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Opinion
Updated ,first published
It’s the year 2026, and sometimes it feels as if we’re taking a nice leisurely walk through a Museum of Wretched Ideas.
Consider what’s happening in the United States. Tariffs raise prices and restrain economic growth, while the federal government embraces both Gilded Age corruption and a version of the spoils system.
A disturbing number of young people on the right are fascinated with fascism. An extraordinary 34 per cent of young people overall express a favourable view of communism, and young Americans are far more likely than their parents or grandparents to say that political violence is “sometimes OK”.
And hovering over American culture like a dark cloud is the rise of antisemitism on both the left and the right. Once again, ancient slanders are circulating through the culture.
Or consider what is happening abroad. Germany rearms to confront the Russian threat. Japan rearms to deter China. War rages in Europe and in the Middle East. Threats of territorial expansion haunt the world. Russia is trying to grab Ukraine. China continues to covet Taiwan. And the Trump administration, incredibly enough, has cast its expansionist eyes on Greenland.
When you step back and actually think about it, these trends are confounding. I mean, I can understand the temptation to return to some of the discredited ideas of the recent past, I guess, but to revive so many, all at once? And to do it so soon after those wretched ideas ravaged the world?
What is going on?
The answer lies in part in the interplay between two political sayings that are so oft-repeated that they have become cliches. When they should be top of mind, though, they seem to have lost their impact.
Here’s the first (and you can probably say it along with me), from George Santayana in 1905: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” We can argue about the precise historical parallels, but the echoes of the past are everywhere.
Here’s the second, from Winston Churchill in 1947: “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried.”
It is no coincidence that authoritarianism is once again appealing to people at a time when two things are happening at once. Liberal democracies are struggling to meet the needs of a substantial portion of their citizens, and entire generations have come of age with no living memory of the totalitarian horrors of the 20th century.
In other words, millions upon millions of people are enduring democracy as “the worst form of government” without the necessary balanced understanding (that citizens in the mid-20th century had gained through firsthand observation) of “except all those other forms that have been tried”.
So even fascism and communism — for some people, at least — are no longer avatars of atrocity, but dynamic alternatives to a sclerotic present. In their frustration, all too many people are attracted to the theoretical benefits of authoritarianism, and they don’t have the experience or the education to understand its actual and inevitable defects.
They do not understand the link between their fashionable and transgressive ideologies and the oceans of blood that fascism and communism spilled across the globe.
In this ahistorical context, even political violence can seem justified — perhaps even a bit daring and romantic — unless you’ve lived through, say, the riots that swept American cities in the 1960s, a cataclysm that was far more violent, deadly and prolonged than anything that happened in the United States in 2020.
In 2024, I taught an undergraduate class with a catchy title, “Why American Politics Went Insane.” At the risk of shortening a semester to a sentence, the devolution proceeded in three stages, from victory to separation to radicalisation.
When the Cold War ended, the United States, for the first time since the wars against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, faced no external challenges to its prosperity and power. We were, in the words of former French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine, the “hyperpower”.
I began with “The End of History,” to borrow a term from Francis Fukuyama’s misunderstood book, but I began with his prescient warning near the end:
If men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterised by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.
That is exactly what we are doing. We are struggling against each other. Some of us are struggling against democracy itself. America is the only nation out of 25 comparable countries in which a majority of people believe that their fellow citizens are morally bad. It should be no surprise, then, that negative partisanship (when you support your party primarily because of your disdain for its opponents) is a central factor in American politics.
If I taught the class over again, though, I’d add a fourth stage: amnesia. The problem isn’t just that we’re at each other’s throats; it’s that we’re turning to the worst of recent history’s alternative ideas in response.
It’s no coincidence that this is happening at a time when a generation of world leaders has no experience with world wars and rising millions of young people have no experience with real fascism and actual communism.
When experience ends, education has to begin. You can’t just know what the Holocaust was; you also have to understand the Holodomor. The phrase “the guns of August” should mean something to you, and when you see every great power press on the military gas — with no one pumping the brakes — that should trigger the most urgent concern.
Few things are demonstrating that what’s old is new again more than the rising tide of antisemitism. How many times must ancient lies be debunked? Must it happen every generation, for thousands of years?
So now we face a test. Can we educate ourselves away from disaster? Is there enough knowledge left to penetrate not just the minds, but also the hearts, of people who are deeply discontented?
A few weeks ago, a clip from the remarkable HBO series Band of Brothers went viral online. It was from the episode in which the boys of Easy Company discover a concentration camp. The impact is visceral. It’s impossible for a decent person to watch it without vowing to himself or herself, “Never again”.
I’m also reminded of a horrific scene at the opening of Netflix’s science fiction drama, 3 Body Problem, featuring a struggle session during China’s Cultural Revolution. Once again, the impact is visceral. The brutality is hard to watch.
Television isn’t enough. Books aren’t enough. The stories of fathers and mothers, grandmothers and grandfathers, aren’t enough. It will take everything — watching, reading, listening — to make us remember.
We have to know that the world as it is, with all its inefficiencies and injustices, is better than the world that was. I pray that we can learn that lesson before bitter experience teaches us once again that this imperfect democracy and this frustrating liberal world order are infinitely better than the violence and oppression — the deliberate starvation and slaughter of millions of men, women and children — of the none-too-distant past.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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David French is a columnist for The New York Times, writing about law, culture, religion, and armed conflict.From our partners
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