Understanding Our Disruptive Moment in History – and What It Requires

The old order is dead. The Right has a revolutionary theory of the moment that promises renewal. Unless we can counter it with a transformative vision, we will lose.

By Thomas Zimmer, June 29, 2026

Before we start, let me remind you that I have launched a version of this newsletter in German. Same content, same analysis – only in German. If that is of interest to you, head over to Demokratie Americana (Opens in a new window) (where all pieces should be available within a few hours of publication on here). Please help me spread the word!

Only the extended intro to this piece is free for everyone. If you want to read more than the preview, please consider becoming a paid member of Democracy Americana, which is solely funded by readers and constitutes my main source of income as an independent writer.

As a paid member, you also gain access to the audio version of the essay – which you can find at the end of the piece or available for download in the podcast player of your choice.

Without your support, I will not be able to continue this work. Please know that I am immensely grateful for your generosity!

Not ready yet for a paid membership? You can subscribe to the free version of the newsletter:

The old world is dying. Defending the status quo is no longer an option: It is neither an adequate response to the challenge we face nor is it viable electorally. We live in a profoundly disruptive moment. Restoration won’t do. A credible transformation is the only way forward.

I have not been able to do much work lately. Most of Europe has been suffering under an unprecedented heatwave. Friday broke the record for the hottest day ever recorded in German history: 41.3 degrees Celsius (a little over 106 degrees Fahrenheit) near Saarbrücken in the country’s south-west. It took just 24 hours for the record to be broken (Opens in a new window) again: 41.5 degrees Celsius (106.7 Fahrenheit) were measured on Saturday in Saxony-Anhalt in eastern Germany.

I live in Hamburg, up north, which sits at the same latitude as Dublin, Ireland, Liverpool, UK, and Edmonton, Canada. It is a port city, close to the North Sea, shaped by a maritime climate. Extreme heat is supposed to be rare up here. We had 39.4 degrees Celsius (Opens in a new window) (103 Fahrenheit) on Saturday, smashing the previous record for the month of June.

Most of my readers live in the United States. Depending on where you are, you may look at these temperatures and think: It’s not that bad, is it? But remember, the vast majority of people here have to make it through the punishing heat without air conditioning. Schools and daycares, hospitals, public transportation… AC is rare. In private households, you will almost never find it. I am writing this after spending most of the past 72 hours in our little basement with my family. The rest of the house is basically uninhabitable. We are among the lucky ones: We have a basement.

Why does no one have AC, you may ask? Well, there are many reasons, I suppose – but the most profound one is that our homes and cities were built for a world that is no more. It’s simply not supposed to be this hot so early in the summer and for such a long period of time. But that’s the thing: The old rules don’t apply anymore. 

I don’t want to push the symbolic significance of this heatwave too far. But it should serve as a reminder that we are facing major disruptions – politically, socially, technologically, economically, environmentally. And unless we come up with transformative answers that are commensurate with these challenges, we will suffer.

I had planned to write about the bizarre spectacle of America’s semiquincentennial last week – asking what, exactly, it is that we are asked to commemorate at the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. That piece will be coming soon, hopefully still before the Fourth of July weekend. But today, I want to offer something else – a broader reflection on where this moment sits in history. If I have a core message, it might be this: We are not witnessing some accidental departure - but we are living through a profound disruption nevertheless, one that makes any attempt at “politics as usual” largely obsolete.

I am not just talking about Trump, who is himself more a manifestation than the cause of a long-standing anti-democratic radicalization of the American Right. Nor am I merely referring to the political situation in the United States more broadly, which is best understood as the latest iteration of a struggle that stretches back all the way to the Founding. I believe we are at an inflection point not just in the history of the American Republic, but indeed in recent global history.

I know this all sounds rather abstract: A grand reflection on historical continuity and disruption... And I understand this may seem frustratingly removed from the more immediate, more pressing tasks of the day. But bear with me: I believe it is precisely because the challenges ahead are so profound that we better come up with a good answer to the question of where this moment sits in history. What are the broader historical forces that got us here, that are tearing the present apart and shaping a future whose contours we cannot yet grasp? 

Unless we get that diagnosis right, we are doomed to fumble about in the dark. Unless we grasp the assignment, our response is destined to fall woefully short of the task ahead.

The more I talk to journalists, politicians, and diplomats the more I realize how much work there is still to be done. Understanding why the old world is truly dying, acknowledging that there will not be a return to the status quo ante, that any political project built around the idea of restoration must inevitably fail… it is a massive challenge, both politically and intellectually. But there is simply no way around it.

So, here, in an attempt to convey the stakes of our moment, are eight propositions about this inflection point in history: About how the political, economic, technological, and environmental crises intersect and why they are escalating now – and about the political implications of recognizing the profound disruption we are witnessing.

1) Escalation of a very old political conflict

Politically, we are experiencing the latest iteration – and escalation – of a conflict that has shaped the country since its inception. It’s a conflict over national identity, over what “America” is supposed to be and who gets to belong, and consequently: over how much democracy, and for whom, there should be in this land? The country was never not divided over these questions. In fact, if there is something exceptional about the United States, it is this continuity of conflict between fundamentally incompatible visions of what the nation should be. The idea of “America” has been endlessly, relentlessly contested since the moment the country was founded.

The shift we need to achieve is not to go from a willfully naïve exceptionalism that glorifies American history as 250 years of stable democratic consensus to denouncing every invocation of democracy and equality as an insidious lie. The goal must be to understand U.S. history as defined by a continuity of conflict over the nation’s identity, ideals, and boundaries.

Today’s political conflict is therefore not a departure from the historical norm. However, it is escalating now for specific reasons and under specific circumstances. The first reason is structural. After decades of what political scientists call partisan sorting, the two major parties in the United States have come to embody and represent – in their animating visions as well as their electoral coalitions – incompatible ideas of what “America” should be. That was clearly not the case if we go back sixty or seventy years, when both parties existed as extremely heterogeneous coalitions that covered basically the entire ideological spectrum.

But the establishment of the civil rights order in the 1960s catalyzed and sped up a process of party reconfiguration by which those opposed to gender-egalitarian, multiracial, pluralistic democracy ultimately united in the Republican Party. Their voices have dominated the GOP since at least the 1970s. While Democrats came to (mostly and somewhat reluctantly) embrace the idea of extending the democratic promise, at least in principle, conservatives were willing to tolerate democracy only as long as it wouldn’t undermine what is supposedly the “natural” order manifesting in clear hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth.

As a result, the fault lines in the struggle over whether or not the experiment of democratic pluralism should be continued at all map onto the fault lines of the struggle between the two parties. Democracy itself has become a partisan issue. That means the stakes in every election are dangerously high. While election outcomes are de facto determined by relatively small shifts among a rather small group of people whose vote choices are overwhelmingly determined by much more immediate concerns and a general sense of frustration with “the system,” the consequences are dramatic. In a very real sense, democracy itself and the fate of the American experiment is on the ballot every single time.

The second reason is deeply intertwined with this trajectory of the parties. The struggle over how much democracy, and for whom, there should be in America is now playing out in a society that is far more diverse than at any previous moment in U.S. history. Over the past few decades, America has pluralized significantly – demographically, culturally, religiously. In this sense, the anti-democratic radicalization of the Right is a reaction to something very real: The nation has accelerated away from their conception of “real America” of white Christian patriarchal domination. In the rightwing imagination, Barack Obama – a moderately liberal politician by any reasonable standard – epitomized the threat from brown foreigners, the dangers of Black radicalism, and the triumph of extreme leftism. Obama’s presidency dramatically heightened the white conservative fear of demographic change; it supercharged the perception of a loss of political and cultural dominance. By the end of the Obama era, it had become dogma on the Right that Democratic governance was fundamentally illegitimate – an existential threat to the very survival of the nation.

Today’s Right is defined by an escalating siege mentality – and by a general sense that “conservatism is no longer enough,” that a far more radical form of politics is needed in response to these developments.

What unites all factions on the Trumpist Right today is the belief that a “leftist” revolution has already taken place, that the radical “Left” has taken over all the major institutions of American life. It fuels their raging assault on the civil service, the universities, and modern science: What may appear as a rabid destruction of state capacity and irrational self-sabotage of the country is, from the Right’s perspective, a final offensive against the power centers from which a leftist subversion is quickly spreading. As the Left now has command of America, all that is noble has been destroyed, there is nothing left to conserve; nothing short of a radical “counter-revolution” can now save the nation.

The Right’s political and intellectual leaders believe they are engaged in a noble war for the “soul,” the identity, the very existence of the nation. If the stakes are so high, if the other side is out to destroy all that is good about America and not only tear the nation’s moral fabric apart, but erase the “natural” order in the process, moderation, restraint, and patience are not an option. There is therefore no line they don’t feel justified to cross.

2) Economic disruption and anti-system sentiment

A criticism I often encounter when I talk about these conflicts over national identity and the egalitarian promise is that it distracts from what supposedly is the real story: One about the devastations wrought by globalization and neoliberal hegemony as the real drivers of what is generally called the rise of “rightwing populism.”

There is so much to say about the role of globalization and neoliberalism, about how these phenomena relate to the struggle between ideas of egalitarian pluralism and a hierarchical ethno-state. For the purpose of grappling with the disruptive quality of the moment we are experiencing, let me just say this: The structural transformation of our economies, something that is somewhat euphemistically described as the “rise of the service industry,” the decline of high-industrial modernity, the highly destructive impact of decades of neoliberal consensus from the 1970s through at least the 2010s… these developments have undoubtedly reshaped reality around us in profound ways, and any serious attempt to understand the pre-history of the present must assign a prominent place to these world-historic transformations.

The key, however, is to resist the temptation to make the economic transformations the real story and insist that everything else is downstream from that. Too often, the “culture wars” label is weaponized to relegate analysis that focuses on racial and cultural resentment, on anything that centers identity and ideology, to secondary importance – with “culture” meant to signify the ephemeral character of such issues compared to what is supposedly, at its core, a story about class and material distribution. As if the distribution of power and status along the dimensions of race, gender, and religion doesn’t have an immediate material impact?

The Right, unfortunately, has a much more plausible, holistic understanding of the struggle we find ourselves in. If you ask them: “Is your project imposing hierarchies of race, or gender, or religion, or class?” they answer with an enthusiastic: “Yes!” They envision a society that distributes status, power, and wealth along all those lines. Unless we approach the conflict with an equally holistic understanding of these organizing principles and how they intersect, we will be eternally at a disadvantage.

Similarly, the only way to understand the disruptive dynamic of our moment is to think of these different strands not as mutually exclusive, but as overlapping crises and mutually reinforcing escalations. In broad strokes: It is a disaster that the radicalization of the ethno-nationalist reaction in response to the profound pluralization of society happens exactly as large swaths of the population have lost faith in the system and its institutions. That the system hasn’t delivered in the estimation of so many people – that they are now convinced that their children will have a worse life than their parents had – is immediately tied to the way the neoliberal consensus chose to handle (and in many ways: exacerbate) the effects of the economic transformations since the 1970s. 

In recent years, election after election across the “West” has proven how large the reservoir of anti-system voters is, how much the electorate is defined by an anti-elite sentiment. America has been experiencing a profound de-alignment of the established order. Meanwhile, institutions like labor unions that could have acted as intermediaries between “the system” and those disaffected voters have been ravaged by the neoliberal assault. It has become much more difficult to channel the disruptive political energies of a society in which the established institutions have lost the people’s trust into a (small-d) democratic direction. Fertile ground for those who promise to demolish the “liberal” order.

3) Technological disruption

Another one of these exacerbations that overlaps with the escalation of the political conflict to make this such a profoundly disruptive moment: The AI revolution that is proceeding at warp speed around us.

I am not really qualified to assess the economic impact AI will have. But the rise of AI has already helped to fuel a drastic political realignment to the right among the Silicon Valley tech elite. A few weeks ago, I wrote extensively (Opens in a new window) about how America’s tech barons are aggressively taking the side of authoritarianism, animated by profit motives, ideological radicalization, and elite self-victimization. That includes even many of those who, until quite recently, presented themselves as liberals and supported the Democratic Party.

It was always a mistake to equate technological futurism with social progressivism, as the fundamental worldview in the tech elite circles has always had inherently anti-democratic tendencies, leading so many of them to conclude that democracy is incompatible with their “vision.” The fundamental worldview in these circles was a type of libertarianism driven by a desire for freedom, understood as the ability to remain unburdened from any kind of politically or ethically motivated restrictions, unhampered from any demands modern society may place upon them. The pervasive skepticism towards democracy and any kind of “burden” proved to be fertile ground for a more aggressive reactionary ideology.

The tech billionaires did not depart from a previously stable liberal-democratic conviction. This is not a complete aberration. It is better understood as the result of an activation and exacerbation of long-standing anti-democratic tendencies and reactionary sensibilities. But why now?

When I wrote about tech’s rightward radicalization, I focused on the example of venture capital titan Marc Andreessen who has been talking nonstop about why he had absolutely no choice, as he sees it, to break right. The story Marc Andreessen is telling about his own rightward turn is incredibly revealing. Andreessen insists there used to be (capital-D) “Deal”: He gifts the world beautiful tech – and in return, he not only gets money, but has a right to be revered and admired.

However, Andreessen claims that leftwing radicals took over the Democratic Party, leading to the Biden administration waging a “terror campaign” against the tech elite – while “woke” radicals also infiltrated his companies and tried to destroy them from within. 

Underlying Andreessen’s fantastical tale is a story of real historical change. Compared to the 1990s, Andreessen’s nostalgic golden era when center-left parties and politicians were happily praying at the altar of big tech, the general mood is certainly a little less accommodating today.

And this is where the timing of AI’s breakthrough becomes important to this story. Andreessen unequivocally states that the Biden administration’s “campaign to try to kill A.I.” (Opens in a new window) was the moment he and his fellow tech barons decided to support rightwing authoritarianism. There was no such “terror campaign,” of course – but probably an implication that a Democratic administration might not be willing to let this AI monster unfold entirely unregulated. And that caused a veritable panic among the tech titans who are convinced that the future of AI – meaning: the question of who gets to shape and rule and profit in a world completely remade by AI – is being decided now. AI added significantly to the urgency these elite tech circles felt. And one reason why they are aggressively aligning with the “counterrevolution” on the Right is that they want to force the disruption – and vanquish anyone who stands in its way.

4) The liberal international order is no more

I think it is fairly obvious that the disruptions we are experiencing are not confined to domestic U.S. politics. For a long time, America has been too powerful and too influential for the rest of the world to remain unaffected by whatever is going on within the United States. What is usually referred to as the “liberal international order” – the global political framework shaped and defined by the United States in the wake of the Second World War – has crumbled. The sooner everyone accepts that it is gone and the task now is to shape what comes next, the better. 

The contours of the next global political order are nebulous still. I doubt we will just seamlessly transition from the American into the Chinese century, for instance. I heard international relations scholar Nicholas Grossman say (Opens in a new window) he believes a kind of multipolar chaos is more likely, and I agree. I also don’t think it is particularly helpful to imagine a straight-up return to a previous order – a new Cold War perhaps, or a repeat of the kind of big-power imperialism that characterized international relations before the First World War. Whatever will emerge, I believe, is more likely to be something new, although it may well combine elements from previous regimes. A kind of neo-imperialism fused with what Stacie Goddard and Abraham Newman are calling “neo-royalism” (Opens in a new window) to capture the quasi-dynastic elements of how personalist regimes conduct foreign relations – less governments acting to advance the interests of their nation-states and more authoritarian cliques doing business with each other. Add to all of this a strongly ideological component – a struggle between democratic pluralism and anti-liberal ethno-nationalism that transcends the boundaries between domestic and international politics. For now, the government of the United States is actively antagonistic to the “liberal international order”; an aggressive affirmation of white Western supremacy forms the basis of a national security strategy that believes it is in the immediate national interest of the United States to advance the cause of rightwing ethno-nationalism everywhere, against the supposed evils of “globalism.” And finally, for now, Trump’s desire to project dominance and power hovers over everything else.

The American government is in the hands of delusional, abusive bigots. And there will not be a return to the previous era even after Trump is gone. The forces that made his rise possible in the first place won’t be going anywhere. Under a President Vance, for instance, U.S. foreign policy would perhaps be less erratic – but also more consistently ideological, and that means: more aggressively antagonistic towards liberal pluralism. Meanwhile, for the foreseeable future, any Democratic administration will be preoccupied with the domestic struggle and confronted with a Republican opposition that is almost guaranteed to hold enough power in Congress, the Supreme Court, and on the state level to make functional governance near-impossible. That, unfortunately, is perhaps the most likely scenario: The pendulum swinging back and forth between anti-liberal authoritarianism and Democratic paralysis. And as long as that is the case, the United States will, at best, be an unreliable player – and at worst a powerful antagonist. It won’t lose its hard-power advantage over the rest of the world overnight. But the “liberal international order” was also built on trust in its stability guaranteed by Washington. That’s just over.

5) Let us not repeat the mistakes of the Biden interregnum

The Biden administration did not approach our moment as a fundamental break. When they came in, they believed a combination of good governance, a return to “normal politics,” and a message of “Look ahead in unity” would work. Theirs was profoundly a project of restoration. And that was also the message they sent out, both at home and abroad: The worst is behind us now, let us move past this unfortunate accident, let us pick it up right where we left off before the Trump departure. Too many influential people both in the United States as well as abroad were eager to jump on this message – when they should have known better. It was just easier that way. Easier to pretend it had all just been a brief aberration, a nightmare from which we can all wake up together.

That was an utter disaster.

I cannot tell you how difficult it was, from November 2020 through January 2025, to convey to journalists, diplomats, and political elites on either side of the Atlantic, but particularly over here in Germany, that the collective “Let’s kick the can down the road” approach was destined to end  in catastrophe. So much time and energy wasted on finding ways to pretend that what was happening right in front of our eyes was actually not what it so clearly looked like.

Let us not do that again.

6) The old world is burning (quite literally)

As I am writing this at the end of the most brutal heat wave Germany has ever seen so early in the summer, I realize I have never tackled the climate crisis in Democracy Americana. I try to stick closely to my areas of expertise and climate politics falls beyond that territory. But to the extent this approach may have contributed to the impression that the climate crisis is something that happens apart from the political conflicts I focus on, that we can neatly compartmentalize and separate between the democracy crisis and the climate crisis, I apologize.

As rising temperatures are threatening the very foundations of human civilization as we have created it, it becomes ever more obvious that the systems and structures we have built for a world that is no more are reaching a breaking point.

The rise of far-right movements and parties is certainly not the only reason why we have so far been unable to muster a response that is commensurate with the problem. But far-right “populists” are often, as is the case in the United States, aligned with powerful moneyed interests pushing for a deregulatory agenda that views any attempt at tackling environmental issues as an outlandish assault on “free enterprise.” It’s also become a core element of rightwing political identity to view any kind of environmentalism as part of a “woke,” “globalist” agenda to undermine the strength of the nation; the Far-Right is generally committed, certainly in the United States, to a retrograde politics of resource exploitation and to elevating the most destructive behavior towards the planet, the environment, and the climate because it makes them feel “manly” somehow. As is so often the case, Trump represents these reactionary tendencies and grievances in the most bizarre form: The man in the most powerful political office on the planet is pursuing his own vendetta against wind turbines (Opens in a new window)…

It’s the worst possible timing, really, to have so much power concentrated in the hands of reactionary forces that are fully committed to their crusade against modern science and common sense, who, fueled by greed, grievance, and ideology, are so fully devoted to disastrously self-destructive behavior as long as it is coded as anti-“woke.”

7) This is a properly scary moment

You can probably tell that I am not super impressed with the job mainstream conservative, liberal, progressive, and leftwing politicians have been doing on either side of the Atlantic. Too many are still acting like deer in the headlights, so unsure how to respond to the far-right assault that they aren’t really responding at all. They seek refuge in platitudes about “taking the concerns of voters seriously,” which has generally translated into just parroting the Far-Right on immigration and “culture war” issues as if we didn’t have mountains of empirical evidence that adopting far-right positions and rhetoric only ever helps the Far-Right (Keir Starmer was the latest politician who thought he knew better; let’s ask him how it’s been going (Opens in a new window)…). A consultant class devoted to singing the one-note song of “Follow the polls!” is far too influential in center-left and mainstream progressive circles. And too often, timid political leaders make avoiding “backlash” their overriding concern.

In fairness, though, let me say that I do not envy the people who, by sheer accident of timing, have been put in positions of influence and power right as the many overlapping crises of our moment have made it impossible to continue “politics as usual.” I mean this sincerely: The task they are facing is in many ways unprecedented, there are no easy answers. Tackling just one of these challenges would be hard: The destructions wrought by the rightwing “counter-revolution”; the profound disillusionment with the system brought about by decades of elite impunity and neoliberal “reform”; the technological revolution spear-headed by people who, in a fundamental sense, seem to be convinced that humanity itself is the problem; and the climate crisis rapidly accelerating to the point where the structures we built for a world that is quickly vanishing are starting to fail.

This is a scary moment. I understand the temptation to pretend it ain’t so. To cling to the idea that the established strategies, tactics, and patterns of behavior might yet work still – even when we are so clearly entering a constellation in which accepted modes of making sense of the world around us prove inadequate and unable to generate solutions.

Perhaps it is unfair to have all this put on the plate of this generation of political leaders. But fair’s got nothing to do with it. We need better.

8) A transformative vision to match the Right’s revolutionary theory of the moment

I am not in the camp of those who believe we are doomed (and perhaps even deserve our impending downfall). Far from it. But status quo politics won’t cut it. What we need is transformational aspiration that meets the moment.

Clinging to the status quo is not only inadequate diagnostically – it is also a disaster politically. One big advantage the Right possesses is that they are pursuing a transformative vision. They have a revolutionary theory of the moment and are committed to a (counter-) revolutionary political project. Let’s be clear: Their vision is cruel. And they don’t have any real answers to the challenges we are facing beyond what they are always offering: Blame and subjugate. Find “others” to blame, persecute, and purge; subjugate those who are “unworthy” of equal status and hope that the psychological as well as material rewards of domination for some override all forms of solidarity beyond race, gender, religion, and wealth. 

What makes this project particularly dangerous right now, however, is that the re-imposition of such a discriminatory order first necessitates the destruction of “the system”: Even beyond those who are ideologically attracted to such a hierarchical vision, the Right’s project appeals to a sense of discontent and disaffection – to those who may feel that any revolution is better than maintaining the status quo or perpetuating “the system.” The Right doesn’t have answers to our problems, but it has a promise that fits our moment of unprecedented disruption temperamentally.

The challenge is to counter this with a progressive vision that is equally adapted, both in substance and temperament, to the disruptive challenges we are facing – and therefore capable of attracting and channeling the widespread desire for transformation rather than merely reform. 

A political project of restoration centered around defending “the system” and restoring the status quo ante is destined to fail. It is incapable of winning elections. And frankly, the status quo ante isn’t worth restoring anyway, considering that it got us into this mess in the first place.

Let us aspire to transform. Don’t think of this as a project of idealistic utopianism, but as an exercise in practical realism. Considering the disruptions we are facing, a leap forward is the only viable option.

Thank you for reading and thank you for listening – and please know that I am deeply grateful for your support and your generosity!