The Politics of our Time: Back to the Future Edition

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The Politics of Our Time: Back to the Future Edition

The year is 2000. The ball has just dropped in New York City, ushering in a new millennium inside the world’s largest economic powerhouse. It felt like the future had arrived on schedule.

Globally, development was accelerating. Technology was advancing fast across personal life, medicine, energy, and defense. Academia still carried broad credibility. Democratic institutions, while imperfect, were widely trusted. The United Nations, an organization that had navigated a turbulent decade in the 1990s, looked poised to enter the 21st century with renewed confidence, alongside the World Health Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. The economy was strong. Terrorism had not disappeared, but it felt contained. Culture hummed with its own signs of forward motion. The BlackBerry was chic, Tom Ford was leaving Gucci, and Britney Spears was arriving.

It was, in many places, a time of expanding wealth and widening possibility. Democracy appeared to be growing. Peace deals were being achieved. More people were eating, surviving, and gaining rights.

But 25 years on, that world feels like it belonged to a different lifetime.

We did not get the iRobot household (and perhaps that is for the best). We did not get the sleek Matrix lifestyle or the Back to the Future promise of clean, confident progress. What we did get was a climate crisis and deepening global hunger, new wars and renewed old ones, populism and neo fascism rising in multiple democracies, artificial intelligence harvesting and monetizing attention, and a political atmosphere that at times feels less like 2000 and more like a darker echo of 1945.

How did a world that seemed to be moving forward feel as though it has slid backward. How did the story of progress become a story of fracture. And how has 1 man, Donald Trump, come to look poised to reshape global politics in just 4 years in office.

If we are going to answer that, we have to go back to the future.

The Post 1945 Promise

In 1945, the world emerged from what remains the deadliest conflict in human history. The United Nations was founded, imperfectly and unevenly. It began with far fewer member states than it has now, shaped in part by the realities of a world still dominated by colonial empires. Yet its principles were undeniably innovative.

The UN offered a simple premise for a dangerous new era. We may look different, sound different, and believe different things, but if we are going to coexist, we must work together.

That promise was never fully realized. The Cold War was full of hot wars. Civil conflicts and genocides scarred continents. Great powers competed through proxies, pressure, and ideology. But even critics of the UN often concede one central point. The post 1945 international system helped prevent a nuclear World War III.

Just as importantly, it forced the world’s leadership into a framework of dialogue, negotiation, and norms. Over decades, that produced real, if uneven, advances in global civil rights protections, including protections related to women, children, religious minorities, and LGBTQ people. It also accompanied a broad wave of independence movements and democratization. Today, democracies technically outnumber autocracies. Conflict did not vanish, but in many regions, it became less frequent and less total. People lived longer. Medical progress contained or eliminated diseases that once decimated societies.

The UN, the IMF, the World Bank, the WHO, the Bretton Woods architecture, and the leaders and diplomats who shaped them did not “fix” the world. But the world, on balance, became better than it had been.

Then came September 11, 2001.

The Shock of 2001

To be clear, extreme violence and terrorism existed long before 2001. The 1990s alone included atrocities and upheavals that should have shattered any illusion of stability, from Rwanda to the Balkans and beyond. But 9/11 felt different.

It landed after a period of relative calm and economic confidence in the West. It was experienced as an attack on the core narrative that the post Cold War world had entered a safer era. It also pulled global attention toward a region that, in popular Western imagination, had faded from the center of history after the Soviet Union collapsed.

That region was Afghanistan.

The Soviet invasion, and the decades of conflict it set in motion, is a story in its own right. What matters here is that Afghanistan became a catalyst for the defining policy shift of the early 21st century. The United States pivoted from a Cold War obsession with communism to a post Cold War project of humanitarianism, and then into an era dominated by counterterrorism.

Across administrations, the architecture of Western policy reorganized around this mission. The consequences were vast, extending across the Middle East and, at times directly and at times indirectly, reshaping approaches to Israel and regional security.

Meanwhile, a different race was accelerating.

The Second Gilded Age and the Tech Race

If 2000 felt like the start of a smooth ascent, the years that followed became a scramble, not only for security, but for capital and influence. America entered a second gilded age. The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria unfolded across television screens and policy memos. At the same time, the technology sector surged forward, transforming the economy and daily life at a pace that outstripped public policy.

Apple, Microsoft, Google, and later Meta and X became not merely companies, but infrastructure. Their founders and executives became not merely billionaires, but political actors, shaping information ecosystems, public debate, and in some cases the direction of national politics.

All the while, adversaries were rising or reasserting themselves. China surged into the position of the world’s second largest economy and a major military power. Russia, weakened in many respects, still held on to strategic leverage and imperial ambition. Britain left the European Union. France and Germany began to talk again about rearmament and strategic autonomy.

It was a period of extraordinary development in just 25 years.

But underneath that speed, a question grew sharper.

What about the average person.

2016 and the Global Turn

That is where this story takes off.

In 2016, an American election produced a political shockwave that reverberated across the Western world. Donald Trump, the real estate billionaire and celebrity, entered the presidency as a symbol of disruption and grievance. The movement behind him stretched from traditional conservatives to extremist groups that embraced political violence, racism, and conspiracy. Trump, whether praised or condemned, became a global export.

Not because other countries copy American politics exactly, but because the underlying conditions felt increasingly shared. Stagnant wages, housing insecurity, cultural backlash, disinformation, and institutional distrust.

The pattern spread. Different leaders, different contexts, but similar dynamics. Hungary, Germany, the Netherlands, Israel, Brazil, Argentina, and many others saw populist or far right forces gain ground. Even where they did not win, they shifted the mainstream.

The center of gravity moved.

2020 to 2025: A Cascade of Crises

Then came the cascading shocks.

COVID 19 reshaped daily life and exposed institutional fragility. The Black Lives Matter protests erupted into one of the largest civic movements in modern American history. Russia’s war against Ukraine escalated global insecurity. Gaza reignited as a central fracture line in global politics and public morality. Conflict intensified in Sudan and in parts of the Congo region. Tensions rose sharply over Taiwan. Disinformation metastasized. Public health, once a technical domain, became a cultural battlefield.

At the same time, extraordinary scientific achievements unfolded in full view. Vaccines were developed in record time. Yet trust, the social glue required to translate scientific breakthroughs into collective outcomes, began to erode. Anti vaccine movements grew. Conspiracy thinking gained mainstream oxygen. The information ecosystem became more polarized, more monetized, and more hostile.

From 2020 to 2025, the world felt unmoored.

The Crisis of Trust

This is the politics of our time. Uncertainty, volatility, and fatigue. In many Western societies, people have become apathetic toward politics or actively distrustful of government. But democracies cannot function on cynicism alone. They require a baseline of faith that institutions are of the people and for the people, even when those institutions fail.

That faith has been steadily weakened, not by 1 event, but by years of mismanagement, misrepresentation, and policy that often felt disconnected from daily reality. Liberal and conservative governments alike carry responsibility. The public was asked to accept disruptions, bailouts, wars, and austerity, while the visible winners of the era were increasingly concentrated among elites and megacorporations.

This is the terrain where political extremism grows. Both the far right and the far left have produced violence and intolerance in different contexts. But the far right, in particular, has translated cultural resentment into political machinery with alarming speed.

The symbols change. The rhetoric evolves. It is not always swastikas and hammers. Sometimes it is flags, memes, balaclavas, and stochastic violence. But the underlying pattern is familiar. A politics of fear, grievance, and scapegoating.

At the center sits a weakened international system. The UN, once an imperfect but stabilizing arena, is treated by many publics as irrelevant or compromised. International cooperation, already difficult, becomes harder when domestic politics is defined by distrust.

And yet, there are counter currents.

The Unclear Future and the Case for Hope

The global story is not only one of decline. In some places, illiberal movements are stalling or being reversed. Democratic coalitions have held in unexpected ways. New leaders have emerged with mandates built on pragmatism rather than spectacle. Societies are experimenting, sometimes painfully, with the question of how to rebuild civic trust.

The future is not written.

But what defines this period is that the world feels weakened, and people can sense it. Institutions that were built to manage global problems are struggling in a world where those problems are accelerating, and where publics are less willing to grant legitimacy.

That is why the question of the next 4 years, and the political forces shaping the United States, matters beyond America’s borders.

Because the world is not simply watching American politics. It is being shaped by it.

If the 21st century is going to move forward, it will require something that has become scarce.

A renewed belief that the future can be built deliberately, and together.

I suppose that means we will have to go back to the future.