When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, many people in the West felt that a great force beyond a country had vanished. For fifty years, two rival ideas had faced each other, each insisting that it was the best way to arrange politics and society. Then suddenly one of those ideas disappeared. Francis Fukuyama called this event the “End of History.” That phrase has likely been misinterpreted more often than it has been studied carefully. He was not suggesting that history, in the ordinary sense, would simply stop and that nothing important would happen again.

That would have been a rather strange claim for a political scientist to make. His argument was more specific: liberal democracy appeared to have outlived its serious ideological competitors. Conflicts would continue, certainly, but they would increasingly take place within the broad framework of liberal democracy rather than between fundamentally different systems.

Seen from the perspective of 1991, this was not an entirely unreasonable conclusion. The problem is that history did not turn out in the way that Fukuyama and many other thinkers had predicted. Thirty years later, the growing power of right‑wing, nationalist, and populist movements in democracies that were once thought to be safe forces us to rethink that confidence. What became of the expectation that liberal democracy had become the political horizon?

Competing Explanations

There is a temptation to answer that question quickly. One common explanation is economic: liberalism failed to spread the benefits of globalization and market expansion, leaving large portions of society insecure and resentful. Another explanation gives weight to culture, arguing that intolerance and exclusionary attitudes either remained hidden beneath the surface or were successfully mobilized by political actors. Both explanations capture part of the story. Neither, however, is sufficient on its own.

Both of these answers contain a kernel of something true, but neither one, taken alone, is patient enough with what actually happened. What seems closer to the truth is that liberalism’s expansion after the Cold War, tied as it was to globalization, to market integration, and to an increasing emphasis on the individual as the basic unit of social life, set off a chain of disruptions that unfolded over years rather than months.

These disruptions produced insecurity, of more than one kind, and this insecurity did not translate itself into politics automatically. It had to be translated. The right proved remarkably effective at doing so, turning a diffuse and often unnamed unease into a story about authority, about belonging, about a nation that had lost something and might still reclaim it. To understand how this translation took place, it helps to examine each layer of the process on its terms before considering how they ultimately fit together.

Tensions Within Globalization

Begin with the layer since it is the one most people reach for first and, for evenness and reason, the one most often flattened into a slogan. Globalization, whatever else can be said about it, did produce benefits. Trade expanded, supply chains grew more........

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