Politics returns. Arthur Schlessinger Jr’s. mid 1960’s referenced “Vital Center” is unwinding. A “Polanyi moment” risks approaching as social cohesion erodes and electorates embrace siloed discourse defining outsiders as enemies. Politics has become long on building cordon sanitaires against opponents, while being short on policy solutions and consensus.
By Jeffrey Sommers, Cosmin Gabriel Marian and Daniel Pop
The world system has exhibited concerning symptoms since the 2008 financial shock. Recently, we have seen their multiplication, intensity growing, and direction becoming unpredictable.
This suggests that we are either living through an interregnum on the way to yet another failed recycling of older ideas or at a critical juncture on the way to something new.
After the 20th century, it seemed that the world would no longer look this way. Francis Fukuyama, in 1989, published a famous essay in The National Interest, which announced “the end of history.” Soviet communism’s collapse was supposed to have demonstrated that liberalism was the evolutionary apex of political theory and practice. The future would be one of convergence in market economies. Government would be reduced chiefly to technocrats tweaking monetary supply to keep economies in equilibrium, with politics being the terrain on which interests competed and lobbied to allocate available resources to their preferred policy agendas.
“History” has long since laid waste to much of Fukuyama’s analysis. He was among the first to criticize the reductionist representations of his ideas. Later, he asserted that democratic socialism would have been the preferred end of history rather than the Hayekian liberalism prevailing in what Donald Rumsfeld termed the “New Europe” before the 2008 financial shock hit.
Since 2008, we have seen a great unravelling. Just as the mid-20th century certainties of historical materialism for the second and third worlds (as they were once called) unwound after 1968 and collapsed in the 1980s, so has confidence in political liberalism since. Political liberalism, however, has proved surprisingly resilient as a set of values in Western Europe and the U.S. It survived the excesses of Victorian-era laissez-faire, only to return with renewed vigor after the healing balm of Keynesianism and social democracy were applied to the wounds inflicted by two world wars and the Great Depression. The 1970s economic slowdown then saw liberalism in the UK nearly collapse again, as the Sex Pistols ironically sang “God Save the Queen” and – on a more serious note – “no future,” only to see London experience renewed confidence in political liberalism and something like a reprise of the Belle Epoque by the 1990s – which has retrospectively been viewed by historians and social analysts as a short-lived postmodern simulacrum of liberalism’s earlier form as financialization delivered growth that was both weaker and of shorter duration than during Belle Epoque.
Yet, over the past three decades, few seemed to recognize or tolerate concerns that economies and societies are dynamic entities in which contradictions can build up over time and lead to calls for substantial change. However, the consensus on the values of liberal democracy has been eroding. Precarity for the working and even middle classes in much of the Transatlantic world operates as a centrifuge: it opposes the gravitational pull of the liberal centre, leaving political spaces contested. Commitment to party eludes the left, the centre, and the right as electorates shift their allegiances across the political spectrum – in certain places with each successive election.
Rather than consensus or an End of History suspending politics, we see a dynamic yet increasingly paranoid system – this paranoid manner of politics edges ever closer to the global mainstream.
The 2008 crisis was a departure from what John F. Kennedy’s advisor, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., referenced in the mid-1960s as the “vital center.” Then came more anti-systemic challenges. Syriza in Greece rose to power in 2014 by opposing neoliberal austerity. In the spring of 2015, their finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis raised the possibility of Greece’s exit from the Eurozone. This would have amounted to real change, but the risks were massive. Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras, facing threats from the European Central Bank (ECB) to annihilate Greece’s economy, preferred surrender.
Tectonic economic forces continued to generate social and economic contradictions in Europe, with Europe’s right increasingly proposing fundamental policy changes on immigration, public services, job creation and public order.
This led to several European political leaders rejecting political liberalism. A year after “Eurocrats” curbed Syriza’s challenge, Farage’s Brexit movement mobilized neoliberalism’s losers and succeeded in the referendum, taking the UK out of the EU. The promised benefits failed to ensue; thus, Brexit turned into a cultural protest. Meanwhile, Marie Le Pen rose and fell again in France. Significant gains by the National Rally led President Macron this summer to make the riverboat gambler’s move and call for snap parliamentary elections, only to see Le Pen’s Rassemblement National’s hopes dashed on July 7th. In Germany, the right-wing AfD swept European Parliament elections in June 2024 along decidedly historical-geographic lines, questioning whether Germany ever re-united in 1990. Meanwhile, in Budapest, curiously, people queued up to vote in local and European elections not for liberals who oppose Orbán’s FIDESZ party but for a conservative party bereft of money that rapidly arose to challenge Orbán’s practices. Even if largely ineffectual in practice, rejection of the vital centre grows more potent by the disaffected.
In the Transatlantic space where political liberalism first arose in Western Europe, it arrived at a “Polanyi moment,” (rejection of market extremism) delivering the risk of political illiberalism beyond Hungary. Jaques Delors’ call for a social Europe in 1986, which was meant to square competitiveness with a social model led to ever-increasing economic liberalization and marginalizing ever more of West Europe’s working classes. In East Europe, EU integration and migration threatened the national aspirations of its populations previously shackled under communism.
Absent fixes that deliver prosperity and stability in West Europe, with governments in East Europe retaining national autonomy within democratic structures, one can expect greater volatility ahead.
The Democratic Party in the US agonized over replacing President Joe Biden, who resembled the early 1980s feeble gerontocracy of the Soviet Union, where illness plagued its leaders. The Democratic Party money spigot closed for the embattled president, who exited the race on July 21st. The weight of the party was thrown behind Kamala Harris, who like many Democrats, positions herself within the educated middle class, signally their habits by shopping for vinyl records and demonstrating her tasteful selection of jazz and soul classics with the press pre-positioned outside to capture the moment. In a parallel reality, the GOP’s convention spectacle in Milwaukee featured attendees in cult-like fashion, making Trump’s gauze-covered ear a fashion statement. Trump trotted out Kid Rock as the soundtrack to his convention, with professional wrestling icon Hulk Hogan giving a rousing call to “Fight”! Politics again is being contested on the terrain of culture where in an inversion of 20th century politics, see Democrats forfeit working-class support they courted in the 20th century to plutocrat Republicans presenting themselves as labor’s champion
The West created social democracy’s vital centre to disarm the political extremes of 1917-1945. Fukuyama’s “end of history” only restarted history. Economic liberalism crescendoed in the 2008 shock, whose echoes were heard as a Polanyi moment, begging the question, to quote the late British Eric Hobsbawm, if we have entered a new “Age of Extremes.”
But unlike the interwar years, no “ism” has arisen to replace the current order. Instead, we exist in that dangerous place once defined by Antonio Gramsci when he asserted that:
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Jeffrey Sommers is Visiting Professor at the Political Science Department, Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania; and Professor of Political Economy & Public Policy, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA.
Cosmin Gabriel Marian is Professor and Chair at the Political Science Department, Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania.
Daniel Pop is Lecturer at the Political Science Department, Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania.
