Article Excerpt:
Donald Trump is returning, artificial intelligence is maturing, the planet is warming, and the global fertility rate is collapsing.
To look at any of these stories in isolation is to miss what they collectively represent: the unsteady, unpredictable emergence of a different world. Much that we took for granted over the last 50 years — from the climate to birthrates to political institutions — is breaking down; movements and technologies that seek to upend the next 50 years are breaking through.
Let’s begin with American politics. Trump is eight days from taking the oath of office for the second time, and America’s institutional storm walls are not, in 2025, what they were in 2017.
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Democracy does not die in darkness. It degrades through deal-making — a procession of pragmatic transactions between those who have power and those who want it or fear it. We have seen this termitic corruption consume democracies elsewhere, including Viktor Orban’s Hungary, which Trump and his allies cite as a model. Money and media make peace with the regime because to do otherwise is too costly. Once proud political parties become vehicles for the individual ambition they were designed to replace. I consider the range of outcomes for Trump’s second term to be stupefyingly vast, stretching from self-destructive incompetence to muddling incoherence to authoritarian consolidation. But the levees that narrowed the possibilities of his first term have been breached.