The Old World Isn't Coming Back To Save Us

We were nurtured by a political settlement that is unlikely to survive the decade; we'll have to learn to survive in a new one.

There are now, effectively, two right-wing political parties within the United Kingdom’s mainstream, and the likely upshot seems to be that by competing to cater to the increasingly right-wing views of a growing segment of white Britons, Reform and the Tories will pull each other to the right. On the subject of those Britons and their right-wing views, there seems to be a preference cascade on the issue of migration that has only just begun to snowball into the mainstream and shows little sign of stopping. It seems highly plausible, if not likely, that the next election will deliver a drastic rightward shift, and that the next government could include the Reform Party. Meanwhile, the historic left-wing coalition of interest groups seems to be coming apart at the seams, both over the current Labour government’s policies and, more acrimoniously, over the issue of Israel and Palestine. Partially as a result, hardline social conservatives within the UK’s Muslim community are beginning to flex their political muscles and assert themselves as a bloc whose preferences will have to be acknowledged. Elsewhere in Europe, similar situations are cropping up, and the cordon sanitaire looks to be within one or two general elections of breaking in France and Germany if current trends continue. I present these as descriptive statements, irrespective of valence.

Across the Atlantic in the United States, the “ResistLib” core of the Democratic base—joined by a few Lincoln Project types who ought to know whereof they speak—is fantasising about a future “de-Ba’athification” of the US government in which Trump appointees and perhaps whole agencies are purged. Many want to go further and enact a “Second Reconstruction” to tear out the roots of Republican power, even in deeply red states. I submit that while all of this is conceivably possible, it is, at present, exceedingly unlikely. Democrats do not command the loyalty of any centre of hard power in the United States as Republicans do with ICE and many state and local law enforcement agencies. Although Trump’s popularity has taken some hits, the hoped-for “Blue Wave” of 2026 as yet shows little sign of materialising—certainly not to a degree that would offset an unfriendly House and Senate map (which will only get worse in 2030). Perhaps most importantly, the leadership of the Democratic Party displays very little sense that it is capable of rising to the moment that its exponents constantly warn the country is facing. There are, of course, individual explanations (uncharitably, excuses) for every failure at every step of the way, but the question remains, if the Democratic Party believes that Donald Trump is an existential threat to Americans’ liberties and US democracy; why did a Democratic administration—which at the time possessed official control of all the levers of federal hard power—allowed him to run for president, win, and take office? Even Gavin Newsom, currently the darling of the Democrats’ online and increasingly radicalised base, has shown little appetite for the kind of lawfare and direct confrontation that would likely be required at this stage to put the genie of Trumpism back in the bottle.

My point in saying all of this is to argue that the world we knew in the 2010s is not likely to come back; at no point are we all going to wake up from a bad dream and feel like it’s 2015 again. When I speak of the world of the 2010s, I speak of a period in which left-wing parties (either neoliberal or social-democratic) were generally ascendant in the West, in which left-wing social causes were expected to advance further, and in which the major organs of society (universities, legacy media, and large corporations) were expected to not merely accept the advancement of such causes, but to positively facilitate them. I am speaking, briefly, of the world in which “wokeness” was dominant. Personally, I am at best an ambivalent defender of this period, but even I am forced to acknowledge that the material basis for many of the things I hold near and dear was a product of this political economy, and that basis is threatened by the new regime that seems to be emerging across the Occident. It rather worries me, therefore, when I see other people who are also attached to these things mount defences of them which only make sense if you think we’re still in the world of the 2010s. What good is an appeal to the ECHR when the first priority of the next government is likely to be withdrawing from it? What does it profit us to maintain lockstep support from a party that has a very good chance of being locked out of national power for a generation?

Ultimately, the political settlement will shape what is materially possible. I have acknowledged, on occasion, that some of the first politics I ever chose for myself were those of (early) third-wave, sex-positive feminism. As much as my outlook on the world has changed since then, many of those priorities are still dear to me. The liberation of pleasure from the strictures of domination and social hierarchy, its pursuit as a positive good in itself, the ability to freely choose one’s own path, LGBT life being open, destigmatised, and accessible—these are all things that are deeply valuable both to me and the majority of my friends. I do not know how we preserve them in a world where ethno-nationalism is a dominant political force and where the right is globally ascendant—I fear we cannot preserve them in full, or at least in the same forms they have existed for the last decade and a half. I believe, however, we have to try and learn how to do so, because if these things we love can only survive if the clock is turned back to 2015, I fear they won’t survive at all.