If we want to continue the materially comfortable lifestyles of our parents, we will have to turn to a more authoritarian government, argues the Roma Tre University's Onofrio Romano. Fukuyama's end of history has self-evidently turned out to be wrong. But it has identified a key insight. What came to dominate the world over the last few decades was not liberal democracy, but rather a desire for an idealized Western lifestyle: consumeristic, pleasure-seeking, technology-loving. However, as the first quarter of the 21st century comes to a close, we are discovering that Western liberal democracy-style governments may not be the best suited to provide such a lifestyle. If we do not want autocracy – and Romano argues we should not – we must dial back our desires for immediate pleasures and comforts.

For more on this topic, join the debate at the HowTheLightGetsIn festival, in the debate 'The Iron Fist vs The Invisible Hand'. 

Francis Fukuyama famously got it wrong when he declared “the end of history” after the West’s triumph over real socialism. The liberal-democratic model didn’t become humanity’s final destination. And yet, from another angle, Fukuyama wasn’t completely off. The West has pulled much of the planet into its orbit, spinning around the axis of economic growth, powered by technology and governed by instrumental rationality.

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Liberal democracy has lost momentum, but the lifestyle associated with it—consumerism, material comfort, pleasure-seeking, technological mediation—has won big.

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Go deeper, and you’ll see that the Western ideal of the “good life”—its worldview, its vision of society and humanity—has achieved near-universal appeal, despite all rhetorical camouflage. Take Vladimir Putin’s €12,000 Loro Piana parka during the Moscow stadium war rally, not long after invading Ukraine: a louder statement than any anti-NATO rant. His sartorial submission to Western consumer aesthetics speaks louder than his nationalist pride.

Liberal democracy has lost momentum, but the lifestyle associated with it—consumerism, material comfort, pleasure-seeking, technological mediation—has won big.

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But that’s just scratching the surface. To truly understand what kind of “victory” the West has achieved, we have to look deeper. What version of the West has actually prevailed?

To get there, we need to revisit a crucial turning point in modern history that was archived too hastily: the fall of real socialism in the East, preceded in the West by the quieter dismantling of social democracy and the rise of neoliberalism. Our take is that this transition has been deeply misunderstood—especially its cultural meaning.

From an institutional-regulatory point of view, it was clear: top-down planning lost. Market self-regulation, fueled by self-interest, took over—signaling the ascendancy of horizontal societal autonomy (i.e., marked by networks and webs of relationships, rather than the top-down).

But this regulatory shift led to a fundamental misreading of the cultural transition. Liberal democracy became shorthand for an entire symbolic universe. As the philosopher and critic Cornelius Castoriadis put it, institutional forms are signifiers loaded with meaning—visions of the world, of society, of humanity. In this case, the horizontal neoliberal model pointed back to early modern individualism: autonomy over tradition, rational self-governance, freedom from communal bonds, and emotional dependencies.

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This connection, however, is misleading. Our hypothesis is that the post-socialist era actually marks a symbolic disjunction—a break between the economic-functional system and the cultural imaginary. So, while our lifestyles have reached certain standards and expectations, our institutional and economic organizations are no longer set up to provide those. Rather than deepening modernity, we’ve witnessed a cultural demodernization.

This process wasn’t new. Daniel Bell had already flagged it in the 1970s—the growing gap between the techno-economic structure and the cultural codes of the West. The economy continued to follow the logic of capital accumulation, efficiency, and productive labor. But culture shifted into what Bell called a “psychedelic bazaar.” The bohemian, anti-bourgeois ethos of early 20th-century intellectuals became mainstream by the late 1960s, driven by calls for the new, sexuality, liberation—a hedonistic break from bourgeois self-restraint.

The term “demodernization” itself first appeared in The Homeless Mind, describing how the youth movements of the 1960s and 1970s reversed the modern trajectory of individual emancipation from collective structures, longing instead for a return to “home.”

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The version of the West being globally desired was not that of modern self-discipline and rationality—but the West of cultural abandonment, emotional indulgence, and neo-tribal fusion with commodities and others.

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In this worldview, emotional resonance replaces rational functionality in human relationships. Passivity takes the place of productivity. The obsession with the “now” overrides long-term planning. David Riesman had already predicted this in the 1950s, describing the shift from “inner-directed” individuals to “other-directed” conformists—from the internal gyroscope to the external radar.

Michel Maffesoli would later describe this cultural turn as a return to tribalism:

Contrary to those who still read our societies through the lenses of individualism and disenchantment, I’ve shown that what we’re really seeing is a form of tribalism — bringing with it a re-enchantment of the world… This binding force, this ‘mana,’ is lived daily, in the here and now. It’s not the isolated individual governed by reason that dominates, but the tribal group communicating through a shared imagery it voraciously consumes.

In field research conducted during this transitional period in Albania, we found that the version of the West being globally desired was not that of modern self-discipline and rationality—but the West of cultural abandonment, emotional indulgence, and neo-tribal fusion with commodities and others. What triumphed wasn’t modern Western civilization (Zivilisation), but a kind of internal Western infra-Kultur—an anthropological fallout of modernity itself.

From this perspective, the liberal-democratic framework wasn’t the end goal. It was merely the gateway to a demodernized Western lifestyle. The problem? Within just a few decades, this institutional framework has proven unable to deliver on demodernization’s promises.

Here, we must bring in a second interpretation of demodernization—one advanced by Alain Touraine, who sees it not as a cultural turn within modernity, but as a systemic incoherence: a growing disconnect between functional systems and cultural identities. The mediating structures that once linked the two—politics, ideology, community—have broken down.

Mauro Magatti takes this further. Today’s techno-nihilist capitalism shows an extreme systemic homogeneity at the global level—a single macro-technical system (the neoliberal market mechanism), with functionalized institutional spheres that operate autonomously (different market actors), detached from values or collective sovereignty. Meanwhile, the cultural sphere explodes with signs, values, styles—a deterritorialized aesthetic space or a media-saturated one—totally disconnected from the economic machine.

But the current polycrisis (economic, health, geopolitical) has flipped this dynamic. No longer do we see system-level sameness alongside cultural fragmentation. Quite the opposite. Beneath the dazzling spectacle of cultural diversity lies a shared aspiration for a singular lifestyle—the demodernized one.

This may seem odd, given the resurgence of nationalism and religion claiming to resist cultural universalism. But, much like the fox in Aesop’s fable, many of these reactions are second-order responses—instrumental strategies to gain access to the very resources needed to sustain the demodernized dream.

The illusion of diversity—whether in Western postmodern semiotic chaos or in revanchist cultures outside the West—masks a deep underlying cultural convergence.

Where diversity truly emerges, ironically, is in the systemic-functional sphere. The global self-regulating market that emerged after the collapse of 20th-century verticalisms—top-down, centrally controlled institutional systems—is now failing to reproduce the material conditions required to access the promised land of demodernization, both inside and outside the West.

This failure only makes sense if we understand the neoliberal market as a stopgap for the crisis of social democracy—not as a continuation of classical 19th-century liberalism. The form may be similar, but the function is radically different. The new liberalism doesn’t free the individual from top-down control—it re-disciplines the subject through competition and existential precarity, after a brief historical period in which social democracy had offered real freedom from need.

The market, then, doesn’t empower the modern individual—it defeats them. Neoliberalism is a remedy to the failure of Western modernity itself, built on the primacy of the individual. And this is the source of many of today’s impasses.

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The West still seduces the world culturally, but it no longer leads institutionally. It can’t deliver on its own promises.

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The systemic homogeneity of neoliberalism is now clearly crumbling, replaced by a new logic of anticipation wherein economic and social processes are once again being determined “upstream” in a more vertical manner, rather than allowing for flexibility on the ground. Public institutions—national or regional—are beginning to retake control over social and economic development, reintroducing verticality in new forms. We can look at, for instance, the striking instances of friendshoring in the gas supply chain, where European countries choose for political reasons to buy gas from their American ally in defiance of any consideration for market convenience.

This is where Fukuyama’s prediction truly collapses. Liberal democracy has lost its edge. The West still seduces the world culturally (though now in demodernized form), but no longer leads institutionally. It can’t deliver on its own promises, causing widespread anomie, a disconnect between societal goals and the realistic paths available to reach them.

Meanwhile, institutional verticalism—especially in countries like China and Russia—appears far more effective at giving large populations access to the demodernized lifestyle. China continues to post impressive GDP growth, lifting over 800 million people out of poverty. Even during the pandemic, its rigid (and often criticized) protocols achieved remarkable results. Russia, for its part, seems to hold strategic ground in Ukraine, where the EU has applied the same failed model it uses for internal development: funding from above while hoping for grassroots mobilization below, with predictably disappointing results.

The West’s response to rising powers has not been to double down on liberal-democratic values, but to mimic the very strategies of its rivals—from friendshoring to protectionist tariffs on Chinese goods.

What these emerging powers are doing is simple, yet profound: realigning institutions and culture. They are healing the split between liberal-democratic regimes and demodernization that began with globalization. And that, more than any ideological war, may be the defining challenge of our time.