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.

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.