Re-reading this piece,

“After communism fell, the promises of western liberalism to transform central and eastern Europe were never fully realized – and now we are seeing the backlash.”
https://t.co/rnlRNa72fd

“Across central and eastern Europe, many of the democracies that emerged at the end of the cold war have been transformed into conspiracy-minded majoritarian regimes.”

No single factor can explain the simultaneous emergence of authoritarian anti-liberalisms in so many differently situated countries.

Yet resentment at liberal democracy’s canonical status and the politics of imitation in general has played a decisive role.

The very conceit that “there is no other way” provided an independent motive for the wave of populist xenophobia and reactionary nativism that began in central and eastern Europe, and is now washing across much of the world.

The enthusiastic copying of western models, accompanied as it was by the evacuation of Soviet troops from the region, was initially experienced as liberation.

But after two troubled decades, the downsides of this politics of imitation became too obvious to deny.

Income by race converged at the greatest rate between 1940 and 1970.

However, as of 2018, Black/white income disparities were almost exactly the same as they were in 1968, 50 years

Although clear majorities supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a national poll conducted shortly after its passage showed that 68% of Americans wanted moderation in its enforcement.

In fact, many felt that LBJ was moving too fast in implementing integration.

On the heels of Reconstruction came a period that Southerners called “redemption,” a violent project to restore white hegemony.

Redemption coincided with the vast upheaval of industrialization and urbanization, when the United States more broadly plunged into the Gilded Age.

But as the century turned and the Gilded Age gave way to the Progressive Era, a diverse group of reformers grabbed the reins of history and set a course toward greater economic equality, political bipartisanship, social cohesion and cultural communitarianism.

Some six decades later all of those upward trends reversed, setting the United States on a downward course that has brought us to the multifaceted national crisis in which we find ourselves today, which bears a remarkable resemblance to the Gilded Age.