End of History

TRUMPISM IS NOT AN ALTERNATIVE TO LIBERALISM:

Hungary: Orban’s ouster heralds thaw in EU ties (Timothy Jones, 4/13/26, AP, AFP, Reuters)

Hungarian voters turned out in force on Sunday to deliver a landslide victory to pro-European candidate Peter Magyar, who has pledged to turn the country away from its far-right, authoritarian course under Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Magyar’s center-right Tisza party is set to gain 138 seats in Hungary’s 199-seat parliament, giving it five seats more than the two-thirds needed to push through the reforms the 45-year-old former Orban loyalist promised on the campaign trail.

THE IDEA OF THE wEST IS UNIVERSALISM:

The West is an idea: There has never been a single concept of the West, which helps explain its potency as an idea. (Jeremy Jennings, 3/12/26, Englesberg Ideas)

Some of these criticisms of the West might well be justified but, in Varouxakis’ view, the call for the wholesale demolition of western civilisation risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater. A better approach, he suggests, is for us to cease referring to the institutions and ideas we hold dear as ‘western’ and to begin referring to them by universal names. ‘They deserve’, he writes, ‘to be adopted not because they are “Western” but rather because they are freedom-promoting, fair, equitable, conducive to justice, peace-promoting, happiness-enhancing, and so on.’ The classic texts of Greek and Roman literature, he holds, ‘constitute an inheritance for the whole of humanity’.

hISTORY eNDS EVERYWHERE:

Nepal climbs its Everest of honesty (The Monitor’s Editorial Board, March 09, 2026, CS Monitor)

Nepal is the third South Asian country in recent years – after Sri Lanka and Bangladesh – to demand both democratic and generational change in political systems characterized by entrenched leadership, nepotism, and inefficiency. In all three nations, youth-led street protests resoundingly called for honesty and accountability, and ousted longtime political leaders, including – last September – Nepal’s four-term Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli.

Why did you evolve into a liberal democracy? Because it’s there.

ONE FOR DONALD:

A Quiet Peace in the Caucasus Could Change the Balance of Power (Renee Pruneau Novakoff, 3/05/26, Cipher Brief)

The peace deal signed at the White House between Armenia and Azerbaijan last August could reverse a trajectory of bloodshed and hatred between those two countries and replace those cornerstones of their relationship with peace, prosperity and stability.

It could start a new trade route to Europe that bypasses Russia. This would leave Moscow, which has manipulated politics in that part of the world for centuries, out in the cold. There is still a long way to go but the dynamics are positive, and the time is right to make this happen.

Iran knows that and last night, Azeri authorities say that Tehran attacked the Caucasus with drones […]

I was an analyst at CIA in 1988 and spent my days writing about and briefing policy makers about the Armenian and Azerbaijan conflict over Nagorno Karabakh. I spent a lot of time trying to explain why the two sides were fighting over this mountainous area that has no oil or minerals of much worth. It was hard to explain to practical U.S. policy makers how the Russians set up this conflict as a way to keep control over their Muslim and Christian neighbors.

The current peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan is something I never expected. If it lasts, it will allow these two countries to focus on their economic growth and stability instead of wasting blood and treasure on centuries old hatreds instigated by their neighbor.

NOW THE REFORMATION:

The Coming Iranian Revolution (Abbas Milani, 3/03/26, NY Times)

The people of Iran wanted a revolution based on the idea of modern citizenship and a social contract, to bring democracy, freedom, independence and a republic, even an Islamic one but without clerical rule. Ayatollah Khomeini promised those ideas, giving Iranians and the Western powers what they were desperate to hear. In the end, what he orchestrated was a counterrevolution.

In a suburb of Paris, in the months before the overthrow of the shah, the ayatollah gave scores of interviews. He concealed his political ambition and suggested he would ultimately step back from governance, though in past writings he often espoused rule by the clergy. He even wrote a letter to President Jimmy Carter, asking him to defang the Iranian military and promising to keep Iran free of Soviet domination and the country’s oil on the markets. But all along, he was keen on clerical despotism and, as it soon became apparent, harbored deep resentments against the United States.

In another indication of his counterrevolutionary mode, many people in predominantly Shiite Iran believed that a reformed conception of Shiism was needed to make it amenable to modernity. But Ayatollah Khomeini, from his first major book in the 1940s and later as the supreme Shiite religious authority, insisted on keeping traditional rituals and dogmas, thus quashing the idea of modernizing Shiite Islam.

The romance of revolution, ignorance about Ayatollah Khomeini’s past writings and his pose as a defender of a liberal democratic polity in the months before the shah’s overthrow made the bait and switch work, albeit briefly. Iranians from all walks of life, Western leaders and many prominent intellectuals saw him as the flag bearer of Iran’s democratic aspirations.

Now Iran just needs to return to the traditional Shi’a wait for the messiah, like the West.

WHAT’S LEFT OF WHITE SUPREMACY…:

The System Everyone Hates Is the One That Has Actually Worked (Richard Hanania, Oct 24, 2025, Doomslayer)

Neoliberalism was a response to stagnation and malaise around the globe. Outside the Communist Bloc, the mid-20th century was dominated by Keynesianism in the West and state-led development in the Global South. Governments regulated industries, controlled capital flows, and expanded welfare states. By the 1970s, cracks appeared in this system: stagflation (low growth and high unemployment) in the United States and Europe and recurring fiscal crises discredited state-centered models. In the developing world, mounting debt and balance-of-payments problems forced governments to seek assistance from international institutions, setting the stage for policy change.

This atmosphere of crisis created an opening for market-oriented thinkers who had been marginalized in earlier decades, perhaps most notably the Chicago University economist Milton Friedman, who would win the Nobel Prize for economics in 1976 and become highly influential as a public figure advocating for deregulation. The law and economics movement, centered on figures including Ronald Coase, Richard Posner, and Gary Becker, also emerged at the University of Chicago, and they began to apply cost-benefit analysis to government regulations that had previously gone unquestioned. They called for taking efficiency concerns into consideration when interpreting legal doctrine.

Neoliberalism was characterized by taking seriously classical liberalism’s commitment to free markets and limited government. In the context of the world created by the 1970s, this approach meant slowing the growth in the money supply, deregulating industry, taking a skeptical approach to labor unions and industrial policy, opening markets up to the free flow of capital and trade, and in some cases, trying to shrink or at least prevent the expansion of the welfare state.

This cross-partisan convergence toward such ideas beginning in the late 1970s and continuing into the early 2000s has been called hegemonic neoliberalism. The first wave was identified with the right, associated with the tenures of Ronald Reagan (1981–1989) and Margaret Thatcher (1979–1990). The second came in the 1990s in the form of the “Third Way” leaders, notably Bill Clinton (1993–2001) and Tony Blair (1997–2007). Far from rejecting their conservative predecessors, they consolidated the new order: Clinton championed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), welfare reform, and financial deregulation, while Blair’s New Labour accepted Thatcherite economic reforms.

…once you have a system where everyone succeeds? The End of History demonstrates that white men are nothing special.