By Tolga Sahin | Staff Writer
The post–World War II order is not slowly winding down. It is ending in real time, on several axes at once, and the generation now in college is the one that will have to decide what replaces it.
That order, to its credit, did a great deal.
Over eight decades, it underwrote the richest and most peaceful stretch of modern history — roughly a billion people lifted out of absolute poverty, no great-power war and a pace of trade and technological growth its architects would not have predicted.
American primacy, NATO, the Bretton Woods institutions and the dollar as the reserve currency held together for about three generations, and for most of the people who lived inside the arrangement, each generation did better than the last.
The architecture began to give way in 2008, when the financial crisis punctured the assumption that liberal institutions and open markets would keep the tide rising for everyone.
Wages stagnated, housing moved out of reach, inequality widened and a generation graduated into debt and a recession the people managing the old consensus proved unable to explain.
By 2016, the two loudest movements in American politics were Donald Trump’s right and Bernie Sanders’ democratic-socialist left, both arguing that the people running the country had stopped running it for most of the people in it. Then Britain voted to leave the European Union. The establishment has been losing altitude ever since.
A decade later, the people presiding over the transition are old across nearly every great power. The U.S. president is 79, China’s is 72, Russia’s is 73, India’s is 67 and most of Europe’s leaders are in their 60s. Since 1993, every American administration except Barack Obama’s has been led by a president born in the 1940s — Clinton, Bush, Trump, Biden, Trump again — which means that for three decades, the men making decisions about a 21st century world have come almost without interruption from the generation that came of age during the Vietnam War.
That run is ending, and what replaces it is not going to look like a return to the center. The two names at the heart of 2028 speculation are Vice President JD Vance, born in 1984, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, born in 1989: a millennial MAGA Republican on the right and a millennial democratic socialist on the left.
MAGA and the Democratic Socialists of America agree on very little, but they agree that the bipartisan consensus that governed American politics from the end of the Cold War through 2016 is not one either side is interested in restoring.
The same fracture runs through Europe in both directions at once. Reform UK is leading Labor and the Conservatives, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) has overtaken Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) as the largest party in Germany and France’s National Rally polls first.
On the other flank, Die Linke has clawed back to around 10% after being written off. The Greens remain a durable continental force and new antiestablishment left-wing formations continue to emerge across Britain and the continent.
The pattern is not a drift in any one ideological direction but a departure — voters walking out, from both sides at once, of the room the postwar consensus built.
The costs are already being paid in blood. Russia’s war in Ukraine has entered its fifth year, the United States and Iran have been at war since late February and guardrails that an entire generation grew up treating as permanent are no longer holding.
Commentary on these events tends to fixate on the personalities of particular heads of state, but the deeper problem is structural: the world’s most consequential institutions have been run by old men who cannot picture those institutions not existing and who will not, in most cases, be around to live with the consequences of the decisions they are making now.
The people who will have to live with those consequences are in college now. It will not be a 75-year-old’s world for much longer, and what our generation builds in place of the one that is ending will shape the rest of this century.
