Faith in several key national institutions is at an all-time low in the U.S. To many voters, political outsiders are more compelling than experienced politicians. Anger toward elites is commonplace as income inequality rises. The social climate is growing lonelier and more frayed. Community life has suffered, worsened by internet use. We trust each other less, and we are more anxious and pessimistic about the future. 

For most of the 20th century, politics and even political parties were viewed as a home outside of home by many, fortified by strong social bases of support. Unions, churches, civic organizations and local community life made up the foundation. This rootedness created both manageable stability for the state and meaning for people.

These places of belonging have since declined, and so too has politics declined as a home. What has emerged in response is an untethered and distrusting public. Historically, transitional periods of great economic and social dislocation like ours are also times of heightened anti-political sentiments. Everyday people become detached from and even suspicious of their public representatives. 

What makes today’s situation remarkable is how forcefully anti-political feelings have risen across many different countries, all at the same time. Recent polling shows dissatisfaction with democracy across 12 leading high-income nations at a median of 64% — a record high. These trends extend far beyond the Western world. 2025 has seen unprecedented revolts in Asia motivated by a strong sense of disgust toward politicians and nepotism. Similar anger has fueled protests in Kenya, Morocco, Madagascar and elsewhere across Africa. 

Politicians and elites now find themselves “ruling the void,” in the words of political theorist Peter Mair.

In this day and age, anti-political feelings tend to manifest as a swarm. Usually online, movements rapidly take shape, organize themselves and then often dissipate as quickly as they appear. United by shared distrust of the political class, the 15-M protests in Spain, Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring were some of the first primarily internet-based, swarm-like movements in the 2010s. “Neither-nor” and “Down with the partycratic dictatorship” were common slogans of the indignados in Spain in 2011. 

More recently, the Yellow Vests formed in France in 2018 as a decentralized swarm against the state. Swarms have even toppled governments — as in Armenia in 2018, Bangladesh in 2024 and Nepal in 2025. Outsider candidates have also embraced the anti-political climate to enter power themselves, with mixed results.

In the past decade, the populist right has had more success capitalizing on the anti-political mood. But anti-politics is a raw public energy, not bound by any political ideology. It is redefining the entire political terrain. Is anti-politics, as The New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote in 2016, truly the “governing cancer of our time”? Or is it instead society’s antibody response against the state’s failures, a symptom of a deeper transformation?

While periods of anti-political fervor have taken hold just as strongly in the past, our situation today is unique. There are two historical moments that can help us understand what motivates the current frustration and sets it apart. Through this frame, we can better contextualize the U.S. case and also discern what future might come of it.

Anti-politics is a vehicle of discontentment, a real but disorganized spirit of our time, and its destination is an open question.

After World War I

While being held in an Italian prison by fascists in the 1930s, philosopher and politician Antonio Gramsci wrote that “at a certain point in their historical lives, social classes become detached from their traditional parties.” 

When ruling elites lose their consensus, he continued, they are “no longer ‘leading’ but only ‘dominant’ … this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies and no longer believe what they used to believe previously.”

This insight was the preface to an often-quoted adaptation of his words: Such times are when the “old is dying, and the new is struggling to be born.” This is also when a “great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” 

Gramsci was diagnosing a social climate that had emerged from World War I. The Great War produced homelessness and personal loss on an unprecedented scale. Centuries-old empires like those of the Habsburg Dynasty of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire collapsed. New states emerged from the rubble, and lives in the ones that survived were permanently altered. 

Because everything was so battered, the years between the two world wars were a time of intensely contested mass politics in Europe. People were searching for an identity and desperately sought answers on how to start anew. 

Many spoke openly against parliamentary democracy at the time. The democracies after World War I were hastily constructed and were unable to cope with the tide of popular demands. Rife with factionalism and historical grievances, they were inherently unstable.

Parliamentary democracy, therefore, became an easy whipping post of frustration. In “The Revolt of the Masses,” Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset in 1929 likened the anti-political mood of the masses to “mere negation.” The crisis of politics then was mainly channeled by two mass movements: communists and fascists. 

The fascists would ultimately be most successful in converting this anti-political mood into power. By the end of the 1930s, the crisis of politics had transformed the European continent. In 1938, only 13 European states were parliamentary democracies, down from 26 in 1920. 

The damage caused by radical mass parties provoked philosopher Simone Weil to write “On the Abolition of All Political Parties” in 1943. She concluded that the logical endpoint of every party is a monopoly on power at the expense of society. The ultimate goal of a party, she wrote, “is its own growth, without limit.”

The social climate remained distrustful and cynical well into World War II. In “World of Yesterday,” published in 1941, Austrian writer Stefan Zweig looked across Europe and found pessimism everywhere:

The sad irony of the period is that the public, who had grown so cynical of parliamentary politics, now found their frustrations once again exploited and their destiny decided for them, just like in 1914. They had no choice but to fall in line.

“Men went to the front, but not dreaming of becoming heroes,” Zweig wrote. “Nations and individuals felt they were the victims of either ordinary political folly or the power of an incomprehensible and malicious fate.”

Under The Iron Curtain

Unlike during the volatile interwar years, anti-political feelings were forced underground in Eastern Europe after World War II. The public was suppressed under a cult of power ruling like an impenetrable leviathan. In 1956, the Soviet state violently crushed the people’s uprising in Hungary. In 1968, it did the same in Czechoslovakia.

After that tragedy, it became clear to many that politics was a dead end. According to Czech dissident Václav Havel, even though no one believed in the state, one had to “behave as though they did or tolerate them in silence.” The mood was best captured by Polish dissident Jacek Kuroń: “What is to be done when nothing can be done?”

With all political possibilities for change seemingly closed, dissidents instead asked how life should be lived and shared with others. They turned their focus toward civil society, forming a counter-movement that Hungarian writer György Konrád called “anti-politics.”

Anti-politics was a social movement that sought to create a public space separate from the state. It went by many names: “second culture,” “parallel polis,” “politics from below.” As Havel put it, the dissident “has no desire for office and does not gather votes. He offers nothing and promises nothing.” 

Eastern European anti-politics was instead a social project: a moral critique of power rooted in everyday life. Havel famously coined its credo as “living within the truth.” Polish journalist Konstanty Gebert described living within the truth as setting up a “small, portable barricade between me and silence, submission, humiliation, shame.”

Seeing no political possibilities, dissidents reimagined how they should live with others. Their meetings were held underground, in apartments and secret work meetings. They stressed that their actions — even down to their language — were not political but pro-social. They took to creating a second culture through films, novels, poetry, music and other mediums as they explored their extreme conditions. Today, this is commonly looked back upon as the golden age for Eastern European literature and art. 

Ultimately, of course, the dissidents were victorious. They won by remaking the social sphere into something that could bludgeon the state. As the cracks accumulated, Soviet rule collapsed under the weight of its own illegitimacy. Some of the writers and heroes of the anti-political underground would go on to run for office themselves, despite originally promising otherwise. 

The Eastern European case demonstrates how anti-politics reinvents itself with each new set of material circumstances.

Today

For much of the 20th century, it was accepted that political parties had to be linked to civil society organizations for turnout and legitimacy. This made parties more receptive to public pressure; they had to show interest in bread-and-butter deliverables. Parties also relied on the public and its organizations for funding and leaders. 

Over the past few decades, however, civil society organizations have eroded. As a result, today’s parties struggle to draw sustained, mass participation like they did a century ago. The state is also not dominating public life so punitively, like under Soviet rule, that a second culture is needed.

The conditions are categorically different today. As the tense relationship between the state and everyday people is again being renegotiated, its expression will be unique to the 21st century. 

Today’s anti-political mood has been building for some time. In “Ruling the Void,” published in 2013, Mair documented the unusual convergence of trends across all Western democracies: depressed voter turnout, declining party membership, an increase in independents, wild electoral swings and low participation in civil society organizations. These trends have since deepened and calcified. 

Today, voters are less guided by partisan cues. In the U.S., a plurality does not identify with either major party. Consequently, the correlation between one’s class and voter preference has weakened. No longer do voting blocs fit clear schemas and predictive models like they used to. This is the new public that Mair likened to “the void.”

The reason for these changes is longstanding and structural, but the frustration has been intensified by the internet. As Martin Gurri documented in “The Revolt of the Public” in 2014, the internet has undermined the old, top-down mediators of information. Traditional media no longer exclusively sets the agenda and states cannot effectively rule by persuasion alone. Dominant narratives struggle to hold sway. In Gurri’s words, this means “every inch of political space is contested” in a horizontal, decentralized media environment. 

The explosion of information has led to a collapse of meaning, which has been replaced by pure negation. As philosopher Byung-Chul Han succinctly said in a 2022 interview in Noema, “The more we are confronted with information, the more our suspicion grows.” This is natural fuel for anti-politics. Gurri similarly argued that government failure now sets the public agenda. Since meaning can no longer be narrativized from the top down, states are unable to easily hide or excuse their failures like before. 

Rather than affirm the power center, the internet energizes the “world of the very small,” in the words of former President of Armenia and physicist Armen Sarkissian. He has likened the internet’s destabilizing effects to quantum mechanics: “You need just a couple of high-energized particles. They come and hit. And what you get is a chain reaction.” 

In January 2022, Sarkissian fell victim to this very phenomenon, only four years after an internet-based swarm had toppled the Armenian government. He claimed that the public had become obsessed with “all sorts of conspiracy theories and myths” which was starting to affect his health. In a surprise announcement, he resigned and claimed his presidential office did not have sufficient power to influence events. 

Yet, this idea that the internet would deepen the void was not a given. As Gurri writes, implicit in the century-long struggle for suffrage was the belief that “once all the people were inside the system, something magical would happen: the good society.” The internet was once viewed as merely an extension of this long march toward inclusion, one that would only better represent a general interest. 

The internet has instead highlighted the inertia and emptiness of political institutions. Today, with little left sacred, these institutions are readily filled by opportunistic outsiders and other political entrepreneurs, who are also shaping the public conversation. Some cynicism has always been part of democratic society, but it is now easily converted into actionable anger.

While the internet has deepened anti-political feelings, preexisting societal conditions laid the groundwork for this to happen. Since the 1970s, political parties across Western democracies have been hollowed out. Their organizations have grown more closed and insular, relying less and less on their constituents for decision-making and funds. The present-day anger, therefore, is not imagined but rooted in longstanding exclusion.

Mair and political scientist Richard S. Katz argued in their 2018 book that leading Western parties have undergone a process of “cartelization.” Whereas mass parties in the early 20th century were labor-intensive, bottom-up, reformist and relied on members for funding, cartel parties view politics as a profession, depend on a wealthy donor class, possess an in-group mentality and collude with each other to maintain their positions. Because cartel parties rely less on member recruitment, they instead outsource decision-making to institutional bureaucracies, courts and a web of organizations outside of government.

These changes naturally make everyday people feel invisible and secondary. Lacking a direct relationship to the public, political elites are more and more beholden to only themselves. Political parties’ main purpose then becomes simply maintaining their positions. As Mair noted, Western parties have “become agencies that govern rather than represent.” In this dynamic, the public’s role in democracy is largely relegated to being a spectator.

It’s unsurprising that the ballot box has become the natural vehicle for anti-politics. Votes can be sudden reminders to political elites that the public still controls some levers. In recent years, populist movements on both the right and left have tapped into anti-political sentiments to unseat the traditionally dominant parties in Western Europe and beyond. In fact, 2024 was the worst year for incumbents on record. In developed countries that held elections, every single governing party lost vote share.

The American Case

Modern U.S. history tells a decades-long story of how anti-politics takes root. In the late 1960s, the public grew distrustful and receded while political parties became more insular to protect themselves.

Sometimes called “the last innocent year,” 1964 was the high point of American institutional trust at 77%, per Gallup polling. Both the failed Vietnam War and corruption scandals at home — such as Watergate and the findings of the Church Committee on CIA abuses — deeply damaged public faith in the following years. By 1979, it had plummeted to 29%. 

The public responded to the diminishing prospects of politics by turning inward. The 1970s were the “Me Decade,” as journalist Tom Wolfe put it. Former hotbeds of student activism calmed. Relatively rare during the previous decade, self-help books started to fill the bestseller lists. Concepts like “burnout” appeared in psychological journals for the first time. As Christopher Lasch wrote of the period, a “therapeutic sensibility” was taking over America. No longer were Americans viewing politics as a place to actualize their dreams. 

Instead, they looked elsewhere. What was once political became personal. Sociologist Nina Eliasoph has documented how this transformation affected even the language of everyday people. In her field studies during the 1980s, she was surprised to find how often words like “doable” and “personal” overlapped with “non-political,” whereas “not doable” was associated with “away from home” or “political.” By the end of the 20th century, this passive sensibility was clear at the ballot box. In the 1996 presidential election, voter turnout dropped to a historic low.

This was not without reason. As the scandals of the 1970s unraveled, both the Republican and Democratic parties reorganized themselves away from the public, justifying this shift under the guise of stability. The public was deemed simply too volatile and emotional to decide politics now.

This gave rise to the so-called “invisible primary” or “money primary”: the primary before the primary, where a candidate is primed for the public by investors and insider allies. It was a turning point in how parties procured funds. In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled in Buckley v. Valeo that election expenditures count as “free speech,” making dark campaign money legally permissible. Then in 1982, the Hunt Commission codified preselected superdelegates as part of the Democratic primary process, further gating party elites from the public.

As the Democrats restructured themselves, Republicans strategized around the rising number of non-voters. In 1977, they filibustered to irrelevance President Jimmy Carter’s bill to make voter registration easier. As Pat Buchanan, the future White House communications director for President Reagan, put it: The “busing of economic parasites and political illiterates” to the polls would mean the end of the insurgent New Right.

Consultants and pollsters instead became a leading group within the party apparatus, which now lacked strong civil society roots. According to political scientist Costas Panagopoulos, media mentions of political consultancy increased 13-fold from 1979 to 1985. The maintenance of the party cartel became an end in itself for those employed by it, and politics consequently became the art of maintaining this closed-off world.  

The result was the development of a “permanent campaign,” as political strategist Sidney Blumenthal famously put it in 1980. The ballooning costs of the permanent campaign were simply too high to allow for any outsiders. In many cases, being an incumbent was the ticket to virtually automatic victories. Once you entered the party system, you stayed. As a result, the U.S. has effectively become a gerontocracy.

Despite both political parties building decades-old moats around themselves, they are still under siege today. In the 21st century, longstanding distrust has hardened into a generalized opposition supercharged by the internet. As if awakened from dormancy, the once-passive public has made its power felt. Both Barack Obama and Donald Trump were victorious despite not being chosen by the invisible primary.

Yet contemporary anti-politics presents us with a glaring contradiction, both in the U.S. and elsewhere. While outsiders tap into the anti-establishment mood to win votes, they struggle to maintain legitimacy once they enter power themselves. This is because anti-politics today is rarely expressed as a positive program. 
Since there is no clear majority opinion driving it other than general cynicism, what we have instead is “unpopular populism.” And as is so often the case, electing a new government does not fundamentally redress the tension; it just briefly pauses it.

A General Opposition

More than half a century ago, American political theorist Robert Dahl speculated that the political future might be motivated by a new principle: “an opposition to the democratic leviathan itself.” To the average alienated citizen, the state would become “remote, distant, and impersonal.” Dahl, in many ways, was right.

Today’s political life is dominated by a general discontentment with representation itself. But this is closer to unveiling the true reality of politics than one might assume. 

One cannot be nostalgic about past eras of mass politics, as if they had been actually representative. On the contrary, those eras obscured the actual relationship between the state and the public. Back then, after all, powerful political machines relied on bosses in civil society organizations to churn out votes. 

This past setup was marginally more representative and sometimes even delivered results, but the American public rejected it in the 1970s precisely because it exposed itself as corrupt. The internet has now converted this longstanding cynicism into raw discontentment. The state’s naked self-interest is so clearly out in the open now, seen for what it is. 

Messy as it may be, what has been broken apart cannot be put back together. When anti-politics is the prevailing mood, the most relevant division becomes up versus down, insiders versus outsiders. What is most resented by people is being made invisible. 

Any successful future movement will have to position itself as both part of the public and prove it can deliver pro-social, material results. A healthier civil society has to be rebuilt from the bottom up. Despite lacking coherence, anti-politics is effectively the real movement: a symptom of a deep fissure that can no longer be ignored.

The post A New Anti-Political Fervor appeared first on NOEMA.

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The post Noema’s Top Artwork Of 2025 appeared first on NOEMA.

The Last Days Of Social Media

Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion.

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A Third Path For AI Beyond The US-China Binary

What if the future of AI isn’t defined by Washington or Beijing, but by improvisation elsewhere?

by Dang Nguyen

Why Science Hasn’t Solved Consciousness (Yet)

To understand life, we must stop treating organisms like machines and minds like code.

by Adam Frank

The Unseen Fury Of Solar Storms

Lurking in every space weather forecaster’s mind is the hypothetical big one, a solar storm so huge it could bring our networked, planetary civilization to its knees.

by Henry Wismayer

From Statecraft To Soulcraft

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by Alexandre Lefebvre

The Languages Lost To Climate Change

Climate catastrophes and biodiversity loss are endangering languages across the globe.

by Julia Webster Ayuso

The Shrouded, Sinister History Of The Bulldozer

From India to the Amazon to Israel, bulldozers have left a path of destruction that offers a cautionary tale for how technology without safeguards can be misused.

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The Moral Authority Of Animals

For millennia before we showed up on the scene, social animals — those living in societies and cooperating for survival — had been creating cultures imbued with ethics.

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Welcome To The New Warring States

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Signs Of Life In A Desert Of Death

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The post Noema’s Top 10 Reads Of 2025 appeared first on NOEMA.

In the last Noema roundup, we focused on how the benefits of productivity growth and wealth creation fostered by AI can be spread widely through the idea of universal basic capital, where everyone, not just the top 10%, has a share in “owning the robots.” The aim is not just to constrain the concentration of wealth at the top, but to build it from below.

The corollary in political life is to balance the power of special interests with the time, money and organizational capacity to dominate electoral democracy at the expense of the average person. This can be done by inviting the broader civil society into governance through new mediating institutions that empower citizen engagement from below as a complement to representative government.

Indeed, as politics at the national level are paralyzed by zero-sum partisan combat or even moving in an authoritarian direction, engaged citizens across the democratic world, in cities, provinces and states, are coming together to forge solutions to the issues that matter most to them, closest to home.

In Jim Fishkin’s new book, “Can Deliberation Cure The Ills of Democracy?,” the pioneering practitioner of deliberative polling surveys the whole array of such practices from citizens’ assemblies to policy juries and independent citizen reviews of ballot measures that are taking place from Brazil to Europe to the U.S. state of Oregon.

The aim in each endeavor is to convene a gathering of citizens that is indicative of the body politic as a whole to consider issues outside the fever of the electoral arena. In those nonpartisan “islands of goodwill,” knowledgeable experts provide verified information. Pro and con positions are presented, as in a jury trial. On that informed basis, citizens deliberate choices and seek consensus to guide policymakers. Fishkin’s experience over 30 years consistently demonstrates how the polarization sparked by the partisan rancor of electoral competition dissipates and how common ground is found through structured deliberation.

The limitation of most of these efforts is that they are advisory and not binding on the powers that be. In recent years, that is beginning to change as citizen-driven deliberative practices are being integrated into political systems through institutions that foster “government with the people,” which directly impacts policy choices.

For example, in Mongolia, of all places, the law requires a deliberative poll by citizens before any proposed change in the constitution can take place.

While Europe is often castigated as being behind in economic innovation, it is often ahead in innovations of democratic governance.

In Ostbelgien, the German-speaking part of Belgium, a permanent citizens’ assembly with rotating participation has been established that convenes to address a particular issue of general public concern. Fifteen hundred residents are invited annually to join through a process of random solicitation, from which 30 are chosen. Meeting on weekends over several months, their recommendations are forwarded to the parliament, which is required to consider how to enact them. This process has led to binding policies such as banning cell phones in middle schools and the provision of government funding to recruit young people into the nursing profession, where there is a shortage.

Increasingly, digital tools are enabling deliberations at scale.

One compelling example is Decidim Barcelona. Launched in 2015, it is the official open-source digital platform for citizen participation in the Catalan capital that allows residents to propose, debate and vote on city-related issues. Over the last decade, it has matured into what is essentially the “soft infrastructure” of “smart city” governance.

On the Decidim platform, citizens can weigh in on city government proposals, including strategic plans involving traffic, tourism, housing and infrastructure, as well as submit their own proposals. If those proposals attain a designated threshold of support by others on the platform, they will become a deliberative case. When citizens recommend actionable items arising from that process, city officials must provide an answer of acceptance, amendment or rejection, along with the reason for that decision. The platform has a self-monitoring function that reports on the follow-through implementation of policy decisions.

From now until 2027, the Decidim process will determine how and in which districts, and for which projects, 30 million euros ($34 million) of the city budget will be spent.

On the other side of the world, in Taiwan, another participatory platform for citizen engagement, vTaiwan, was also set up in 2015. Launched by the island’s first Digital Minister, Audrey Tang, it is an online platform that enables thousands of participants to simultaneously discuss an issue and reach a rough consensus.

An AI sorting tool visually tracks the migration of divergent views toward convergence during deliberative sessions when participants are fully informed and exposed to others’ views. Topics tackled have ranged from whether Uber should operate in Taipei to same-sex marriage. So far, the platform has facilitated deliberations on 26 national issues, with more than 80% leading to government action.

The latest iteration of such AI-assisted deliberation is the introduction of Engaged California (EC), which we wrote about in Noema when it launched in February. The Berggruen Institute was closely involved in moving it forward. Set up within the state’s Office of Data and Innovation, it is a three-way tool with a three-step process.

EC enables policymakers and administrators to listen at scale to average citizens outside of election cycles and respond; it invites citizens to directly voice their concerns and proposals on an ongoing basis; and it is a platform for Californians from all walks of life to interact with each other to find common ground.

The engagement process first invites a wide range of citizens to sign up for deliberation on a given issue and offer proposals that set the agenda for addressing the problem. AI will then sort through those thousands of comments and organize them thematically into discussion areas. The online participants, with access to expert advice and relevant information, then weigh the proposals among each other, refining and ranking actionable items for the government to enact. The AI tool visually displays, in the form of data points, where consensus views congregate.

Just last week, the first use case of EC, focusing on recovery from the firestorms earlier this year in Altadena and Pacific Palisades, was completed.

The process whittled down thousands of comments from the affected residents into 19 categories, from which participants prioritized their top five actionable items, which included burying power lines underground, urgently revamping the water supply infrastructure in potential burn areas and streamlining emergency communications. Coordinated by the Governor’s office, the relevant agencies at the state, county and city levels then specified the immediate and long-range remedial government action being taken in response to each of the citizens’ recommendations.

Having proven itself, the Engaged California project is now in the process of being institutionalized as a regular feature of governance in the state alongside elections and the direct democracy of the citizens’ ballot initiative, the recall and the referendum.

As these practices proliferate, a new governing ecosystem is evolving in which the new mediating institutions serve as a counterweight to what the political scientist Robert Dahl called the competitive “polyarchy” of political elites who predominantly hold sway in electoral contests.

The post A New Governing Ecosystem Is Evolving appeared first on NOEMA.

“Many of us know that there could be an assault at a subway station, or that a young guy could be sitting alone in the back seat of a bus, and suddenly two or three people with an Arab background come in and rip him apart,” Frederiksen, who leads the left-leaning Social Democratic party, said in September.

Her comments have upset many in progressive circles and especially the many now second- and third-generation Danish citizens of Arab descent, who have felt targeted and estranged from their native country as a result. But the statement seemed deliberately aimed at cementing the party’s position as tough on immigration, ahead of next year’s general elections.

In Denmark, where non-Western immigrants and their descendants comprise some 10% of its 6 million people, the issue of immigration was once a clear dividing line between left and right on the political spectrum. Today, being tough on newcomers is a cornerstone of political consensus. Over the past two decades, successive governments have tightened asylum laws, slashed welfare benefits for immigrants and pursued a zero-asylum policy. With that last goal nearly achieved — Denmark granted asylum to only 860 asylum seekers in 2024 — the supposedly center-left-leaning government is now promising even stricter rules.

It’s not only Denmark. Countries across the old continent are grappling with a surge of populist right-wing parties, and more established parties seem to be trying to draw lessons from the Danish experience. The U.K. home secretary recently sent officials to Denmark to study its border control and asylum policies. Denmark’s strict rules on family reunions and temporary refugee stays are among the policies under review, the Guardian reports. While “getting to Denmark,” as coined by political scientist Francis Fukuyama, may once have been considered the El Dorado of good governance, is this really where we all want to go?

The Seeds Of Anti-Elitism

In 1987, Denmark won its first Oscar with “Babette’s Feast,” an adaptation of a famous tale by Karen Blixen about a political refugee from France. Villagers greet Babette’s arrival in Denmark with sometimes subtle presumptions and whispered speculations. When, many years later, she wins the lottery, she throws an opulent banquet for the community with turtle soup, blinis crowned with caviar, and quail and foie gras. The villagers make a pact to reluctantly eat the foreign food, but take no pleasure in it.

The film’s interrogation of the parochialism of a small community and its fears toward the foreign and unfamiliar was a sign of the times, arriving at a moment when anti-immigration sentiments had started to seep into Danish politics. The right-wing Progress Party — born in the 1970s as a libertarian protest party against high taxes — had by the 1980s redirected much of its energy toward opposing Muslim immigration.

Its leader claimed that Turkish guest workers, invited during the economic boom of the 1960s, along with later refugees from Iran and Iraq, were eroding the Danish welfare state from within. Central to this critique was the 1983 Aliens Act — then the most liberal immigration law in Europe — that extended generous rights to individuals seeking asylum and family reunification. Even though immigrants from Muslim-majority countries were well under 2% of the population, the so-called party of progress cast such immigration as not just a threat to Danish national identity, but as something essentially incompatible with it. In doing so, the Progress Party attracted voters from smaller rural communities who were estranged from the educated elites of the capital, not entirely unlike the insular community depicted in “Babette’s Feast.”

Still, anti-immigration sentiments remained on the political fringes of the extreme far-right. Anti-immigration sentiments were fiercely rejected in remarks by politicians across the political spectrum throughout the 1980s and ‘90s. In a famous speech, then-Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, a Social Democrat, declared that the Progress Party would never become “stuerent,” literally “clean for the living room,” an idiom signaling the party’s inherent disreputability as political partners. For established parties, the Progress Party and its successor, the Danish People’s Party, were to be kept at arm’s length, eternally excluded from what was considered normal politics.

But that is a bygone era.

In 2001, Anders Fogh Rasmussen made a surprising but calculated decision to accept the Danish People’s Party’s outside support for his center-right minority government in order to gain a long-awaited premiership. With its 22 seats, the People’s Party now effectively had veto and bargaining power over government policy, notably on assimilation and immigration, and none of the responsibilities.

The depth of that influence was dramatized in an episode of the popular Danish television series “Borgen,” with an apt Machiavellian episode title, “The Art of the Possible.” The series follows a fictional prime minister who reluctantly adopts increasingly tighter immigration laws to secure her government’s survival and retain the outside support of the populist party. Throughout the series, the issue of immigration served as a prism for illuminating left-right divisions in Danish politics at the time and highlighting how a relatively small far-right party could exert disproportionate influence over a single topic.

In real life, Rasmussen’s early aughts government similarly adopted ever-tighter immigration and asylum laws, responding to the demands from the Danish People’s Party and a growing popular concern over what many on the right viewed as the country’s liberal family reunification laws. These reunification laws enabled a “chain” effect on migration, allowing the arrival and permanent settlement of relatives from non-Western countries who gained access to free healthcare, schools and universities, among other benefits of the Danish welfare state. Sometimes, proponents suggested, these family reunifications even occurred through forced or arranged marriages.

In 2001, a new “Ministry for Integration” was established to centralize political control over a domain that was no longer considered a peripheral social issue but one that had been elevated to the very center of the government’s agenda. The following year, the government passed new laws as part of a so-called “immigration package.” Among their new mandates were requiring foreign spouses to be at least 24 years old before applying for family reunification, longer reunification waiting periods, married couples needing to demonstrate ties to Denmark that were stronger than any other country, to pass a language proficiency test, and the payment of as much as $12,000 in today’s dollars for any future welfare expenditures.

Gradually, Rasmussen and his right-wing coalition grew less hesitant about using their new anti-immigration rhetoric and policies. Polls continuously showed that about half the population viewed immigration as a serious threat to Danish culture and throughout the aughts and the early 2010s, successive governments proposed increasingly harsher assimilation and migration policies, culminating in the controversial minister for integration, Inger Støjberg, posing by a birthday cake in her office to celebrate the government’s 50th tightening of immigration legislation.

At the border, officers gave increasingly more scrutiny to immigrants from non-Western countries. Denmark sharpened its external controls on immigration, using its long-standing opt-out from European Union asylum cooperation to limit the number of asylum seekers and reduce immigration incentives.

As Syrians were actively fleeing war and the Assad regime at the end of 2015 and in early 2016, Denmark partially closed its southern border with Germany and passed a new law that enabled border officials to confiscate jewelry and other valuables from refugees, in order to allegedly cover the cost of their asylum, and perhaps more importantly, to also deter Syrian asylum seekers from Denmark.

The Danish government ran ads in Arab-language newspapers, urging potential immigrants to reconsider Denmark as a destination and warning that social benefits had been halved, family reunification suspended and permanent residency contingent on mastering the Danish language.

In the span of about 15 years, what may have begun as concessions to a far-right support party had hardened into a governing consensus on the right and center-right of the political spectrum. More than 50 laws had been passed to tighten immigration, but in polling voters from these parties continued to ask for ever stricter laws and ranked immigration as one of their top three priorities.

The Mirror & The Wall

Denmark’s drastic measures drew heavy criticism throughout the aughts and 2010s from liberal and left-wing parties in parliament, as well as internationally from rights groups, United Nations agencies and even, notably, Denmark’s own neighbors. Though Germany and Sweden ostensibly have a similar political culture to Denmark, as mature democracies with a common history, these two neighboring countries effectively provided a contrasting mirror image to the Danes, displaying the progressive and solidaristic posture that outside observers typically expect from wealthy Northern European welfare states.

Unlike Denmark, in 2015, Germany was squarely at the forefront of Europe’s refugee crisis after the fallout of the so-called “Arab Spring” and the Syrian Civil War. In a decision unmatched across the continent, Germany’s government waived its asylum rules and welcomed more than a million refugees. Then-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s famous exhortation “Wir schaffen das” (“We can do this”) resonated among Europeans as a particular exemplar of how a political leader could guide her fellow citizens, given the country’s capacity and moral imperative to welcome refugees.

In the fall of 2015, another event emerged as a comparative foil to Denmark’s immigration policies. Public broadcasters invited Danish and Swedish politicians from across the political spectrum to a debate on immigration and refugee policy, broadcast live on national television.

It was remarkable to witness representatives of these two adjacent Nordic countries understanding each other while speaking in their respective languages — with no live translation or interpreter — and yet portraying such diametrically opposite views on immigration. Swedish politicians on the left and the right recalled their country’s historic role in welcoming refugees fleeing Nazism, Stalinism and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. Then these politicians argued that Denmark’s policies were “cynical” and “racist,” comparing Denmark’s public discourse around Muslims to Nazi Germany’s 1938 rhetoric on Jews. Meanwhile, Danish politicians dismissed Sweden’s posture as naïve and disingenuous. They argued that Swedish media and policymakers embraced political correctness to the point of self-censorship and had therefore limited coverage of the country’s disastrous efforts at multicultural assimilation.

In Denmark in 2015, the Social Democratic Party, once the most representative in the nation, could — again — not form a new government. At the ballot box, the Danish People’s Party had become the second largest party in parliament with roughly 22% of the vote.

Then-party leader Helle Thorning-Schmidt resigned, and the Social Democratic party entered a period of introspection. The party needed to reinvent itself. But how? Long regarded as the architects and guardians of the Danish welfare state, Social Democrats had historically been defenders of poorer, working-class people. But those were the very people among whom the Social Democrats had steadily lost political ground. In rural and poor areas, voters were turning to the far right.

Some critics argued that Social Democrats had lost touch with the everyday concerns and cultural values of ordinary Danes and were now synonymous with the cosmopolitan elite of Copenhagen. Ordinary Danes, these critics suggested, were preoccupied particularly with immigrants coming from Muslim countries and their lack of assimilation. These Danes wanted to preserve the nation’s renowned welfare state but restrict its benefits to insiders — what political scientists today call “welfare chauvinism.” To regain power, pundits argued that the Social Democrats would have to platform the concerns of everyday Danes and reinvent themselves. That meant embracing a new platform of law-and-order, anti-immigration and anti-establishment policies typically associated with far-right parties.

Most notably, the Social Democrats endorsed a “paradigm shift” in Denmark’s migration and integration approach — from viewing refugees and asylum seekers as future citizens who could be permanently integrated into Danish society, to now temporary residents by default, who could be repatriated as soon as their home countries were considered safe.

The Social Democratic Party’s transformation proved highly successful. In 2019, the party returned to power under Mette Frederiksen, who quickly advanced a series of restrictive asylum and migration measures, openly pursuing a goal of zero asylum seekers. Asylum seekers could now be sent to another country for processing; rejected asylum seekers were sent to often newly expanded detention facilities to await deportation. Benefits were also cut, and family reunification laws tightened again by applying a ceiling on the maximum number of reunifications. Denmark also dropped its U.N. quotas for refugees to 200 a year, and revoked the temporary protected status for some Syrian refugees.

With such measures, Social Democrats transformed themselves from a center-left party into something farther to the right, absorbing much of the far right’s immigration platform and, to a certain extent, what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu might call its cultural habitus. Frederiksen, active on social media, posts images of herself polishing her own windows or eating simple open-faced sandwiches. In her yearly televised New Year’s address, copies of bestselling novels around social issues were prominently displayed in the window beside her. Such novels have reignited debates about the lack of class mobility and steep societal divisions between urban and rural Denmark.

For the Social Democrats, being tough on immigration is a way to signal their ties to everyday Danes and their efforts to take seriously the anxieties of those who feel left behind by a changing world. Social Democrats have reclaimed voters from the Danish People’s Party and repositioned themselves as guardians of the welfare state. Yet the needle keeps moving — and further rightward.

Last year, the Social Democrats’ shadow minister for immigration and integration, Frederik Vad, delivered an influential speech in parliament that he called “the third realization.”  In this speech, Vad warned of a fifth column of Danish citizens with Muslim backgrounds who were allegedly “undermining Danish values from within.” In the subsequent public debate, a controversial book by the French anthropologist Florence Bergeaud-Blackler about Islamist networks in France was used to back up this claim. Vad, for example, argued that Muslims working in public institutions like schools, libraries and hospitals should be scrutinized for potentially promoting Islamist values, and citizenship rights should be redefined to include aspects of loyalty and tilhørsforhold, or “belonging” to Danish society by adhering to its values and culture.   

Seeing their agenda adopted once again by the Social Democrats, the far-right People’s Party has quickly advanced its own, even more radical idea of “remigration” as a new frontline in Denmark’s migration debate.

The concept of remigration originates in the extreme ethno-nationalist Identitarian movement in France and is now banned by the French government. In Denmark, the far-right People’s Party advocates a remigration scheme that includes reviewing and potentially revoking Danish citizenship granted to migrants from Muslim‑majority countries over the past 20 years, followed by their forced mass deportation.

In support of remigration, the People’s Party has also proposed measures that, in the party’s own words, make it “close to impossible to live an Islamic lifestyle in Denmark.” Such steps include prohibiting halal foods in schools, banning sharia-based arbitration and potentially shutting down Muslim schools and cultural centers if they do not adhere to “Danish values.”

Ultimately, such targeted restrictions are meant to pressure Danish citizens of Muslim faith to lower their heads or be forced out. For now, remigration remains the official policy only of the People’s Party, though members of the center-right Conservative Party have expressed openness to discussing the idea.

Some experts, like Mira S. Skadegaard, a university professor who teaches about minority rights, have called remigration a modern form of ethnic cleansing against Muslim citizens in Denmark. Liberal party leader Martin Lidegaard recently denounced the Danish People’s Party’s remigration proposal as “wild, extremist, and un-Danish,” vowing to fight it both politically and legally. Denmark’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, similarly warned in an interview in November that such a plan hitches the right-wing bloc to a wagon they will regret; he has urged more voices to speak out against it. Meanwhile, Kristian Madsen, now editor-in-chief of the A4 news outlet and a former speechwriter for the ex-Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, argues that remigration is a “disgusting” concept, and in a recent column, he called out today’s Social Democrats for sharing in the People’s Party premise that Muslims are unwanted in Denmark.

All this raises the question: How far right will — or can — this go?

Horseshoe Politics & Its Discontents

The mainstreaming of far-right positions that started two decades ago in Denmark is no longer an aberration, even in erstwhile strong liberal and open democracies like Sweden and Germany — and even in the U.S., it seems. The far-right Sweden Democrats Party, hitherto shunned by the rest of the parties in its parliament, has provided external support to help the conservative minority government stay in power for the last few years, much like the Danish People’s Party did at the beginning of this century. Their rise can be directly correlated to rising crime in Sweden’s degraded suburbia.

Similarly, in neighboring Germany, the far right and xenophobic Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has witnessed a seemingly unstoppable rise in the polls. Earlier this year, another taboo was shattered when Germany’s Christian Democrats passed a parliamentary vote on citizenship rules and border controls with the support of the AfD, thus cracking the “firewall” against it that had endured until then.

It is no exaggeration to claim that in this sphere, Denmark was the canary in the coalmine — predating such developments elsewhere in Europe and the United States by multiple political cycles or even a generation. The question is, now, what this trajectory suggests about the state of democratic politics, of its normative underpinnings and where things might go in Denmark — and beyond — from here.

Compare, for example, the political consensus that has consolidated in Denmark around restricting immigration with that of a country like Italy, which has long been at the forefront of the fight against illegal immigration due to its geographic position in the middle of the Mediterranean.

Italians generally trace their experience with modern immigration back to Aug. 8, 1991, when Vlora, the first large boatload carrying 20,000 Albanian migrants, docked in the Southern port of Bari, Italy. Since then, immigration has easily been the most divisive and polarizing issue of Italy’s identity politics. Subsequent Italian right-wing governments have attempted various plans and agreements that were later adopted by the rest of Europe. In 2008, Italy and Libya signed a “Friendship Treaty” that included an apology for Italy’s prior colonialism and a $5 billion infrastructure fund in exchange for the repatriation of immigrants. The deal showcased the same transactional logic — immigrant repatriation in exchange for hefty payments to an autocratic regime — perfected nearly a decade later in a deal between the European Union and Turkey after the 2015 refugee crisis.

In 2022, Italy’s far-right party won government power for the first time. Since then, Italy’s far-right government has successfully pushed Europe to adopt similar accords from Tunisia to Egypt. Today, Rome operates an extra-territorial asylum processing center in Albania. In a social media exchange with one of the authors of this article, the Albanian philosopher Lea Ypi referred to this practice as “fascist humanitarianism.”

Remarkably, the discursive practices and policy positions of a Scandinavian Social Democratic-led government, traditionally known for its progressivism and solidarity, closely align with those of far-right governments, such as Italy’s. Copenhagen has teamed up with Rome to question the reach of the European Court of Human Rights, which has already ruled against some of Denmark’s immigration policies, and to call for a renationalization of judicial powers to rein in the Court’s reach and “make political decisions in our own democracies.” And Denmark was the first country in Europe to transfer asylum seekers to countries outside the EU for processing (that policy has since been put on hold).

References to Muslim migrants as threats are now used in Italian far-right political slogans,  but they were pioneered by the Danish far-right three decades ago and are now a staple of Denmark’s political conversation, even by left-leaning parties such as the Social Democrats. In the jargon of political scientists, this is a textbook example of the horseshoe theory, applied on a transnational scale.

 When in power, center-left governments in Italy also pursued severely restrictive immigration policies, much like the Biden administration in the United States was responsible for a volume of deportations comparable to that of the first Trump administration. Yet Europe’s center-left forces have generally struggled to reconcile their political narrative with their political reality. Instead, they continue their old efforts to rebuild consensus with other left-leaning political goals and groups, while attempting to ignore their discomfort with the so-called paradigm shift — from assimilation to repatriation — of Denmark’s supposedly center-left Social Democrats. As a result of such mixed messaging, Europe’s center-left coalitions have been routinely punished at the polls.

Today’s Danish experience, however, is very different, and it stands as an outlier. That’s because, according to research by political economist Laurenz Guenther, the public in virtually all European countries is consistently more culturally conservative than its respective political establishment and to the right of mainstream politicians on issues such as immigration and criminal justice. But the Danish Social Democrat Party’s transformation has meant that its positions on immigration and criminal justice are aligned with the public preferences of a slight majority of voters on non-Western immigration.

On the face of it, this alignment might make Denmark a virtuous paragon for representative democracy. But in practice, however, the Danish case shows a worrying involution of democratic politics. In their upcoming book “What Europeans Think About Immigration and Why it Matters,” political scientists Andrew Geddes and James Dennison show how the public tends to interpret immigration through emotional, cultural and selective narratives to make sense of it. Public perception of a need for more law and order tends to result in more radical policies to address this need — a dynamic that, in turn, has fueled the rise of anti-immigration movements on the right.

Of course, not everyone in Denmark is against immigration from non-Western countries. There is strong opposition from some progressive liberal circles in urban areas and from civil rights non-governmental organizations working with immigrant communities, as well as from younger generations.  This was also evident in the upset municipal election result in Copenhagen last month, where the Social Democrats lost power for the first time in 122 years to a Green Left candidate. But perhaps the most surprising voices critical of the government’s immigration policy are among the business community, which is typically more politically conservative and right-wing.

Confederation of Danish Industries CEO Lars Sandahl Sørensen and the Danish Chamber of Commerce’s Executive Director Brian Mikkelsen have consistently argued for a more open immigration policy to help address the country’s aging population and overheated labor market. With unemployment rates as low as 2.6%, Denmark needs foreign labor to supplement virtually all sectors, private and public. Unable to ignore these voices, the government has taken some targeted measures to make it easier for employers to sponsor non-EU skilled worker permits.

Similarly, steps have been taken to attract international students, particularly in science, math and technology. Still, the tough-on-immigration policy and suspicion toward immigrants from non-Western countries remain intact. In the now-infamous Politiken interview, the prime minister scolded a Danish university for having too many students from Bangladesh: “Last year, one in six new master’s students,” she quipped, “was from Bangladesh. I mean, when you say that sentence, you think it’s a lie.” 

When viewed in this light, the Danish case is less a model than a warning about what happens to democratic politics when politicians from the center and center-left move to the right to regain or retain power, rather than deliberating, informing and modeling responsibility and respect. What were once signature proposals in the far-right playbook are now mainstream policies, and — once effectuated by Denmark’s highly functional bureaucratic state — these proposals have a ripple effect on Danish society that has resulted in what sociologist Brooke Harrington terms “performative xenophobia.” Stringent migration laws and policy proposals signal toughness and Danish belonging, while conversely, those who criticize such proposals are perceived as naïve or disloyal to the homeland.

While immigration seems poised to dominate the upcoming election cycle’s discourse, as Denmark’s prime minister predicted, the broad public consensus around the current hardline posture means election results, paradoxically, are less likely to make a difference in determining Denmark’s stance on the subject.

The Danish experience offers a cautionary tale for other countries in Europe and beyond. Over the past two decades, adopting elements of the far-right agenda has not only made its policy propositions more acceptable and seemingly mainstream; it has created space for new demands from the far right, radicalized its discourse and increasingly normalized its worldview. If this is the final destination of “getting to Denmark,” it might not be worth the trip.

The post Inside Denmark’s Hardline Immigration Experiment appeared first on NOEMA.

As trust in the media declines in countries around the world, people are struggling to agree on basic facts, including the outcomes of elections. Increasingly, they are turning away from traditional media sources.

Meanwhile, purveyors of lies and hate are growing their influence across the globe, using information as a weapon to subvert liberal democracy and destabilize open societies. World leaders including Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán have systematically demonized the media, weakened faith in democratic institutions, fueled tribal polarization and undermined trust in the truth itself.

In this increasingly authoritarian age, how can journalists fulfill the mission of the fourth estate? How can we counter disinformation, hold the powerful accountable and champion truth and justice when we are losing the audiences we serve? To answer these questions, we need to go back to fundamental assumptions about the function of journalism in society and adapt our approach to meet this moment.

This is the journey I have been on for the last eight years. From my bases at the London School of Economics and Johns Hopkins University, I have collaborated with sociologists, data scientists, lawyers and fellow journalists to understand what attracts people to the propaganda pushed by authoritarians — and what journalists can do about it.

In this research, we have conducted polls, focus groups and experiments to test strategies for reaching audiences who seem to have succumbed to authoritarian lies, propaganda and conspiracy theories. While much of this work was done in Europe, the lessons we learned can be applied broadly, including here in the U.S., where faith in the media has dropped to a new low.

Our goal was to try something different from the fact-checking and town-hall initiatives already underway around the world. Debunking is an essential and noble endeavor, keeping alive the flame of truth in a cynical age, but much research shows that fact-checking tends to rebound when it bumps up against people’s partisan biases. And while online town halls and engineered one-to-one interactions between members of different partisan groups are also useful, they of course involve people who want to take part in such exercises in the first place.

Instead, my focus has been on how to create mass factual content — TV documentaries and podcast series, news stories and socially aware entertainment — that undercuts the initial appeal of authoritarian propaganda. This is no longer a challenge just for journalists in the traditional sense of the word; these days, everyone is a digital creator the moment they post something online.

Effective media reform certainly won’t be easy; the industry faces myriad challenges, including financial instability and shrinking advertising revenue. But adapting and fulfilling our mission is a critical endeavor. The future cohesion, security and viability of democratic states are at stake.

Breaking The Populist Coalition

Authoritarians and illiberal populists try to divide societies into crass binaries, often along culture war lines: patriots versus globalists; traditional-values conservatives versus woke liberals. Journalists must avoid reinforcing these categories. They should not assume that the so-called “other side” is a homogenous block; that is exactly what propagandists want. Instead, journalists should find cracks in the coalition and engage their audiences in a broader conversation.

Consider the case of Hungary. The country’s shifting political climate under Orbán’s leadership suggests that populist propaganda can fracture when the media focuses on genuine, shared anxieties.

Since returning to power in 2010, Orbán has defined himself as the defender of traditional, Catholic Hungarians against supposed nefarious plots by the EU and Jewish financier George Soros to destroy faith and family. This has made it easier for Orbán to take over independent media, undermine courts, develop laws to defund civil society, curtail academic freedoms and normalize corruption.

But Orbán’s propaganda was never as solid as he hoped. It is now disintegrating: Despite his control over business and media, his party is some 10% behind in a Publicus Institute poll, losing ground to a movement that unites both liberals and conservatives.

When we conducted polling and focus groups in Hungary in 2020, we could already see the cracks in the Orbán edifice. We found that only 22% of people actually believed the conspiracy narratives about Soros. Issues around the culture wars, including immigration and the “defense of Hungarian identity,” were in fact of low salience compared to impoverishment or corruption when it came to voting.

We identified 9% of the electorate who were right-wing but were disillusioned with Orbán and concerned about his authoritarian tendencies and corruption. They disliked the left-leaning parties even more, though, and felt that much of the independent media was too soft on the opposition. Still, Hungarians across the political spectrum felt like second-class citizens in Europe — a sense of inferiority Orbán’s propaganda often played on.

So what caused Orbán’s propaganda to start crumbling? A new opposition leader, Péter Magyar, emerged from inside the conservative movement and focused audiences on corruption and claims of pedophilia inside the government. He used Facebook and a new generation of YouTube news channels to argue that he could both fight corruption and enhance Hungary’s status on the world stage.

As a result, the divisions driven by Orbán’s rhetoric have been scrambled. Concerns about the economy and democracy have been allied with an assertive patriotism.

The lesson for the media is that we can engage with diverse audiences if we cut through the culture war binaries imposed by propagandists. Picking the issues that truly matter to people is the first step. The second is to dig deeper into the underlying anxieties and traumas that authoritarian propaganda exploits — an approach my colleagues and I got to put into practice during our work in Ukraine.

Digging Deeper

Authoritarian propaganda functions like a cult: It exploits people’s pain and fears to create dependence on the leader. We wanted to explore how the media could instead help people process shared traumas to foster independence, which brought us to Ukraine in 2018.

For decades, the Russian state had been pushing pro-Soviet propaganda through everything from movies to memes: It told stories about how the government of independent Ukraine was insulting the memory of the U.S.S.R., and how it was besmirching the sacrifice of Soviet victory in World War II. Russian propaganda also claimed that independent Ukraine was the descendant of pro-Nazi partisans.

The ultimate aim was to help split those nostalgic for the U.S.S.R. — especially in the south and east of the country — from the rest of Ukraine, paving the way for the invasion in 2022.

Ukrainian academics and historians valiantly fact-checked this propaganda. They showed that many Ukrainian partisans fought against both the Soviets and the Nazis in World War II. But these reality checks struggled to compete with the deeply emotional stories pushed by Russian propaganda, which focused on many people’s family memories of fighting in the Red Army. The idea of a country split between a pro-European, pro-democratic West and a pro-Soviet, Russia-leaning East persisted.

Our polling showed that there was slightly more Soviet nostalgia in the east of the country, but it was not monolithic. Outside of a small sample of die-hard Soviet revisionists, most people had a nuanced view of the U.S.S.R.: They were proud of its achievements in science and social services but ashamed of its curtailment of economic and human rights.

Residents of larger cities in the East shared political values with people in big cities in the West: entrepreneurial, open-minded and keen to defend their freedoms. The vast majority wanted a democratic, European future.

When we conducted focus groups, we found that people across the country became most animated when discussing traumas that were rarely discussed: relatives returning wounded from the disastrous Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, families struggling after the collapse of the U.S.S.R.

This pool of resentments and confusion was being exploited by Russian propaganda, which looked to give people a sense of status and grandeur while ignoring the humiliations the Kremlin itself had caused. The power of the propaganda was not in the historical truths (or rather, the lies) it was pushing, but in the emotional relief it provided. Efforts to tackle such lies miss the point. Instead, journalists need to tackle the underlying emotional issues.

In 2019 and 2020, we worked with Ukrainian journalists and filmmakers to create a series of documentaries that told deeply human stories about these less articulated traumas, highlighting the resilience that helped people survive. Some films looked at strikes by miners in east Ukraine against the U.S.S.R.; others explored the lives of Afghan War veterans and the survivors of Chernobyl who had been abandoned by the Soviet regime.

This kind of storytelling helped build trust: We were able to give people a chance to express and process their pain, weakening the ability of Kremlin propaganda to manipulate it. We avoided top-down narratives and minimized voiceovers that imposed a ‘right’ version of history. Instead, we allowed the people to guide the films themselves and narrate their own experiences.

In testing this content, we found that stories of common traumas and resilience united people across the country. The films earned equal levels of engagement and trust across the East and the West. Journalists can learn from this by tapping into people’s underlying concerns, memories and traumas that, when left unprocessed, are ripe for exploitation by propagandists.

Telling Stories That Resonate

In our “post-truth” age, facts may be jettisoned if they collide with partisan identity. Tribal loyalty often outperforms reality. Instead of just debunking disinformation, journalists must focus on the emotional identities underpinning authoritarian belief systems.

I explored this theory with colleagues at the Universities of Georgetown and North Carolina at Chapel Hill in our work to understand the roots of Russian support for the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. We found that it correlated strongly with an idea of collective identity wherein Russia was perceived as being both superior to others and a victim of global conspiracies: Sixty-five percent of Russians embraced this belief.

Such collective narcissism, as it is known in academic literature, can make any attack or criticism of Russia feel like an assault on Russians themselves. Those who supported the war and preferred this identity model were not worried about Putin’s authoritarian turn: Like most Russians, they wanted a strong hand to lead the country.

Russian independent media has shown evidence of the war crimes that the army has committed in Ukraine, but this has done little to change mainstream support for the war.

When researchers at the Ukrainian cognitive warfare company OpenMinds Institute tested different news stories, they found that the topic that was most effective in decreasing support was not fatalities or the corruption of the elite — it was the rising levels of crime: The Kremlin was releasing violent criminals to serve in the army, and upon their return from the frontlines, they were reportedly committing rapes and murders in Russian towns.

So why were these news stories more impactful? The war’s supporters wanted Putin to restore Russian grandeur. They cared about Putin’s claims that he was ending the chaos from the 1990s and imposing order and strength. The rise of crime, however, meant that the war was bringing instability to the home front, which was anathema to them. Its no surprise that the Kremlin censored crime statistics.

If you are an editor at a media outlet or a creator of digital news content who wants to push back against the power of malign propaganda, you need to make hard choices. The stories that will undermine the power of propaganda may not always be the ones that seem the most morally important or newsworthy. You can still remain true to the journalistic process of research and storytelling, but choose the issues that are more likely to subvert authoritarian narratives.

Showing The Bigger Picture

How journalists choose to communicate can be just as important as what they say. When should they opt for infographics over human interest storytelling, or emotive video over analytical text?

In Italy we worked with the newspaper of record, Corriere della Sera, in 2018 to experiment with different ways to report on the highly controversial topic of migration. As hundreds of thousands of migrants arrived from Africa and the Middle East, right-nationalist parties were decrying an invasion enabled by nongovernmental organizations and liberal parties. Even though the rate of migration had actually gone down at the time, there was so much noise around the issue it gave the impression that the numbers were surging.

Media outlets were faced with a dilemma. They couldn’t ignore the topic, but how could they report on it in a way that would increase trust to reputable sources and avoid inflaming toxic discourse?

Over nine months, we tested how people responded to different types of content on Corriere’s Facebook page. Opinion pieces and hot takes were unsurprisingly the most polarizing. We also found that infographics about migrant numbers and fact-checks did little to change people’s minds. Opponents of migration would simply question the data and trustworthiness of the media.

Human interest stories about the travails of migrants were also highly polarizing and provoked the highest numbers of negative comments. While this is a go-to genre for journalists to humanize an issue for audiences, it can also elicit strong pushback. Some readers felt like they were being emotionally manipulated and questioned why stories about a select few migrants should change their attitude about the issue at large. And even these stories still gave the sense of an unstoppable flood of migration.

The stories that produced the most civil conversation and higher levels of trust were straightforward pieces we called “articles with context”: They provided background information about why the migration crisis was happening in the first place, analyzing the wars in the Middle East and famines in sub-Saharan Africa, and considered potential interventions tackling the issue at the source.

By giving context, explaining root causes and exploring possible solutions, journalists can relieve the panic-stricken pressure around controversial topics and help people see the bigger picture.

Fostering Civic Agency

The ultimate aim of authoritarian propagandists is often to sow so much doubt and confusion that it leaves people passive and ready to give up their agency to a strongman leader. Conspiracy theory narratives are particularly useful for this. In a world full of hidden plots and unfathomable powers, people are left with a sense of powerlessness. However, our research found that this propaganda tends to fall on fertile ground.

We looked at why people in Ukraine were inclined to believe Kremlin narratives about the West using aid to Ukraine as a means to secretly control its government and steal its land. The reasons people gave in focus groups were telling. They acknowledged that these claims were likely generated by Russia and potentially untrue, but that the narratives still felt right, because they reflected the people’s personal and historical experiences.

For them, Ukraine had always been manipulated by greater powers, and oligarchs, bank ponzi schemes and extractive governments had always made them feel powerless. On the other hand, people who rejected the conspiracy theories argued that even though they weren’t actually sure if they were false, they felt wrong because, in the words of one participant, “I am a self-made person and I control my own life.”

To tackle belief in conspiracy theories, then, debunking individual narratives will not suffice. It requires shifting people’s mindsets from a sense of victimhood and helplessness to one of greater empowerment. Journalists must become more than purveyors of information; through their storytelling and interactions with audiences, they can help foster civic agency.

There are initiatives that already pioneer this. Hearken is an online platform that enables users to help media outlets choose which topics to cover. It’s an example of engagement journalism, an approach that builds trust by encouraging audiences to take part in shaping editorial agendas. This can help improve the public’s relationship with media outlets, which become social services rooted in community needs rather than mere providers of information.

Implementing these principles will require a shift in both mindset and measurement. Journalists and digital creators should consider not only how their content performs in terms of traffic and engagement, but how it unites audiences. They should also develop metrics for increasing trust and fostering constructive dialogue across divides.

I have been working with the nongovernmental organizations Millions of Conversations and More in Common ahead of the 250th anniversary of the U.S., which will take place in 2026, to consider how a divided America — and the media — can explore the truth about its past. Our soon-to-be-published polling and qualitative research point to a way to engage diverse audiences about what they care about, rather than the polarizing debate.

Beneath the aggressive propaganda, people may be more open to exploring the past together. While 49 percent of Republicans said they opposed critical race theory, for example, only 24 percent disagreed with the idea when described without the partisan terminology: that “policies and laws in the past that unfairly disadvantaged some groups may continue to have their effects felt today.”

The problem, then, is not necessarily immutable ideology, but the political discourse that reinforces it. A better media strategy could unpick that by focusing on the stories of inequality while avoiding the polarizing language.

Media reform is a daunting but urgent task that cannot fall to journalists alone. It will require the support of civic-minded content creators and technologists committed to holding power to account and dismantling its propaganda models. Journalism has evolved many times; the next transformation must involve a real shift in how journalists think about their role in protecting democracy — rather than just chronicling its demise.

The post Journalism In An Age Of Authoritarianism appeared first on NOEMA.

In April, Donald Trump imposed sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs on nearly all U.S. trading partners, expanding earlier pronouncements that targeted only major economies. For critics, it was a reckless act of economic warfare. For Trump and his allies, it was a long-overdue rejection of a naïve world order. In a striking historical parallel, in the Spring and Autumn period of ancient China, Duke Xiang of Song famously refused to attack an enemy before they had properly arrayed their troops, adhering to the codes of ritualized warfare. Predictably, he lost.

Today, a similar accusation is hurled at the United States: that it has restrained itself with outdated moral expectations, while rivals such as China and Russia maneuver freely, unburdened by idealism. Trumpism and the worldview of figures like J.D. Vance represent a sharp rejection of the so-called benevolence of Xiang. Their message is simple: America must adapt to a world where restraint is no longer a universal virtue.

This is not merely a moment of disruption. It marks a paradigmatic shift in global logic. The world is moving from a system of mediated stability toward one of open rivalry. To understand this moment, China’s own history offers a useful analogy. In the Spring and Autumn period (770 to 476 B.C.E.), warfare was ritualized, legitimacy symbolically upheld by the Zhou king. But as the old order weakened, the Warring States period (approximately 475 to 221 B.C.E.) emerged. It was a time of classic anarchy marked by intense competition, innovation, and systemic transformation. Legalism, meritocracy, military standardization and bureaucratic statecraft all took shape in this crucible. The end of ritual was also the beginning of modern governance.

Trump’s dramatic change to tariff policy signaled a clear turn to aggressive economic nationalism and demonstrates a worldview shaped by what I call “Warring States” logic. Trump’s trade policy bypasses multilateralism, instead compelling each country to negotiate bilaterally — on America’s terms. In doing so, Trump is not merely reacting to a broken global order. He is forcing others into an entirely new one.

This deeper shift reflects a redefinition of how power is structured and projected. It erodes the hub-and-spoke system centered on institutions like the United Nations and the World Trade Organization (WTO), replacing it with a peer-to-peer network of transactional relationships. In this emerging order, states act more like strategic actors in a fragmented landscape or rival feudal lords on a decentralized map of shifting power. Whether by design or instinct, this represents Trump’s Warring States-style realignment: direct, disruptive and structurally transformative.

Trumpism does not merely reject global liberalism; it reimagines the architecture of American power. Its core instinct is not isolationist or nihilistic, but fundamentally opposed to established diplomatic norms and rituals, a deliberate departure from the old ways of seeking consensus. In this worldview, legitimacy comes not from international approval but from output: industrial strength, cultural cohesion and strategic clarity. Rituals are not something to be respected, but to be bypassed.

This mindset did not emerge in a vacuum. For much of the postwar era, the U.S.-led international order resembled China’s Spring and Autumn period — a fragile yet enduring balance, upheld by norms, rituals and symbolic legitimacy. Henry Kissinger, the era’s foremost architect in foreign policy, believed in ambiguity, restraint and equilibrium. Institutions like the U.N. played the role of a Zhou king, lacking hard power but commanding deference. Even amid Cold War tension, the world remained rule-bound. Red lines held, backchannels worked, deterrence was mutual.

But the Zhou world is gone. Trumpism marks not an aberration but an inflection point, a recognition that fewer actors obey the old rites, and those who still do risk irrelevance. Like the Zhou order before it, today’s international system is fading not because of ideological rebellion but because its underlying conditions no longer hold. Perhaps from Trump’s perspective, tariff wars were a response to these changing conditions. Institutions like the WTO, he argued, no longer ensured reciprocity, and growing trade imbalances reflected how the liberal economic order had failed to protect national interests.

The transition from the Spring and Autumn period to the Warring States was far more than a change in political climate; it marked one of the most profound systemic shifts in Chinese history. Influential Marxist historian Guo Moruo characterized this era as involving a fundamental transformation that reshaped modes of production, social hierarchies and the very basis of legitimacy over centuries. It represented a deep pivot driven by new material and strategic realities — the spread of iron tools and weapons, mass-produced crossbows, horseback riding and large-scale irrigation — that rendered the old Zhou rituals obsolete. This historical lens suggests that today’s global shift is not merely about changing alliances or rhetoric, but about a deeper, structural and potentially epochal turn.

The Cold War is over. The Warring States have returned.

Who Is Qin?

Trump’s proposed purchase of Greenland, his threats to allies over defense spending and his unilateral withdrawals from major agreements are not anomalies. They reflect a worldview in which statecraft is no longer about upholding norms, but about renegotiating leverage. For Trump, NATO, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Paris climate agreement are not binding commitments but simply contracts subject to exit or revision. His across-the-board tariffs from April follow the same playbook. Last week, after Beijing moved to tighten export controls on rare-earth magnets, Trump threatened tariffs of up to 100% on Chinese imports. Trump’s method is not Cold War diplomacy but rather the logic of a fragmented strategic landscape: confront strategic peers, coerce smaller players and reconfigure the playing field.

China and the United States are now essentially accusing each other of being Qin: the hard, efficient, norm-breaking state that conquered six kingdoms to unify China in 221 B.C.E. And perhaps both are right. Each is gravitating toward a model that prioritizes internal control, technological dominance and narrative power over international consensus. This convergence reflects how great powers make cost-benefit choices under strategic pressure, especially when they begin to think with a Warring States mentality — focusing on their own survival in a low-trust environment.

The United States, drawing on its scale and historic dominance, is acting more like Qin than it admits. It rewrites rules, rebuilds industrial capacity at home and hints at conditioning alliances on alignment and great burden-sharing. Under Trump, the coercive elements of American power, once veiled in diplomacy, are now laid openly on the table. China, with its centralized authority and long-term planning, reflects Qin’s strategic patience. It has expanded its naval power, extended its geoeconomic influence via the Belt and Road Initiative and developed new mechanisms of control, including export controls on strategic materials and cross-border law-enforcement measures affecting diaspora communities.

Smaller Qins are emerging, too. Russia, though weaker, has adopted a similar logic: at times retreating from multilateral commitments, seizing territory and acting unilaterally. Israel, facing what it calls existential threats, along with reduced external restraint, has leaned toward unilateral action in pursuit of strategic depth and deterrence. Both follow the logic of structural siege: act preemptively before geopolitical space narrows. These states are not anomalies. They are structural products of a world without a credible Zhou. The new Warring States system incentivizes Qin-like behavior: preempt, absorb or consolidate rivals, and act decisively.

With the decline of American-led multilateralism, the symbolic Zhou order is fading. The U.N., WTO and Bretton Woods institutions no longer hold the unifying sway they once did. What remains is not Cold War-style bipolarity, but a polycentric contest of rival Qins.

To extend the analogy, today’s major powers can be loosely compared to states from the Warring States era (Qin to the far west, Chu to the south, Qi on the eastern coast, Yan to the northeast, and the central-plains trio Han, Zhao, Wei), each with a distinct strategic profile.

Europe resembles the partitioned remnants of Jin, a once-powerful north-central state whose collapse and subsequent division into three weaker entities (Han, Zhao and Wei) is often taken to mark the start of the Warring States period. Japan, diminished in geopolitical clout but resilient in technological and commercial infrastructure, plays a role akin to Qi, a wealthy coastal power in the east: militarily constrained yet indispensable for its salt, iron and trade.

The Islamic world mirrors the southern state of Chu: a sprawling, diverse civilization that was once seen by northern powers as culturally alien or inferior and labeled the “southern barbarian.” Yet it wielded immense cultural vitality, military strength and strategic depth. Likewise, today, Islamic countries remain underestimated by the major powers, but their demographic weight, ideological intensity and geographic centrality make them a latent force in shaping the global order. Other strategically pivotal actors, such as India, Canada, Australia, South Korea and Vietnam, resemble Yan: peripheral yet adaptable, and often playing outsized roles in shaping balance at critical junctures.

Contemporary populist strategists echo elements of Shang Yang, the radical Qin reformer who championed centralization and legalist discipline. Trump, in this analogy, resembles Lü Buwei — the ambitious merchant who rose not through aristocratic lineage but through bold maneuvering, opportunism and a shrewd grasp of leverage. Lü brought a trader’s instincts into a warrior bureaucracy, much as Trump injected transactional thinking into the strategic imagination of American statecraft. Both were disruptive, theatrical and instrumental in reshaping their respective systems, pursuing rule-rewriting to lock in future advantage.

In this light, the “Make America Great Again” movement is less a conservative restoration than a strategic recalibration rooted in the logic of the Warring States. It tends to favor unilateralism over consensus, conditional alliances over norms and the pursuit of dominance over the maintenance of the international order.

Shifting Powers, New Rules

The Warring States period was a quintessential case of international anarchy. With no overarching authority, each state acted according to its own survival calculus, much like today’s global order. Traditional balance-of-power theory suggests that weaker states will band together to check the rise of a hegemon. But history tells a more sobering story. The Qin did not rise because balance worked; it rose because it learned how to break nearly every alliance in its way. This historical irony has long haunted strategists. Political scientists like Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Joseph Nye each offered different answers to the problem of order without empire. But as multilateralism falters, their assumptions are under renewed strain.

Kissinger’s approach to diplomacy centered on maintaining global stability by balancing great-power relationships and avoiding open conflict. Rooted in realist thought, it emphasized equilibrium, restraint and the ritualized management of rivalry. In this sense, his worldview echoed elements of the Spring and Autumn periods in ancient China, when states adhered to formal hierarchies and codes of conduct to preserve a fragile peace amid recurrent armed clashes.

But in today’s emerging Warring States-like environment, with multilateral institutions weakening and great-power competition increasingly zero-sum, Kissinger’s framework may no longer be sufficient. The speed, intensity and asymmetry of modern rivalries demand more adaptive strategies. Brzezinski’s Cold War vision similarly relied on durable alliances to balance against adversaries like the Soviet Union. Yet in today’s world of fragmented power and shifting loyalties, alliances are proving more fragile.

As in the Warring States period, where diplomacy was often undercut by betrayal and realignment, collective security strategies are increasingly undermined by diverging national interests and strategic mistrust. The Hezong (“vertical alliance”) was a coalition of Qin’s rivals — principally Qi, Chu, Zhao and Wei — championed by the strategist Su Qin (no connection to the Qin state). Although Su Qin initially persuaded these states to unite against the Qin state, the alliance soon unraveled under pressure, as the state of Qin exploited internal divisions and picked off members one by one. The same logic plays out today, where coalition-building can struggle to withstand the strain of asymmetric interests and coercive leverage that is wielded by dominant powers. For example, within the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (comprised of the United States, Japan, India and Australia), India’s posture toward Russia has at times diverged from that of its partners, testing the cohesion of the coalition.

The theory of complex interdependence, developed by political scientists Robert Keohane and Nye, posited that dense economic and institutional ties among states could diminish the utility of military force and make cooperation a more rational path to mutual gain. Nye later expanded this logic into his influential theory of “soft power,” emphasizing the ability to shape global outcomes through appeal and emulation grounded in culture, values and institutional legitimacy rather than coercion. These frameworks flourished during the high tide of globalization, when multilateralism and integration seemed to promise a more stable world order.

Today, however, those ideals are fraying. In a world increasingly marked by zero-sum rivalries, technological decoupling and hardened geopolitical lines, soft power alone is no longer sufficient. Even the United States, though still the leading exporter of soft power, has retreated from its interdependence agenda, dismantling the U.S.Agency for International Development (USAID) and shifting toward industrial policy, techno-nationalism, and hard-power deterrence. What was once a contest of influence is becoming a competition of capacity.

In contrast to Kissinger, Brzezinski and Nye, political scientist John Mearsheimer’s theory of offensive realism offers a starker lens through which to view today’s global dynamics. Mearsheimer argues that international politics is fundamentally zero-sum without a central authority, with great powers compelled to maximize their relative strength in order to survive and deter challengers. His framework calls for assertive strategies, a focus on hard power and a readiness to override existing norms when strategic advantage is at stake. In today’s unraveling international system, Mearsheimer’s vision appears increasingly prescient. Success depends less on restraint and more on agility, coercive capacity and the ability to project credible power.

This dynamic closely resembles the late Warring States period of ancient China. Although the Qin was widely recognized as the greatest threat, rival states failed to sustain collective resistance. Instead, they remained locked in short-term struggles, seizing cities from one another, shifting alliances opportunistically and undermining regional balance. In Mearsheimer’s framework, this behavior is not irrational but structural. In an anarchic order, even existential threats rarely override the drive for relative gains. Cooperation breaks down not because of a lack of foresight, but because trust cannot be enforced.

While neorealism explains the inevitability of great power rivalry, neoclassical realism helps us understand why systemic stress often leads not only to external conflict but also to internal experimentation. When institutional adaptation proves insufficient, states begin to turn to new ideas, redefining not just their policies but the very logic of governance. The Warring States period exemplifies this dynamic: it produced a fierce competition of ideologies such as Confucianism, Legalism and Mohism, each of which advanced a distinct incentive structure for political behavior. Rather than a static multipolar balance, the system resembled a multi-agent reinforcement learning environment in which states, operating under partial information, continuously adjusted their institutional strategies in response to both systemic pressures and the evolving moves of their peers. The result was not equilibrium but a turbulent ecology of adaptive innovation.

Through strategic deception, institutional coherence and a superior legal-bureaucratic framework, Qin systematically dismantled multilateral coalitions and neutralized each counterweight in its path. Its decisive edge lay not merely in military might, but in the Legalist system that enabled rule-based governance, standardized administration, consistent rewards for performance as well as harsh punishments for rule violation. This internal coherence allowed Qin to align incentives, scale innovations and integrate logistics at a level unmatched by its rivals. In a fractured and competitive system, such adaptability can overpower even the most coordinated balancing efforts, suggesting that long-term stability hinges not just on power distribution but on institutional innovation.

A similar dynamic may be unfolding in today’s fractured world. Rather than settling into stable multipolarity, the global system may tilt toward whichever model proves most adaptive and exportable. Just as the Qin model outlasted the dynasty that created it and shaped Chinese governance for two millennia, the dominant political framework of this era may survive well beyond the state or regime that first established it. In an age where distance no longer restrains influence and alliances are fragile, it is institutional design, not raw strength, that may determine the next global order.

The Return Of The Unrestrained State

One of the most widely accepted theories in postwar international relations has been the Democratic Peace Theory, which holds that democracies almost never war with one another. Some may argue that democratic institutions temper aggressive statecraft, holding leaders accountable and encouraging restraint, but in a Warring States world, strategic imperatives can override internal constraints.

In moments of heightened geopolitical competition, democratic institutions may still produce leaders who act unilaterally or coercively. The United States, for example, has shown renewed interest in direct asset acquisition and strategic control. Under Trump, the United States floated the idea of purchasing Greenland, questioned the neutrality of the Panama Canal and proposed reshaping alliances based on transactional compliance. These were not mere diplomatic eccentricities. They reflected a broader shift toward a hard-power mindset, even within a democracy.

In such an environment, the incentives for maximizing power begin to outweigh ideological constraints. The line between democracy and autocracy becomes less about internal governance and more about how a state pursues power abroad, as even democratic leaders, operating in an anarchic international system, may act unilaterally when opportunities arise. A Qin-like state is not distinguished by how it votes, but by how it competes — through coercion, innovation and the erosion of norms to secure advantage.

This points to a deeper structural argument. In an anarchic international system without a credible hegemon, all states, regardless of their regime type, may be drawn toward a realpolitik approach. Democracy may provide resilience and legitimacy at home, but it no longer guarantees moderation abroad. If the strategic environment rewards offensive action, even democracies will adapt.

In the end, democratic peace may have been a luxury of the Spring and Autumn era, the period preceding the Warring States, sustained less by the absence of war than by relative stability and shared norms. In a Warring States world, survival depends less on internal values than on external capabilities.

This shift has resurrected the centrality of the state. For decades after the Cold War, many believed that globalization and transnational institutions would dilute sovereignty. The political commentator Thomas Friedman declared the world “flat.” British political economist Susan Strange warned about the retreat of the state. But in today’s Warring States environment, the state is not fading. It is returning with force.

One of the clearest signs of this return is in the realm of technological sovereignty. Artificial intelligence, semiconductors, quantum computing and biotech are no longer seen as commercial frontiers alone. They are treated as instruments of national power. The United States’ CHIPS and Science Act and China’s Made in China 2025 plan exemplify this race for tech dominance. The ability to control data, compute and algorithms is increasingly analogous to the control of oil in the 20th century and of iron during the Warring States period. AI governance, once thought to be the domain of open collaboration, is now framed as a race among rival powers.

States are also reclaiming control over strategic supply chains. The pandemic, the war in Ukraine and rising tensions over Taiwan have exposed the fragility of economic interdependence. As a result, industrial policy has returned. Washington is subsidizing semiconductor manufacturing; Beijing is accelerating the development of its domestic tech stack. In an era when de-risking (and, in some quarters, decoupling) is no longer taboo, supply chains are no longer viewed as neutral pathways but as instruments of influence and resilience.

At the same time, the boundary between public and private power is shifting. Tech giants once saw themselves as stateless actors. Today, their infrastructures are increasingly regarded as national security assets. In the United States, firms like OpenAI and Nvidia are closely aligned with government strategy. This alignment became explicit when Washington converted previously committed CHIPS support into a 9.9% equity stake in Intel, making the government a significant shareholder. In China, companies such as Huawei and ByteDance operate under the scrutiny of the party-state. Both the U.S. and Chinese governments are now deeply involved in the proposed sale of TikTok. Meanwhile, nongovernmental organizations face growing constraints, including reduced funding, such as through the dismantling of USAID and increased scrutiny in countries like India, diminishing their global influence. This growing convergence between national policy and corporate capability suggests that the real unit of competition is no longer the company but the state.

In short, the world is not just becoming more fragmented. It is becoming more state-centric. Governance models, innovation capacity and strategic autonomy are no longer abstract policy goals. They have become conditions for survival. The return of the state does not signal a return to the past. It reflects a shift toward a new strategic landscape, where adaptability is the ultimate currency of power.

Survival Through Innovation

In the Warring States period, dominance came less from charisma than from scalable capacity: ironworking that enabled mass weapon production, discipline in drilled armies and institutional reform — including standardized laws and measures, county administration and merit-based ranks. These turned resources into deployable power, enabling rapid mobilization and battlefield wins. In the future, it may come from AI, not merely as a weapon but as an integrated system of perception, decision-making and governance.

If one nation builds an AI architecture a generation ahead of others, the resulting asymmetry could resemble the technological gap of the first Gulf War, when in 1991 U.S.-led forces used precision-guided munitions and satellite coordination to decisively overwhelm Iraqi defenses. But today’s stakes are far greater. The winner of the AI race could shape conflicts or entire systems of influence before others even grasp what is unfolding.

In the classical Warring States era, Qin unified China through force and reform. In the AI-driven world to come, dominance may not depend on territory, but on embedding systems and setting the standards that others must follow. Technology has redefined the physics of power. Distance no longer constrains influence. Data, infrastructure, finance and ideology now project power globally, at low cost and without physical presence.

Unlike physical empires, AI can cross borders invisibly. A sufficiently advanced governance system that combines language models, surveillance, predictive analytics and logistical control can dominate not through war but by embedding itself into the critical systems of other states. This is already taking shape, with examples including China’s LOGINK port-logistics platform, which aggregates port-call, vessel-movement, and cargo-flow data across participating hubs and has drawn U.S. government bans and warnings about data and operational dependencies, as well as the U.K.’s award of the National Health Service England Federated Data Platform to U.S. firm Palantir and its partners, controversial amid privacy concerns and the company’s long-standing U.S. defense and intelligence ties.

In such a world, the leading AI model may not need to fire a shot. It could preempt deterrence, distort communications and shape outcomes faster than human systems can respond. Retaliation becomes irrelevant if threats are neutralized before they are understood. What follows may not be a Pax Americana or Pax Sinica but a Pax Algorithmica. A world coordinated through a dominant AI system. States may retain flags and parliaments, but sovereignty may become symbolic.

That cooperative equilibrium, like the Zhou order before the Warring States, has begun to unravel. As technological stakes rise and AI becomes the new frontier, the contest is no longer about shaping shared standards but about securing unilateral advantage. What comes next resembles not protocol-driven consensus, but the logic of strategic rupture.

The first half of the contemporary technological revolution was defined by the internet and mobile connectivity, systems based on protocols that supported globalization and multinational organizations. This era was characterized by cooperation and interconnectedness, similar to the Spring and Autumn period in ancient China, where rival powers competed within a shared framework of legitimacy and norms. In telecom, major powers like China, the United States, Europe and Japan competed fiercely over standards and patents but did so within a framework of shared rules and procedural legitimacy. Influence was earned through participation, negotiation and adherence to common protocols. Legitimacy mattered, processes were followed and dominance came through consensus and protocol, not disruption. However, that equilibrium has now collapsed.

We are now entering the second half of this technological revolution: the era of artificial intelligence. This stage is characterized by intensified competition and ruthless rivalry. The AI race, particularly among large language models, is fragmented, unsanctioned and accelerating, resembling the Warring States period at its most elemental. States and firms no longer wait for agreement. They iterate, deploy and redefine the rules as they go. The race for AI supremacy will dominate future global power struggles, with AI emerging as the modern “iron,” just as it propelled Qin to power during the Warring States period. The nation that can out-innovate its rivals may rise to global preeminence.

In today’s global AI race, victory will not go to the nation with the most wealth or the largest chip reserves. It will go to the one with the most adaptive system — politically, institutionally and cognitively. Like the AI models they seek to build, states must be able to learn, iterate and self-correct. Political rigidity stifles innovation; responsiveness accelerates it. The countries that foster the best environments for experimentation, scientific discovery and continuous improvement will define the technological frontier.

The Warring States era serves as an apt analogy for what lies ahead, where different governance models must compete openly, just like competing AI models. Each of the seven major states ran its own political experiment, creating a vibrant laboratory of governance. Some focused on legal and bureaucratic reform: Qin implemented a rigid legalist order under its influential minister Shang Yang; Wei produced an early systematic legal code under the statesman Li Kui; and Han honed its statecraft using bureaucratic techniques developed by Chancellor Shen Buhai.

Others prioritized military innovation. The southern state of Chu experimented with military egalitarianism under the general Wu Qi, while Zhao’s King Wuling radically transformed his army by adopting the superior cavalry tactics of his nomadic neighbors. Still others focused on different strengths: Yan relied on the coalition diplomacy of its general Yue Yi, while the wealthy coastal state of Qi fostered intellectual pluralism by hosting thinkers of diverse schools at its famous Jixia Academy. Together, they formed the most concentrated political laboratory in ancient history.

Today, the contest has returned. States are competing to define the architecture of the future. For years, global discourse revolved around the Washington Consensus and the China model. Now, what prevails may not be the most admired but the most functional. And when one system pulls decisively ahead, others may not resist. They may convert. This was the logic behind Qin’s triumph. Its model outperformed the rest not because it was loved, but because it worked.

The most effective political systems in this new Warring States era may resemble AI models: adaptive, iterative and responsive to feedback. China once thrived on this flexibility during the Deng era of the late 1970s through the 1990s, when the country opened up its economy and encouraged experimentation, but now it struggles to balance centralization with innovation. The United States, long admired for institutional reinvention, now faces mounting internal gridlock, casting doubt on its capacity for renewal. In the long run, it is not ideology or force that will define the global order, but which model proves most adaptable. And in that race, history offers no guarantees.

The Most Luminous Of All Times

But adaptability alone cannot be the final measure of success. Even in a Warring States world, humans still yearn for what is just. Ancient thinkers like the Chinese philosopher Mencius believed that yi, or righteousness, was not merely a social construct but an intrinsic part of human nature.

Even amid ruthless competition, people retain what Mencius called a heart that cannot bear the suffering of others, which he identified as the “sprout of benevolence.” This is not a sign of weakness, but the foundation of righteous politics. Justice is not the opposite of effectiveness. It is what allows systems to endure beyond victory. History does not only reward the strong, but also those who can turn power into legitimacy. Strategic necessity may override sentiment, but it does not erase conscience. The next global order will not only need to function; it must also be fair.

In ancient China, the chaos of the Warring States period gave rise not only to dominant powers but to a new political class: the shi, wandering scholars, strategists and reformers who transcended their birth and borders to shape visions of governance, ethics and legitimacy. Rulers competed to attract these minds, and the era became the most fertile intellectual laboratory in Chinese history. Figures like political strategists Zhang Yi, Fan Ju, and the Legalist reformer Shang Yang, moved across rival courts and rose to Qin’s chancellorship, offering not just tactics but also new theories of rule. It was an age when ideas operated as instruments of power: alliance schemes, codified legal and administrative reforms and new military doctrines were proposed by itinerant thinkers and then quickly implemented, often determining war or survival.

Today’s fractured world may catalyze a similar emergence. As institutions erode and traditional elites falter, a new global shi class may rise, not bound by noble lineage or national borders, but drawn from technologists, policy thinkers, builders and founders who shape systems across sectors and geographies.

Yet the parallels are not perfect. Whereas ancient thinkers could traverse states freely, today’s world is defined by visa restrictions, classified research, ideological suspicion and growing techno-nationalism. Even as digital tools connect more people than ever, knowledge is increasingly fenced off by states — for example, U.S.–China scientific collaboration has declined since the pandemic amid tighter national-security controls, even as collaboration remains high in some other regions and fields.

The new shi will need more than brilliance. They must navigate ideological, institutional and computational systems to have political impact. These individuals may not cross borders to become prime ministers, as their Warring States predecessors did, but their ideas may travel through algorithms, protocols and networks to shape how societies govern and adapt. As these new shi shape ideas that travel beyond borders, their legacies may not be in their titles or offices, but in the systems they help design.

In the long run, the most hopeful outcome of this Warring States era may not be a new hegemon but a new kind of order, without kings and without emperors. Power may no longer lie in conquest but in coherence. Not in dominance but in design. Just as the last Axial Age gave us philosophies of virtue and justice, perhaps this one will yield protocols of resilience and coordination. The architecture of tomorrow may look less like an empire and more like a Transformer model, an AI architecture built on attention, alignment and self-organization. Perhaps a Web 4.0 — a speculative symbiotic web in which humans and AI co-evolve — will not merely replace platforms but reimagine politics itself.

This may sound distant or utopian, especially in a moment often defined by fatigue. In China, a saying has gained popularity: “This year will be the best of the next 10.” It reflects not hope, but exhaustion, a sense of decline and foreboding. But perhaps the diagnosis is premature. What we are entering may not be a collapse, but a modeling epoch: a new Warring States world, chaotic and cruel, but also luminous. For those who think in systems and build in code, this is not the end of history. It is its recommencement.

The Warring States era was not only an age of war. It was an age of brilliance. During the political upheaval of that period, Chinese civilization produced some of its greatest minds: Mencius, Zhuangzi, Han Feizi, and Mozi, whose frameworks still shape political and moral reasoning today. Philosopher Karl Jaspers called this broader phenomenon the Axial Age, when societies across China, India, Persia, Judea, and Greece simultaneously reinvented what it meant to be human. Philosophy, justice and law did not arise from peace, but from rupture.

More than two millennia after Jaspers’ Axial Age, we may be entering another globally synchronized rethink. With no shared ideology and dwindling trust in inherited institutions, humanity is being forced back to first principles. What is justice? What deserves to endure? Questions of AI ethics, political legitimacy and governance are no longer academic. They are civilizational. The true contest ahead is between systems that adapt and systems that ossify. The ruthless may win battles, but the adaptable win eras and the just endure. This is not a dark age. It is a time worthy of living.

Editor’s Note: Noema is transparent about the use of AI in any of its pieces. We publish original human-generated ideas but allow authorized, disclosed use of AI in certain cases. The initial submitted draft of this piece utilized ChatGPT as an editorial assistant and translator to help convey Chinese concepts more clearly in English, so as to express the author’s original, human-generated ideas more effectively.

Specifically, it was used to generate section headings, suggest transitions and reduce repetition, as well as for line edits to improve clarity and flow in the initial draft. It was not used to originate facts; all claims and examples are drawn from the author’s own notes and publicly available sources, and were reviewed and edited by the author himself first. This draft has since received multiple human edits. Noema verified the author’s identity and the piece’s conceptual originality using various scanners and review processes and conducted a detailed human fact-check. See our AI policy here.

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When they appear to make costly blunders, sabotaging the plans of a few powerful conspirators working to undermine their authority, World Co-ordinator Stephen Byerley learns the truth: the “errors” are no errors at all, but deliberate, tidy sacrifices meant to preserve global stability. The Machines have concluded that the surest way to keep humanity from harm is to keep humanity from making certain decisions.

Byerley grasps this truth with a blend of relief and dread, knowing that while the Machines will continue to stave off conflict, the affected citizens will never learn why their schemes failed or how they might seek redress. The Machines will keep their motives secret; transparency, too, is a risk to be managed.

Asimov cast the scene as a distant prophecy, yet the future he sketched is already seeping into the present. We often talk about artificial intelligence as a looming catastrophe or an ingenious convenience, oscillating between apocalyptic nightmares of runaway superintelligences and glittering futures of frictionless efficiency. Deep-fake propaganda, economic displacement, even the possibility of existential doom: these capture headlines because they are dramatic, cinematic, visceral.

But a quieter danger lies in wait, one that may ultimately prove more corrosive to the human spirit than any killer robot or bioweapon. The risk is that we will come to rely on AI not merely to assist us but to decide for us, surrendering ever larger portions of collective judgment to systems that, by design, cannot acknowledge our dignity.

The tragedy is that we are culturally prepared for such abdication. Our political institutions already depend on what might be called a “paradigm of deference,” in which ordinary citizens are invited to voice preferences episodically — through ballots every few years — while day-to-day decisions are made by elected officials, regulators and technical experts.

Many citizens have even come to defer their civic role entirely by abstaining from voting, whether for symbolic meaning or due to sheer apathy. AI slots neatly into this architecture, promising to supercharge the convenience of deferring while further distancing individuals from the levers of power.

Modern representative democracy itself emerged in the 18th century as a solution to the logistical impossibility of assembling the entire citizenry in one place; it scaled the ancient city-state to the continental republic. That solution carried a price: The experience of direct civic agency was replaced by periodic, symbolic acts of consent. Between elections, citizens mostly observe from the sidelines. Legislative committees craft statutes, administrative agencies draft rules, central banks decide the price of money — all with limited direct public involvement.

This arrangement has normalized an expectation that complex questions belong to specialists. In many domains, that reflex is sensible — neurosurgeons really should make neurosurgical calls. But it also primes us to cede judgment even where the stakes are fundamentally moral or distributive. The democratic story we tell ourselves — that sovereignty rests with the people — persists, but the lived reality is an elaborate hierarchy of custodians. Many citizens have internalized that gap as inevitable.

Enter machine learning. Algorithms excel precisely at tasks the layperson finds forbidding: sorting mountains of data, detecting patterns no human eye can see, quantifying risk in probabilistic terms. They arrive bearing the shimmering promise of neutrality; a model is statistical, so it feels less biased than a human. The seduction is powerful across domains, from credit scoring to determining who gets access to public services.

In the Netherlands, for instance, an early use case saw the government deploying automated systems to track welfare benefits with minimal human intervention. (It is notable that this experiment led to more than 20,000 families being falsely accused of fraud and helped contribute to the entire Dutch government’s resignation in 2021.) Faced with backlogs and budget constraints, officials grasp for anything that looks objective and efficient. Soon, the algorithm’s recommendation becomes the default, then the rule. Over time, the human intermediary becomes an impotent clerk who seldom overrides the machine, partly because the institution discourages deviation and partly because the clerk has forgotten how.

What vanishes in these moments is more than discretion; it is the encounter in which one person acknowledges another as a decision-worthy being. In the late 20th century, Francis Fukuyama revived an argument ultimately owed to Hegel: Liberal democracy is the most stable form of government because it satisfies the fundamental human thirst for recognition — the desire to be seen and affirmed as free and equal.

Whether or not history truly “ended” with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the insight about recognition remains profound. People do not demand merely material comfort or security; they demand that the social order look them in the eye and admit: “Your voice counts.” When that recognition fails to materialize — when individuals perceive that their fates are determined elsewhere, by elites who will never sit across from them — resentment grows. Contemporary populism is the political face of that resentment. It rails against distant technocrats, against faceless bureaucracy, against any system that patronizes rather than engages. It depicts electoral democracy, with its long channels of mediation that seldom reach the average citizen, as an empty ritual.

AI threatens to deepen this very wound. If the elected official is distant, the algorithm is an abyss. You cannot argue with a neural network’s hidden layers or cross-examine a random forest. Decisions that shape your life — how resources are allocated, which priorities are funded — become technical outputs optimized for efficiency, not political choices settled through public debate.

Even if we could make AI systems perfectly transparent, capable of explaining their reasoning in lucid prose, this does not cure the underlying democratic deficit; a decision explained is still a decision imposed. Without a clear path for recourse, human agency dissolves into statistical abstraction. For the citizen seeking recognition, there is no one to confront, no accountable face on the other side of the counter.

Even the possibility of reciprocity disappears, because the system is constitutionally incapable of respecting or disrespecting anyone; it simply optimizes. In this vacuum, anger can only turn outward indiscriminately, feeding conspiracy theories and demagogic narratives that blame shadowy technocrats, ethnic minorities or transnational plots.

A New Social Contract

The relationship between AI and democracy, however, is not fated to be antagonistic. Whether algorithms shrink or expand the public’s role depends less on the code itself than on the social contracts wrapped around it. Our existing social contracts were forged on the heels of the Enlightenment, as thinkers sought to erect constitutional and normative scaffolding to civilize raw power and align it with collective reason.

Hobbes’ fear of unfettered, natural chaos yielded to Locke’s primacy of the consent of the governed, Montesquieu’s framework of separation of powers, and Rousseau’s notion that legitimate authority must always remain answerable to the general will. These arrangements were designed to restrain the worst impulses of human governors while still harvesting the best of deliberation. They came into being at a time when the power of human reason to perfect society and nature seemed nearly limitless.

Now, however, for the first time in human history, we face the existence of a non-human cognitive actor whose speed, scale and analytical capacities already outstrip our own in narrow fields and will only continue to improve in future years. The shift to a world with superhuman intelligence demands something different than reactive jumps to impede AI progress; it calls for a deeper rethinking of how power and authority operate, where algorithmic systems should make decisions, where they shouldn’t and what mechanisms should exist to help people understand, challenge and override those decisions when necessary.

The central guiding question must be whether we treat AI as a substitute for collective judgment or as an instrument that enlarges the scope for human deliberation. At stake is nothing less than whether human judgment and human dignity retain operational value in the very systems that govern us.

Used well, AI can slash the logistical costs that once confined serious deliberation to narrow circles. Automatic translation, live transcription and real-time summarization enable diverse groups of citizens to debate common problems without sharing a room or the same native language. LLMs can transform technical briefings into plainer prose and cluster thousands of comments from virtual town halls into intelligible and actionable themes. AI facilitators can help forge consensus among polarized groups online, equalizing speaking times and surfacing overlooked voices before the discussion closes. In other words, the same machinery that powers prediction markets can be repurposed to make deliberation scalable, searchable and understandable to the broader public, transforming the way governments make decisions and the role of the average citizen.

Taiwan offers a glimpse of this future. The open source vTaiwan platform uses machine learning to analyze thousands of public comments on policy proposals, identifying areas of consensus and highlighting remaining disagreements. Rather than generating its own policy recommendations, the AI helps citizens and policymakers understand the structure of public opinion and focus discussion on genuinely contested issues. The platform has facilitated successful policymaking on contentious topics in Taiwan, like ride-sharing regulation and digital rights, enabling outcomes that enjoy broad public support, largely because citizens participated meaningfully in their creation.

A less techno-centric model of democratic innovation can be seen in Ireland, where citizens’ assemblies are convened regularly but have yet to harness the power of AI. These bodies bring together groups of randomly selected citizens to deliberate on complex issues and make recommendations to the government. Participants receive expert briefings, listen to stakeholders and engage in structured deliberation to reach consensus. The process is slow and sometimes onerous, but it has produced thoughtful policy outcomes that were unlikely to be achieved through traditional political channels, most notably a referendum repealing the Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution that previously limited access to abortion in the country. These assemblies also tend to be expensive to run and confined to relatively small groups, which has so far kept them on the periphery of the democratic landscape.

AI could help change that by scaling the number of citizens’ assemblies and connecting them to the broader public, thereby bolstering their legitimacy and reach. We saw one nascent version of this last year in Deschutes County, Oregon, where AI was used to record, synthesize and analyze the deliberations of a typically closed-door civic assembly on youth homelessness. With the consent of assembly members, highlights from these small-group recordings can be shared with the public, adding a new layer of transparency to the process and allowing outside citizens to see more clearly what actually comprised the deliberations.

AI could also help improve the quality of deliberation itself. For example, DeepMind’s Habermas Machine demonstrated in a 2024 Science study that an LLM could more effectively find common ground among divided groups than human mediators. Crucially, such tools aim to augment collective decision-making without replacing the essential human work of judgment and compromise.

These scenarios of governing with AI instead of being governed by it may sound cumbersome precisely because they are designed to reinsert friction where technocracy — or “algocracy,” government by algorithm — chases it away. But friction is not inherently bad. In politics, it is often the handrail that prevents a stumble into passivity.

Liberal democracy’s original genius was not merely the ballot box; it was the creation of multiple forums — town meetings, juries, local councils, civic associations — where citizens encountered each other as equals capable of persuasion and compromise. Many of those forums have withered under the pressures of mass society, mass media and now mass data, and with them, so too has the fabric of liberal democracy.

Obeying In Advance

In his well-known book “Bowling Alone,” published in 2000, Robert Putnam began charting the arc of withering American forums, noting declines in league sports, union membership and civic clubs throughout the late 20th century as globalization kicked into overdrive. Three decades later, the metrics have only worsened: local newspapers shutter weekly, worship attendance continues to thin, and the archetypal “meet-cute” has been replaced by a seemingly endless number of online dating apps.

The attrition of face-to-face venues for collective life did not start with the microchip, but algorithms and digital networks have accelerated the erosion. The result is a surplus of individual exposure to information and a deficit of shared context or mutual understanding of how decisions are made and who makes them. Reviving those shared spaces, even in digital form, would be messy, slower than letting code decide everything on its own. But it is also the only path that preserves the promise Fukuyama celebrated: that each person can be both author and audience of the laws that govern them.

None of this denies AI’s power to make certain decisions more efficient and less biased, improving the way government functions and potentially even saving lives. Nor does it trivialize the more dramatic, headline-grabbing risks of AI. It is entirely possible that future systems might acquire capabilities hazardous to humanity, that autonomous weapons could proliferate unchecked or that deep-faked misinformation could destabilize elections.

Indeed, some of those things are already happening. But if the subtler problem of deference is left unaddressed, societies will grow ill-equipped to confront those larger perils — the muscle of civic agency will have already atrophied. People habituated to letting machines decide the mundane will struggle to reassert control when the stakes turn existential.

In the 20th century, Hannah Arendt’s renowned writing on the “banality of evil” revealed how Nazi administrative machinery depended not on ideological fervor but on bureaucratic compliance — civil servants like Adolf Eichmann who processed deportation orders with the same dutiful efficiency they brought to tax collection or municipal planning.

The system’s horror lay partly in how it transformed moral choices into technical procedures, making collaboration feel like competent administration rather than complicity in genocide. According to Arendt, in fact, Eichmann’s gravest crime was his failure to think for himself.

The Soviet Union, Arendt’s other locus of totalitarian analysis, followed a similar trajectory, albeit one that extended through the end of the Cold War. By the 1970s, many Soviet citizens had developed what psychologists call “learned helplessness” in the face of bureaucratic systems that rendered individual agency meaningless. This was a new, deeper form of political repression. It represented the internalization of procedural thinking that made independent judgment feel impossible or irrelevant. When Mikhail Gorbachev initiated a more open, consultative government in 1985 with glasnost, many citizens struggled to engage constructively, having lost familiarity with democratic deliberation and compromise.

The historian Timothy Snyder has argued that the path to tyranny is often paved by individuals who “obey in advance,” anticipating what authoritarian leaders want and preemptively meeting them halfway to avoid conflict. In the age of AI, this phenomenon appears poised to occur at an algorithmic scale, as individuals modify their behavior for a world shaped by omniscient machines.

We are already seeing preliminary signs of this impulse. A July Pew Research Center study found that when Google precedes its search results with AI‑generated summaries, users open far fewer links and often end their search right there. While convenient, by accepting the first synthesized response, we also implicitly accept what the algorithm has deemed important. More likely than us abruptly waking to a world of AI rule, the danger of deference by design is that we will continue to streamline our habits of inquiry and judgment to suit the technology’s parameters, until the habits themselves are emptied of agency. In that sense, AI is less a sudden usurper than the logical culmination of a political culture that has been hollowing out democratic publics and handing off judgment, piece by piece, for decades.

The road ahead, therefore, forks. Down one path lies the continuing consolidation of decision-making power in algorithmic platforms owned by corporations or agencies whose internal logics are obscure to the public. Citizens, numbed by convenience and resigned to complexity, perform citizenship as a spectator sport, casting ballots that merely reshuffle the supervisory committee overseeing an automated empire.

Down the other path lies a conscious effort to embed participation and contestability into every major system that touches communal life, accepting slower throughput and periodic gridlock as the price of freedom. The first path is lubricated by efficiency and the myth of objective expertise; the second is rocky, contentious and labor-intensive — yet it is the only route that keeps alive the foundational democratic claim that the governed never surrender the right to govern.

AI will not, by itself, extinguish or redeem democracy. It will elevate whichever habits we choose to cultivate. If we preserve the paradigm of deference, AI will become the ultimate bureaucrat, inscrutable and unanswerable. If we cultivate habits of shared judgment, AI can become an extraordinarily powerful amplifier of human insight, a tool that frees time for deliberation rather than replacing it. The decision between those futures cannot be delegated; it belongs to us as humans. How we make it may be the most important act of civic recognition we can offer one another in this new age of thinking machines.

The post Rescuing Democracy From The Quiet Rule Of AI appeared first on NOEMA.

This could only be achieved, as he saw it, if his nation firmly anchored itself in “the West” through a liberal democratic constitution in a Federal Republic cemented by Atlanticist ties to America.

For Habermas, the way to detach allegiance from association with the ethnic nation and Volk was what he called “constitutional patriotism.” In other words, loyalty to democratic institutions and norms over and above any nativist appeal to the authoritarian tribal politics of us versus them. Though Habermas understood democracy could be improved through more deliberative practices, this baseline was for him what would make Germany “truly Western.”

It is therefore no small irony that, on the 35th anniversary celebration of the post-Cold War unification of Germany last week in Saarbrücken, the present chancellor, Friedrich Merz, was compelled to defend liberal democracy “as a way of life,” not least against the threat emanating from America these days.

In effect, the tables have turned: Once prodigal Germany now hopes America will remain anchored in the West as it steadily lurches toward illiberal democracy at home and wobbles on defending Ukraine and the rest of Europe from Russian aggression.

“The centers of power in the world are shifting to an extent not seen since the end of the Cold War,” Merz observed. “An axis of autocratic states that challenges the liberal order around the world is directly challenging Western democracies. That is why we must regain the ability to defend our freedom. … The radiance of what we in the West call liberal democracy is noticeably diminishing. It is no longer a given that the world will orient itself toward us, that it will follow our values of liberal democracy.”

Though obviously referring to Russia and China, previous comments by Merz leave little doubt that he also had America in mind. The U.S “has changed so fundamentally over the last few years, perhaps decades, that rules are no longer being followed, parliamentary democracy is under pressure, freedom of expression is being called into question, and the independence of the judiciary is being repressed,” he told a business conference in Berlin in September.

The Dark Enlightenment

French President Emmanuel Macron followed up Merz’s remarks in Saarbrücken with equal alarm about “the degeneration of democracy” across the West.

Beyond threats from the outside, he warned, “on the inside we are turning on ourselves; we doubt our own democracy. We see everywhere that something is happening to our democratic fabric. Democratic debate is turning into a debate of hatred.”

He continued: “We’ve been incredibly naïve, handing over our public democratic space to social networks owned by big American entrepreneurs and Chinese firms whose interests are not at all the survival and the good functioning of our democracy.”

Macron even raised the specter of “the return of the Dark Enlightenment” of authoritarianism. In the present-day context, the “Dark Enlightenment” refers to a movement that promotes an alliance of autocrats and Silicon Valley AI accelerationists to more efficiently run societies like corporations, with a decisive authoritarian CEO, algorithms that replace democratic deliberation and a belief in technological solutions to all of humanity’s problems.

The French president called on Europeans to mount a “resurgence” to “rebuild a 21st-century democracy” if “we want science, culture, education and learning to be at the heart of the public space.” Otherwise, he said, “we risk becoming a continent, like many others, of conspiracy theorists, extremes, noise, and fury.”

Patriotism In Diverse Societies

Habermas formulated his theory of “constitutional patriotism” as a historical response to an authoritarian ideology of racial superiority in what was then a largely homogenous society. It was conceived as a brake against any temptation to succumb once again to the siren call of the Volksgeist transmuted into aggressive nationalism.

Yet, the idea of constitutional patriotism that Habermas believed would make his nation “truly Western” could also serve today as a guiding political philosophy and rallying cry of the oppositional forces to the relentless creep of illiberalism in the most diverse of all nations: America.

If allegiance to individual rights, due process under the rule of law, the separation of powers, judicial independence and free expression are what constitute the West and distinguish it from the axis of authoritarianism, then defending constitutional rule is the most patriotic stance Americans from all walks of life can take.

That it is has fallen to Germans to remind America of what the West is all about suggests we have come full circle to a point where the most ardent pupils of democracy must now tutor their mentors who seem to have forgotten the lessons they once taught so well.

The post ‘Constitutional Patriotism’ appeared first on NOEMA.

Prodigious leaps in technology, science, productive capacity and planetary interconnectedness herald a future that humanity has only dreamed of in the past. Yet these great transformations underway seem to have triggered in their wake a great political and cultural reaction among the multitudes they have bypassed or threaten to uproot. One is a condition of the other.

What is clear is that history is fast approaching an inflection point. We live either on the cusp of an entirely new era or on the brink of a return to an all-too-familiar, regressive and darker past.

From the tumultuous realm of geopolitical conflict to the roiling culture wars, the advent of intelligent machines and the capacity to redesign the human genome, a new Age of Upheaval is clearly upon us.

To help navigate the perilous and promising rapids of oncoming times, the Berggruen Institute has launched a new podcast: Futurology. This weekly series complements Noema in seeking out cutting-edge minds on the frontiers of change, looking to define the paradigm shifts that will help make sense of the world we are entering and figure out how to dwell in it.

The first episodes of the Futurology podcast illustrate its scope and breadth. You can find them on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.

Contemplating the extreme polarization in America these days, historian Niall Ferguson thinks the country is entering a “late republic stage” like the last days of the Roman Republic before it lapsed into an empire. Francis Fukuyama sees not the end of history, but the return to 19th-century-type spheres of influence among the great powers. Stateswoman Anne-Marie Slaughter envisions a more fluid world order with networks of the willing and middle powers playing a key role.

The so-called “godmother of AI,” Fei-Fei Li, argues it is up to us humans to put robots in their place and control them before they control us. Vandi Verman, the Jet Propulsion Lab scientist who guided the Mars Rover expedition, discusses how robots will be the ambassadors of the human species on other planets. John Markoff, the chronicler of the rise of Silicon Valley, worries about the new “cyberocracy” that is coming to dominate all of society. Thomas Moynihan fleshes out the philosophical implications of discovering that we humans are on a course to our own extinction. Indian novelist Rana Dasgupta ponders the contradiction that the “nation-state” is both obsolete — and experiencing a revival. Scholar Stephen Batchelor wonders what the world would be like if governed by Buddhists.

In the most recent episode of Futurology out this week, Nicolas Berggruen and I recount the origins of the Institute and our various projects over the last decade, from “The Think Long Committee” for California to our 21st Century Council meetings in Beijing with Chinese President Xi Jinping. We trace the evolution of the “three Ps” that are the programmatic core of the Institute’s work: planetary realism, pre-distribution of wealth through universal basic capital and participation without populism.

Upcoming episodes will also include the literary journalist Pico Iyer on how the world he has so relentlessly traveled is less connected today than when he wrote “Video Night in Kathmandu” nearly 40 years ago, and philosopher David Chalmers on solving “the hard problem” of determining the origins of consciousness.

Each podcast is introduced by Berggruen Institute President Dawn Nakagawa. You can tune in every Tuesday here.

The post Introducing The Futurology Podcast appeared first on NOEMA.