Discussion Main / EndOfAnAge

This section was cut out for the reason, "We need more time and objectivity to say the era ended." Maybe it could be reinstated in a YMMV sub-tab:

• The Western liberal democratic consensus that seemed rock-solid after the Soviet Union broke up has taken a battering in The New '10s from many different directions. Chief among them:
  • The Greek financial crisis, the refugee crisis, the 2015 Paris attacks and the Brexit referendum seem to be putting an end to the EU's dream of a unified Europe.
  • On top of that, the Global Financial Crisis, a.k.a. the 'Great Recession', of 2008 onwards could be heralding the beginning of the end of the neo-liberal financial sector dominance that was spearheaded by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. What sets the GFC apart from previous recessions is that large financial institutions that managed to survive The Great Depression of the 1930s and subsequent recessions, and heavily benefited from deregulation in the 1980s, were at the heart of the crisis. In fact, David Smick of the Washington Post wrote in 2012 that the "globalization model of the past 30 years is cracking up. And there appears to be no new model to replace it."
  • Since then, the neo-liberal economic order has come under further pressure from the emergence of populist political figures making appeals to those hit hardest by the Great Recession, such as Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in America, and Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn in Britain (which as earlier mentioned voted to leave the EU).
  • The re-emergence of political strongmen in the early 21st Century such as Donald Trump in America, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayip Erdogan in Turkey, and various populist nationalist leaders in Europe, is believed to have dealt a blow to the liberal democracy of the post-Cold War period as described by Francis Fukuyama in "The End of History". Hostility towards international treaty-based economies, disdain towards migrants, and a desire to return to isolationism may spell an end to globalized communities. Fukuyama himself has revisited the topic with a noticeably gloomier outlook from his End of History thesis.
  • Some say the 2016 election was also the end of moderate conservatism, as the GOP moved further to the right and started openly embracing the nationalistic rhetoric of the alt-right, which led to more traditional Republicans performing badly in elections.
  • Further compounding the nationalist resurgence has been incidents of political violence, most infamously in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

Too soon to add?

• With the increasing dominance of Big Tech, the early idealism of the World Wide Web has given way to the formation of echo chambers on social media that have fomented political polarisation, and the Internet of Things that is perceived to have caused disruption to more bricks-and-mortar jobs than it has created.