Humpty Dumpty Had a Great Fall

And no one knows how to put him together again.

We are living through a change in political dispensation, one whose magnitude is—at a conservative estimate—likely to resemble Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal or Ronald Reagan’s rebellion against the postwar consensus.

A change in dispensation usually entails two stages. First, the old way of doing things runs out of steam. There is a long period in which it comes to look increasingly outmoded, its ability to solve problems palpably diminishes, and popular support for it gradually erodes. Then a new politician or political movement comes to power determined to disrupt the old order, often in a way that is—initially, and sometimes persistently—inchoate, chaotic or irresponsible.

The first of these elements has been in evidence for at least a decade. The second fully kicked into gear on January 20, 2025.

All across the Western world, traditional political forces are visibly running out of steam. In Europe, moderates have proven unable to offer a viable vision for the continent’s economic future or to heed voters’ long-standing pleas for them to gain control over their own borders. Parties accustomed to being the giants of the postwar political landscape are turning into midgets as a result. In France, the Socialists and the Republicans have all but disappeared from the map. In Germany, the Social Democrats are polling at 15 percent in the run-up to national elections later this month. In Britain, Nigel Farage’s Reform Party is, according to current polls, leading both Labour and the Conservatives.

The parties of the old order aren’t faring much better in America. The Republicans have fully surrendered to the hostile takeover staged by Donald Trump. The party of Ronald Reagan is no more; attempts to resuscitate it will almost certainly prove futile. The Democrats, meanwhile, are more unpopular than they have been in many decades, in part because they are in denial about their own nature. While Democratic candidates like Kamala Harris still faithfully recite the claim of being the party of working people, her electoral coalition more closely resembles the alliance of high-income and high-education voters put together by Bob Dole in 1996 than that of his opponent, Bill Clinton.

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I don’t mean to vilify or ridicule these political forces. For my sins, I still instinctively identify with them. But any honest attempt at diagnosing the current political moment must begin with the recognition that, at least in their current form, they have come to feel like relics of a defunct past: bit players faithfully reading their tired scripts long after the audience has decamped to another show.

The disoriented sleepwalking of these traditional political forces is all the more striking when it is compared to the confident self-assertion of the challengers who now appear to be in the process of supplanting them. For the last years, it has become clear that populists of every ilk have become a major, perhaps even the dominant, part of the Western political landscape. Where they won power, such as in Turkey and Venezuela, in India and Hungary, it also became clear that they were capable of eroding the rules and norms that traditionally constrained the power of the executive. But especially in the most long-standing democracies, their ability to impose their will in a lasting way remained in serious doubt.

The radicalism and the rapidity with which the incoming Trump administration is now transforming the United States is dispelling that uncertainty. In his first weeks in office, Trump has fired thousands of federal bureaucrats and effectively shuttered a number of government departments. He has thrown key parts of the global economic system overboard by embracing broad-based tariffs and transformed foreign policy by threatening long-standing U.S. allies like Denmark, Panama and Canada. He has taken revenge on his political enemies by revoking the security detail of some of his critics and rewarded his political friends by pardoning those convicted for taking part in January 6. Soon, he may go so far as to transform the relationship between the executive and the judiciary by ignoring court rulings meant to restrain his power.

It is by no means foreordained that Trump will be able to sustain the level of popularity he currently enjoys, nor that he will be able to install a handpicked successor in the White House. But, day by day, it is becoming less likely that things will ever go back to the status quo ante. Even if Democrats win in 2028, the next administration will, for example, be unlikely to reconstitute the federal bureaucracy in its previous state after tens of thousands of employees have left and scores of departments have shuttered.

Over the course of my lifetime, a political order that seemed natural and even inevitable has transmogrified into an ancien régime that, even to its most ardent supporters, feels increasingly outmoded. Now, the political forces which don’t in any way feel beholden to that old order have taken power, and are gleefully dismantling it.

Right before our eyes, Humpty Dumpty has tumbled from a great height. For years, he remained suspended in midair, seemingly defying the laws of physics. Now he is about to hit the ground. We don’t yet know the full magnitude of the impact. But it is already clear that all the establishment’s horses and all the establishment’s men won’t be able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

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For those of us who observe these developments with concern, and believe that there are at least some things in the old order worth preserving, the response to these momentous changes should be serious introspection. Here are three questions, in roughly ascending order of difficulty, to which we should, at a minimum, have a decent answer:

1. Why did the old dispensation lose the support of so many people?

2. Where does the popularity of radical (and, yes, often irresponsible) alternatives to it come from?

3. What might a future look like that addresses these shortcomings in a more responsible way—one that doesn’t insist on returning to a past that is likely gone forever but can credibly promise that we will more fully live up to the most deeply held values and the most oft-repeated promises of our political order?

These questions are incredibly hard to answer. Based on the many pieces I have read and the many conferences and convenings I have attended over the past months, nobody (including me) seems to have a particularly developed or convincing answer to them, especially when it comes to the more difficult, forward-looking ones. But the thing that shocks me the most isn’t that we don’t yet have the answers; it’s that nobody wants to admit the extent to which we are stumbling around in the dark.

This refusal to recognize the depth of the crisis is best encapsulated by the insistence of the newly-elected Chair of the DNC that Democrats don’t need to change. “We’ve got the right message,” a victorious Ken Martin told party faithfuls, ignoring the fact that nearly twice as many Americans now have a negative as opposed to a positive opinion of his party—the worst level since Quinnipiac started asking the question in 2007. But it goes much further than that, extending from progressives to centrists, and from politicians to social scientists.

When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, the various constituencies of the American establishment developed varied, sometimes overlapping, and nearly always self-serving answers to the urgent questions Trump’s victory posed. Here, to give but a sampling, are three of them: Leftists who had always claimed that America’s biggest problem was economic inequality claimed that Trump’s rise was caused by economic inequality and promised that fixing economic inequality would reduce Trump’s support. Identitarians who had always claimed that racism and sexism and other forms of bigotry were America’s biggest problem claimed that racism and sexism and other forms of bigotry had gotten Trump elected and promised that the best way to beat him was to organize the marches and equity programs and diversity trainings that would fight racism and sexism and other forms of bigotry. Social scientists, for the most part, offered an account that implied the need for even less action or self-reflection: Trump, they reassured their grateful readers, had been elected due to the nostalgia and “racial resentment” of old, white men; since the segments of the population staging this “last stand” against the inevitable were thankfully declining as a share of the electorate, the threat they posed was sure to prove temporary.

In the wake of Trump’s reelection, enormous mental acrobatics are required to maintain any of these narratives. That doesn’t mean that their advocates haven’t given it the old college try.

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The American electorate has become a lot more diverse since 2024. But while white people have become more likely to vote for Democrats, Hispanics, Asian-Americans and even African-Americans have become much more likely to vote for Trump. The dominant social scientific account of how Trump could win his first presidential term is rendered nonsensical by the manner in which he won his second presidential term.

Since 2016, scores of equity initiatives were started in every realm of society and Americans have undergone millions of diversity trainings. And yet, racism and sexism and bigotry have supposedly gotten still worse than they were ten years ago, even spreading to non-white groups that are now newly suspected of being “white-adjacent.” Despite such attempts to stick to the script, the idea that racism and sexism and other forms of bigotry provide the main explanation for the Trump phenomenon are looking very shaky.

Finally, the deep, genuine economic distress of the Great Recession, which was commonly invoked as an explanation for the rise of populists in the 2010s, has now long been in the rear view mirror. Though he was a lifelong moderate running in the moderate lane during the 2020 primaries, Joe Biden pursued a robustly progressive set of economic policies as president, including trillions in stimulus spending. Those who nevertheless want to stick to an economic account of the rise of Trump try their best to explain why American voters are expressing their deep desire for more left-wing policies by voting for a proudly right-wing politician like Donald Trump. But logic is not on their side.

What all of these elaborate forms of denial amount to is a soaring background hum of self-delusion, one that is evident to everyone outside a laboriously self-deafening elite. And that denial, as it usually does, starts at home, with an inability to look into the mirror and recognize ourselves for who we are. For at least two decades now, we have had an establishment mostly composed of people pretending that they are staging a great revolt against the powerful. We are ruled by a (mostly meritocratic) caste of the privileged phenomenally adept at identifying and exaggerating and broadcasting the small ways in which they are comparatively underprivileged. We have handed the reins of large swathes of our society over to supposed experts who have, again and again, turned out to be conspicuously inexpert in fulfilling the important tasks with which they have been entrusted.

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I don’t know what all of this means. I don’t know how to answer the three questions I posed earlier. I don’t know how to preserve what I love or how to fight for a better future or how to do both at the same time.

Only of one thing do I feel reasonably confident right now: Anybody who tells you that you can just revert back to the most pleasing explanation for the mess we are in—anyone who is certain that the things they have always thought have somehow been proven correct by events they totally failed to anticipate—is lying to you, and probably themselves.

We will not fix this problem by competing for who can call Trump the worst names. We will not fix this problem by reverting to the playbook of the #resistance that failed the first time around. We will not fix this problem by doubling down on a worldview that has proven to be deeply polarizing and toxically unpopular. And anybody who, like the new chair of the DNC, confidently asserts that they have the right message most definitely doesn’t.

So here’s the only piece of wisdom I feel qualified to offer right now, one that is admittedly both inchoate and anticlimactic: We need to slow down. We need to look ourselves in the mirror. We need to recognize the many ways in which we have failed to understand the world, and our own country, and our place within it. We need to think, long and hard, without making excuses or jumping to conclusions or seeking refuge in well-meaning bromides or self-righteous outrage.

It scares the hell out of me that this seems to be the last thing anyone seems to want to do right now.