense of futility, with its volatile admixtures of gullibility, cynicism, and rage, rendered him ripe for conscription by a mad blame-monger who — short, shrieking, sexless, failed artist himself — possessed a preternatural knack for weaponizing victimhood.

It is no great leap to imagine that those faceless lackeys whose crimes would shock our collective soul — the men who pushed the button to release the cyanide, who oversaw the trucks tipping piles of emaciated flesh into mass graves — were the kids who had a miserable time at school and fared little better in adulthood.

The victim had become the abuser. That’s how this shit works. Always has.

Ultimately, these people will lose. They are losers, after all. However, for as long as society proffers rigid ideas of success and failure, the potential energy of the mass man will be there, itching for a cause, waiting for someone to come and soothe their existential pain.

Learning (and not learning) from our nuclear past

If you’re anything like me, which is to say that the past two years have thrown you into a tailspin of confusion and anxiety about the future, the world as you knew it has been tipped upside down.

A series of political tremors — most notably Brexit and America’s anointment of the mad orange clown — have rocked the status quo. The ground shifts still, buckling and yawing, widening old fractures and cracking open new ones we never knew existed, and I have no better idea than you do as to what kind of society will be reborn when the shaking stops, if indeed it ever stops at all.

My mum, who has reached the age where life’s capacity to surprise is moderated by the wisdom of experience, has an irritating habit of responding to my distress at the state of things with a glib refrain. “It was ever thus,” she sighs, the implication being that people have always been appalling shits to one another — don’t be surprised to see it kick off again now.

Yet while this is no doubt true, why has the instability of our present moment caught so many of us off-guard? How many of us who grew up convinced that we lived in a stable world now find themselves imagining pathways to a future world war? If it really was “ever thus,” why are we feeling so shocked by recent events? In short, how could we have all been so complacent?

The default intellectual paradigm for exploring the era of certainty which appears to have ended with the age of Trump is the “End of History” narrative. The phrase is most associated with the political theorist Francis Fukuyama, whose influential essay “The End of History?” first appeared in the summer of 1989, in the turbulent months before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Fukuyama’s proposition was a product of epochal times. After 40 years of superpower enmity, the Cold War was thawing: China’s one-party state was teetering following the ruthless quashing of student dissidents in Tiananmen Square, and democratic elections in Poland had opened the door for a succession of anti-communist revolutions across the eastern bloc. With the Soviet Union destined for collapse and disintegration, Fukuyama speculated that a final curtain was falling on the 20th century’s decades of ideological struggle.

“What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War,” Fukuyama wrote, “or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

None of this was to say that the human propensity for conflict and destruction had evaporated. But much of the volatility that followed, from the Balkan Wars to the Arab Spring, could be ascribed to this inexorable march toward Western democracy: the violent birth pangs of countries as they approached the inevitable final destination.

What did seem clear was that the so-called West, that beacon of scientific, rational civilization, had already reached the end of the curve. Communism was fucked. The Western ideals of capitalism, liberalism, and representative democracy had prevailed. Eventually, the rest of the world would follow, and we’d all live in a happy, poverty-free, consumerist paradise forever and ever, amen.

As many have pointed out in recent months, such a formulation now looks like a colossal act of self-deception. With Trump, Brexit, and the resurgence of angry, identitarian, emotionally driven politics the world over, people have begun to reject what once seemed axiomatic.

And I’ll be candid with you, dear reader: I still can’t quite believe it, frankly, this overturning of the world we thought we knew. There is incredulity everywhere, but my sense is that it’s especially pointed among my generation. I am white, mid-30s, the product of a middle-class Western upbringing and education. Sager observers may have had cause for circumspection. “As historians might wish to remind metaphysical speculators about ‘The End of History,’ there will be a future,” wrote the great 20th-century chronicler Eric Hobsbawm in 1993. But for me and many others, the liberal consensus felt unassailable.

Whether we liked it or not, the idea of liberalism’s irreversible victory had permeated our lives, delineating our sense of who we were and our place in the world. To scroll through the sputtering disbelief of #TheResistance today is to witness the consternation of people who thought we owned the future. Instead, complacent liberals like myself have been confronted by the revelation that a foundational assumption of our worldview might be a sham. Perhaps the three decades since the collapse of communism — which span the majority of my life — were not, as Fukuyama prophesied, an “end” signaling the irreversible victory of capitalism and liberalism. Perhaps they marked a hiatus, a temporary anomaly — a droplet of reason in an ocean of compulsion and emotional determinism.

Now that this penny has dropped, I’ve found myself wondering how we could have been so callow. For perhaps the most bizarre feature of this hiatus is that it arrived at the tail end of what was the most violent and blood-soaked century in human history. Inevitably, in attempting to grapple with the extent of my own complacency, this got me thinking about the era that preceded Fukuyama’s thesis. It got me thinking about the Cold War.

The recent escalation of tensions between the United States and North Korea — with one pudgy despot threatening to incinerate Guam, his addled counterpart looking up from Fox News long enough to promise fiery retribution — compelled me to the bookshelf, where I picked up Command and Control by Eric Schlosser. First published in 2013, it’s a book that chronicles the various times (and there are a lot) when America nearly catalyzed the final rapture, transforming the world into a sheet of radioactive glass with the push of a button. It includes a detailed exploration of the buildup of nuclear weapon stockpiles during the Cold War, as well as documenting the odd occasion when a hapless airman accidentally dumped a nuclear warhead over the Midwest by leaning on the manual release lever of his B-52 during manouvers.

In December 1960, Schlosser explains, the 34th U.S. president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, authorized the implementation of the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), effectively the blueprint for a nuclear attack on America’s communist enemies. An apparatus of last resort, it was conceived with one blunt intention: to pummel thousands of military and civilian targets in the badlands beyond the Iron Curtain with enough atomic hellfire to leave nothing but ash.

“Within three days of the initial attack,” Schlosser writes, “the full force of the SIOP would kill about 54 percent of the Soviet Union’s population and about 16 of China’s population — roughly 220 million people. Millions more would subsequently die from burns, radiation poisoning, exposure…Once the SIOP was set in motion, it could not be altered, slowed, or stopped.”

Not to be outdone, the Soviets were developing some fireworks of their own. In October 1961, the country’s “Mother of All Bombs,” cutesily known as “Tsar Bomba,” was detonated over the Arctic archipelago of Novaya Zemlya. The explosive yield of this one hydrogen bomb was 50 megatons, the equivalent of 10 times that of every scrap of ordnance triggered during World War II. A year later, the world’s two atomic superpowers faced off across the Florida Straits during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and humanity sidestepped mutual annihilation by the grace of two men’s hesitation. Jesus fucking Christ.

Apologists for nuclear weapon proliferation will of course remind us that this all occurred in the name of “deterrence.” However, as Schlosser also chronicles, top-table military hawks throughout this period were at the president’s ear agitating for preemptive strikes, seemingly unmoved by the prospect of extinguishing a quarter of a billion lives.

Think of it. There we were, two decades after the war that came after the war that was supposed to end all wars, and our leaders were pondering whether to commit mass murder on a scale hitherto unimaginable. In this apocalyptic dick-measuring contest, the potential for humanity to deal murder and devastation increased by factors of a thousand. That this potential remained mercifully unfulfilled was more down to happenstance, luck, and the immediate warnings of history than a sudden metamorphosis in human nature.

Then what? A pause. The Soviet bloc disintegrates. The latent individualism of half a billion people is unleashed as towns from Berlin to Vladivostok tilt toward capitalism. For three decades or so, the “West” and its vassals are gripped by a consumer frenzy. We can’t be bothered to protest the myriad ways that we are getting fucked on — to engage with ideas or wrestle with the fragilities of the system — because we are too busy buying Chinese-made technology on credit.

Unsurprisingly, in hindsight, it didn’t take much to derail this train. An economic crash followed by a period of increased precarity and runaway wealth inequality, and just like that, we started to slip back into the mire.

The economic and social underpinnings of the liberal order suddenly appear, in the starker light of 2017, like the preconditions of past disaster. The rich are so detached, so utterly drenched in mad riches, that they seem blind to the scaffolds they are erecting for their own future. People everywhere are rejecting the evidence of their own eyes. There are flat Earthers, Holocaust deniers, and people shunning the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change even as their homes are swallowed up by the storm surges of unprecedented meteorology. There are religionists demanding a return to prelapsarian values, and fanatics killing for the sake of some words in a book. Humanity, that fragile creature, has reverted to type, retreating into whatever myths and metaphysics most complements our innate prejudices. It’s all there, folks. All the mad shit and hocus-pocus that was supposed to have been beaten into submission by the inarguable primacy of liberal reason is back, and with a vengeance.

What lessons should be gleaned from this apparent relapse? Well, it shows us a few things that, in the naivety of the post–Cold War age, seemed to have been all too often overlooked. It reminds us that facts are not always able to countervail tribal instincts, and that the mere prospect of losing entrenched privileges is enough to drive a critical mass of a population into an abyss of self-destruction. It suggests that the shadow of enormous human suffering has a shelf life; that the concept of steady, inexorable social evolution is a lie. It shows us that Fukuyama was wrong.

A couple articles I’ve read recently appear to shed further light on how so many of us might have been blinded to the storms gathering on the horizon. The first, by Emmett Rensin in the Los Angeles Review of Books, offers a seductive theory of how complacency was a natural extension of the liberal self-image.

In “The Blathering Superego at the End of History,” Rensin suggests that the liberal consensus achieved the status of near-global orthodoxy precisely because it subordinated the political imperative to reform society to a kind of dispassionate managerialism that deferred to facts and expertise. To question the graphs and data streams of the liberal technocracy wasn’t to be ideologically oppositional; it was to be stupid, wicked, and wrong. And the ends justified any means necessary. If other countries weren’t yet with the program, anything that helped to nudge them in the right direction — up to and including military intervention — was reasonable policy. It was only what was good for them, after all.

When history is meant to be over and a single political faction begins to conceive of itself as the permanent manager of a static world…then those tasked with that maintenance must conceive of themselves as acting above politics itself. They become a superego, beyond the libidinal whims of any faction and dedicated not to some alternative vision of the world but to resisting all impulse toward alternatives.

For the past thirty years, Rensin argues, the stewards of this censorious superego, the centrist cabal of experts, policy wonks, central bankers, and subscribers to the Economist, have projected the impression of infallibility that many of us, in our hunger to believe that the reins were held steady, were prepared to swallow whole. But it ignored the most inviolable fact of all: that base humanity, the compulsive id in Rensin’s Freudian metaphor, hadn’t changed one bit. All it was ever going to take was the slightest whiff of incompetence — the revelation, say, that the banking system was a giant casino playing craps with ordinary lives — and the whole consensus would begin to unravel.

“The End of History suggests a perfectly healthy mind,” writes Rensin, “thus, any attempt to alter this situation is dangerous. But the trouble with superegos is that, once they have taken on this role, they cannot cease to perform it. When the id can be kept in control, all is well. But when it can’t, then the result is not the superego’s surrender — it is repetitious, manic dysfunction.”

In a recent cover story for the Atlantic, “How America Went Haywire,” the sociologist Kurt Anderson claims that America, with its “ultra-individualism attached to epic dreams, sometimes epic fantasies,” has long been a unique breeding ground for the more capricious elements of human nature to take root and thrive. “By my reckoning,” Anderson postulates, “the solidly reality-based are a minority, maybe a third of us but almost certainly fewer than half.”

Yes, this propensity for anti-rationalism required certain catalysts — the internet chief among them — to break out and start playing such havoc with America’s national conversation that it eventually propelled a conman to the presidency. But the potential was always there, even in the richest and most powerful country on earth. Anderson reminds us that you can give people freedom, but you cannot necessarily predict what they will do with it. As such, the confidence many of us might have had in the liberal consensus could only ever have been, itself, a delusion and a denial of all the myriad lessons of history.

The idea that progress has some kind of unstoppable momentum, as if powered by a Newtonian law, was always a very American belief. However, it’s really an article of faith, the Christian fantasy about history’s happy ending reconfigured during and after the Enlightenment as a set of modern secular fantasies…Why should modern civilization’s great principles — democracy, freedom, tolerance — guarantee great outcomes?

The point is that for all the surprise and hand-wringing that has accompanied the destabilization of recent months, the symptoms — manifested in the renewed political currency of tribal aggressions, and emotion over fact — mark little more than a return to business as usual. Trump, Brexit, resurgent populism: These are no more aberrations than the advent of a Third World War would be out of character. That so many of us believed we had moved past such tumult is a testament to nothing more than the arrogance of our comfortable lives and the potency of our own wishful thinking.

Because history does not end. It just bides its time until the next conflagration.