We originally published this essay in December of 2022 but are re-publishing and updating it today due to a variety of recent events which relate to its central thesis.
In his book Return of the Strong Gods, First Things editor Rusty Reno suggests that we are nearing the end of the long 20th century and, with it, the end of the American-centric global order that defined the latter stage of that era. It was a world pervasively defined by a fusion of capitalist economics and liberal democratic politics. The Pax Americana protected and preserved this order, with America seeking to draw as many nations into it as possible because the alternative was seeing plausible trading partners instead brought into closer alignment with the Soviet Union. And so it was ultimately a world marked by what the political commentator Peter Zeihan describes as a bribe, a bribe much of the world accepted. Trade in thick national or regional identities, trade in strong religious claims, and trade in any other sort of thick communal markers that instill a sense of purpose and grandeur in your community, give all that up to join the American liberal free market revolution, and in return you will receive personal peace and affluence.
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