Alvarez
Democrats and Republicans over when, exactly—not if—history ended,
which parts of our society are still stuck “in history,” and what they need
to do to catch up. Either way, the presumption is that, regardless of
what happens over the next two to six years, the great historical edifice
of neoliberal rule will hold.
This is why the Democratic and Never-Trump Republican resistance
has been largely incapable of challenging Trump’s wrecking-ball presiden-
cy on any grounds that would directly implicate the neoliberal apparatus
of which they, too, are a part. Instead, the horror and hysteria unleashed
by the ascendancy of Trump has been couched in pearl-clutching
fear over what “norms” and “traditions” the MAGA movement has
destroyed and expunged from our social world. If the neoliberal world
order remains the embodied truth of the “end of history,” then, for all
its concerned showmanship, the neoliberal establishment has yet to
demonstrate any widespread belief that history, as such, is at stake.
Perhaps this outlook is a testament to the enduring acceptance
that, as the cold dust from the collapse of the Soviet Union settled, as
the sun shone on the supposed “end of history,” all sense of historical
urgency—all sense that history is a vulnerable, perishable thing that
must be fought for—hardened into concrete. In the popular mind,
history became a settled matter, a taken-for-granted fixture in the
background of the new millennium. Gone were the days of Marxist
dialectics, Trotskyite permanent revolution, Spenglerian life cycles, the
rise and fall of civilizations charted by Arnold J. Toynbee. At last history
had stabilized on the model of Western liberal democracy; everything
thereafter, including the Trumpian takeover of government, has been
a matter of content, not form.
And yet, every day, all around us, the very meaning of history is
eroding and dissipating. On the barren shores at the end of history, even
the victors wander like historical amnesiacs. From within the worldwide