Why Were Hopes of the 1990s Dashed?

As one who shared the hope, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, that representative government, guaranteed liberties and global capitalism laced with some measure of welfare state protections would spread across the globe, I naturally look back over the intervening long generation and ask what went wrong.

In the 1990s, it seemed to many that the vision of Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History and the Last Man" would prevail. Not that bad things would never happen again. Fukuyama's more subtle thesis was that after the debacle of communism, there was no intellectually viable alternative to some combination of political democracy and market capitalism as the means to a decent society.

But the past three decades have seen the vitality of politically viable alternatives -- China's dictatorial and Russia's authoritarian state-directed capitalism, the oppressive clerical regimes of Shiite Iran, and various Sunni Muslim states. By Freedom House's sophisticated measures, 2004 saw a high point in global freedom, which has been in decline ever since.

How to explain this trend, the opposite of what I hoped for and predicted? As I have reflected on this question, I've fallen back on an article I wrote in 1993 for Irving Kristol's Public Interest, in which I identified four types of political parties. Two were based on European conflicts over religion: Religious parties favored established churches, and liberal parties favored the separation of church and state.

Two others, socialist and nationalist, had their beginnings in attempts to rally the masses in the failed European revolutions of 1848, appealing to their working-class interests or their folk national yearnings.

Structural features -- the Electoral College, the single-member House and Senate seats -- push American politics into a two-party system in which both are incentivized to amass 50% majorities in what has always been a culturally and economically diverse nation. So America's political parties, operating in a unique republican framework and under democratic rules that predated Europe's, have partaken of each of these four impulses in varying degrees.

In my Public Interest article, I argued that religious parties tend to fade out in nations with no majority faith, liberal parties tend to collapse as their characteristic skepticism leaves them yielding to violent opposition parties, and socialist parties tend to peter out because, at some point, socialism fails to work. Parties that endure, I argued, were, in some major respect, nationalist.

American politics over the past 30 years provides some confirmation. The market-respecting liberalism of former President Bill Clinton's Democratic Party yielded to the woke socialism of former Presidents Barack Obama's and Joe Biden's. The religious emphasis and market economics of the Reagan-Bush Republican Party yielded to the demotic nationalism of President Donald Trump's. And Trump won, despite lawfare persecution, a significant and possibly enduring victory over the Democrats' woke socialism last November.

My conclusion in 1993 and, tentatively, now is that nationalism is the glue that holds parties and nations together. The republican nationalism of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the democratic nationalism of Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, and the nationalism of the two Roosevelt presidents, who remain vivid figures 116 and 80 years after leaving office.

The problem we have encountered over the last 30 years is that other countries' nationalisms are not like America's. It turns out that neither the leaders nor the masses in Muslim nations have much interest in electoral democracy, market capitalism or the rule of law.

It turns out that the leaders of Western Europe, traumatized by the horrifying wars of the first half of the 20th century, seek a transnational harmony that overrules nations' democratic electorates and smothers market capitalism with regulations. In reaction, Britain voted to leave the European Union in 2016, as the formerly (under Tony Blair) liberal Labour Party split into socialist and Scottish National parties, and the long-dominant Conservatives into high-education Conservatives and the Trumpish Reform UK party.

In the 1990s, there was reason to hope that Russia was moving toward democracy and that China, despite the Tiananmen Square massacre, would move away from repression and toward convergence with rules-based market economies. Instead, Russian President Vladimir Putin grabbed power from the flailing Boris Yeltsin, and Chinese President Xi Jinping jailed one rival and abolished his predecessors' term limits. Putin has been in power for 25 years, almost as long as Joseph Stalin's 29, while Xi has been in power for 13 years, about half as long as Mao Zedong's 27.

Putin has been following a nationalist policy that dates back not only to Stalin but also to the czars, expanding Russia's power outward from Muscovy in every direction -- though not as far in Ukraine as he hoped and expected. Xi evidently sees China as its emperors did for 2,000 years, as the greatest nation in the world, unfortunately recovering from a hundred years of humiliation by Western powers and Japan.

Something similar has been happening in Mexico. Economic integration with Mexico and replacement of its one-party authoritarian rule by democratic rotation in office and the rule of law was the goal of the North American Free Trade Agreement, pushed in the 1990s by Presidents George H.W. Bush and Clinton, and Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, who grew up on a ranch facing the Lower Rio Grande. NAFTA was ratified, the economies converged, and, as I witnessed, the opposition party ended 71 years of Institutional Revolutionary Party rule in July 2000.

But Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, elected in 2018, has reinstalled one-party rule and government control of the economy, and his handpicked successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, was elected with 61% of the vote. AMLO, as Obrador is universally known, managed to reach accommodations with Trump, and Sheinbaum has as well. But Mexico remains culturally distant, with uncertain property rights and opaque governance despite its geographic proximity.

One lesson seems to be that national character matters and that it is more a product of deep-seated history than of recent American policy initiatives. It pops up even when you don't expect it and can't be transformed by paper guarantees.

Another lesson is that America, with its unique Constitution, fashioned in 1787, revised in 1865-70 and, arguably, again in 1937-41, is indeed exceptional -- and that American exceptionalism is a wine that does not travel.

A third lesson is that the hopes of the 1990s were not totally dashed. Eighty-five years ago, in 1940, a time when some current leaders, such as Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), were living, Adolf Hitler and Stalin were allies in command of or with their allies holding most of the landmass of Eurasia, opposed actively only by Great Britain, whose air force and navy were stretched to the limit.

Representative government, guaranteed liberties and global capitalism laced with some measure of welfare state protections are much better off today than they were then, thanks in large part to the leadership at the time of the British nationalist Winston Churchill, the American nationalist Franklin Roosevelt and the French nationalist Charles de Gaulle -- something to keep in mind as we bewail our current discontents.

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Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. His new book, "Mental Maps of the Founders: How Geographic Imagination Guided America's Revolutionary Leaders," is now available.