Populists like Trump are not responsible for killing liberalism. It is dying because the material conditions that sustained it have disappeared. So argues Rana Dasgupta, whose writing has long examined the human costs of globalization. Western liberal democracy has rested on three pillars: industrial economies, Western economic supremacy, and a single liberal superpower. All three are gone. Dasgupta answer is not to give up on liberalism: liberal values of equality and fraternity are as relevant as ever, and if states can’t be trusted to safeguard liberalism, it must be reinvented as a radical social movement.

It is clear that liberalism is in retreat. Its institutions and practices are losing their purchase on the world; its core tenets and propositions struggle to elicit belief. Liberals tend to blame the demise on their political foes, who are eclipsing them at the polls. But liberalism was not murdered. It died naturally, largely because the conditions that produced and sustained it ceased to obtain. If we wish to retrieve anything from the liberal tradition, we need to understand better what has happened. This essay sketches the historical processes that made and unmade liberalism, in order to approach the question: can we revive liberalism? The answer is for liberalism to be jettisoned by states and preserved as a social movement.

Within Western states—liberalism’s traditional heartlands—liberty is the preserve of capital more than of human beings, to the detriment of both equality and fraternity. Democracy—which was never an event, but a societal orientation—is unravelling. Liberalism’s essential innovation and component, the individual, is being unmade by surveillance and automated opinion. Oligarchy, and the failures of the political class, are making “progress”—which once supplied liberalism with all its moral force—seem antique.

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Philosophical ideas do not spontaneously produce change. They require certain material conditions.

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Liberal conceptions of interstate relations are going a similar way. The “rules-based international order”—which supposedly committed states to a shared movement toward peace, human rights and, latterly, environmental stability—is collapsing. Against the lofty 1940s dream of a United Nations dispensing international law and harmony looms the reality of anarchy and cut-throat competition.

Liberalism began as a religious reformation. Pushing the Christian divinity to the edges of the cosmos, at whose centre now lay the blazing “mortal god” of the modern state, thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries added novel elements to classical theology, such as “individuals” and “rights,” so creating a comprehensive formula for the liberal state.

Why then was no state truly “liberal” until the nineteenth century, and why did universal suffrage become generalized only in the twentieth? Because philosophical ideas do not spontaneously produce change. They require certain material conditions—and the conditions for liberalism did not begin to coalesce in Western states until the middle of the nineteenth century.

Those conditions, which obtained intermittently from 1840 to 2000, were especially threefold. 1) Western economies were organized around industrial production. 2) The West had superior resources to the rest of the world and captured the majority of global revenues. 3) A single Western superpower presided over the capitalist system.

We can immediately observe that those conditions were both exceptional and unsustainable; today, their disappearance is largely complete.

The West was industrial

In eighteenth-century Britain, commercial elites depended little on the British population for the expansion of their wealth, which was invested in overseas enterprises engaged in agriculture, trade, slavery, and plunder. Those enterprises generated epoch-making profits, on which the state itself became dependent. So heavily invested was Britain in the East India Company, for instance, that when, in the 1770s, the Company faced bankruptcy, it risked—and lost—its American colonies rather than face the more terrible alternative: corporate failure. The interests of the state, in other words, were those of giant corporations; they were opposed to those of the population at large, which was repressed and disciplined in brutal ways. Democracy, in short, was inadmissible.

A century later, everything had changed. By then, the British Empire was centred on a domestic industrial complex whose workers were directly responsible for national profits. Those workers now had the collective power to strangle the imperial economy, and their political satisfaction was a question of the state. Nor could industrial workers carry out their function without a modicum of education and healthcare, a concern that was sharpened with the advent, in the twentieth century, of total war. By the 1920s, for the first time in their history, European states spent more on their populations than on defense: they had become welfare states.

Total war also produced centralized states with unprecedented powers over economy and society—powers that were deployed, in the post-1945 liberal heyday, to taking over money flows in order to secure real progress toward liberty, equality and fraternity. By that time, democracy was not just a concession to a resentful population; it had become an essential tool for industrial regulation. It proved to be an effective mechanism, not only for resolving class conflict, but also for giving workers the sense that they had an authentic stake in industrial society.

Despite the many achievements of the post-war West, corporate elites were frustrated that their operations had been commandeered as national utilities. From the late 1970s, they began to extract themselves from national obligations—most conspicuously, by moving industrial production to places where labour wielded little or no political power. This was not merely a “cost-cutting” exercise: it was a full-blown assault on the prevailing Western social contract. In our own century, that assault has been expanded and intensified with legal and technological innovations, of which the most far-reaching is AI.

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This exceptional moment in Western history had to end.

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During their high-industrial era, Western states saw their populations as key strategic assets. Today, deindustrialized and automated, those states do not need all their populations. Quite the reverse: propping up the living standards of non-strategic labour, and containing the political resentment of the growing number shut out of global profits, is a liability. Many Western governments, indebted and unpopular, are inadequate to those tasks—and there is inevitable pressure on democratic structures.

It is no coincidence that the main agencies stepping in to dismantle those structures—and to provide the surveillance systems necessary for warehousing underemployed populations—are those of Silicon Valley. Nor that the process is most advanced in the United States, where Silicon Valley plays a similar role to the East India Company in eighteenth-century Britain. Like that earlier mega-corporation, Silicon Valley does not depend for its profits on the domestic population at large—the whole point is to replace human work with a giant property regime—and yet it has become essential to maintaining the global position of the leading capitalist state. America, too, if forced to choose, is likely to side with the corporations, even at the cost of the democratic institutions on which the state has hitherto rested.

The West was richer than everywhere else

Western liberalism was not merely an internal development. Another reason it was unviable at the time of Rousseau and Montesquieu was that Asia was drawing rents and profits from Europe, and not the other way around. European states were second-rate actors in a global economy whose rules were set elsewhere; their stock of bullion leaked inexorably to India and China. They optimized their subordinate position through slavery, criminality, protectionism, near-constant war—and, once again, brutal repression of their own populations.

With the hijacking of Indian empires and kingdoms, and especially with the Opium Wars against China, their entire structure changed. Britain threw out its draconian anti-union legislation in 1825. It began to expand its electorate in 1832 and abolished slavery in 1833; in that same year, it began to restrict child labour and to protect factory workers against excessive hours and dangerous conditions. It threw out its protectionist legislation in the 1840s. By the 1870s, Britain and other Western states were making substantial investments in their citizens’ health and education, urged on by formalized trade unions and labour parties.

The expansion of rights in Europe was made possible by their denial elsewhere. Europe’s colonies were reengineered as purveyors of cheap raw materials to the metropole, and prevented from competing with Western industrial installations—all of which required their political voice to be silenced. As a result of its enforced industrial monopoly, the West began to expand its economic advantage over the rest of the world, and European workers were allowed to participate in the fruits of global aristocracy. After 1945, the American empire continued the same logic, so that inequality between countries reached its height in the mid-1970s—precisely the moment that Western societies themselves were at their most equal.

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Based as it was on the international restriction of freedom, knowledge and enterprise, this exceptional moment in Western history had to end. It coincided, for instance, with an economic situation that had never occurred in the previous 2,000 years: the simultaneous irrelevance of China and India. By the 2010s, a more “normal” arrangement was restored: China was once again, as in the eighteenth century, propping up foreign currencies and economies so Western states could continue buying its exports.

By now, much of the Western population has effectively been replaced by more efficient Asian workers, and liberalism—the political dividend of a century-and-a-half of economic supremacy—is evaporating. Inevitably, there are political entrepreneurs who offer compensation to discarded workers in the form of hate. There is an equally predictable return to protectionism. But the illiberal turn also draws on a deeper well. From Pliny the Elder to Voltaire, the West was always in awe of Asian power; the enemy against which the United States is arming itself today is a fantastical one, distilled from oriental nightmares.

There was a single superpower

Western liberalism also coincided with another exceptional and unsustainable condition: the existence of a global capitalist superpower.

There have been only two: Britain and America. Their incumbencies, which jointly spanned from about 1840 to the years following 2000, book-ended the West’s liberal era. During their heydays, both superpowers drew sufficient profits from the wider capitalist system that they were able to bear a significant proportion of its administrative costs. Through naval might, especially, both took responsibility for ensuring the flow of fuel and resources into the industrial system. Both supplied a global currency and a system of international commercial law. Maintaining a primordial commitment to free trade, both kept their own tariffs low, even when other states imposed higher tariffs on them.

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If there is a next global capitalist superpower—which is unlikely—it will not be Western or liberal.

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The British period did not blend seamlessly into the American. Already by the early 1900s, Britain’s industrial capacity had been overtaken by the United States and Germany, parliament was debating tariffs to address the trade deficits Britain sustained with all major states, its military deficiencies were amply displayed in the South African War, and Germany threatened its naval supremacy. Between 1914 and 1945, when Britain could no longer fulfil its function, and the US was not ready to do so, there was a “multipolar” interregnum which saw all-out war between the major states, the collapse of trading systems, and the rise of illiberal politics everywhere.

Taking over the capitalist system in 1944 and after, America was, on the face of it, more authentically liberal than Britain. It set about building a virtual empire—based on law and finance rather than physical occupation—whose constitutive unit was the sovereign nation-state. After 1945, America set about the dismantling of European empires and helped construct a mosaic of standardized political units. Those states were bound, in theory, to abide by a liberal world constitution: respect for other states, freedoms, rights, and protections for citizens.

In reality, the complexities of the Cold War era proved too great for such a simple, rule-bound model, which was sabotaged most egregiously by America itself, along with its Soviet rival. In managing their client networks, both powers were significantly more concerned with installing raw “monopolies of violence” than with establishing enduring political cultures. By the 1990s, when the US empire could at last be unfurled in its complete form, a new generation of enemies arose—often emerging from old American client autocracies—whose objective was precisely to expose the hypocrisy of its liberal pieties. The wave of wars that began in 2001 implicated the liberal superpower in many atrocities. It also brought an end to America’s reputation for military indomitability and political skill, and signalled to other powers that it might now be possible to disregard the once-hallowed borders of the international system.

Donald Trump’s approach has been schizophrenic. On the one hand, by withdrawing from previous military and trade commitments, he has signalled his acknowledgement that America can no longer act as capitalist superpower—and that he wishes to usher in a post-American era, when responsibility for the global system is more widely distributed. He certainly has no affection for the network of institutions through which American power was refracted after 1945, preferring to shed international obligations and assume the situation of a more “normal” power.

And yet, contradictorily, he has also attempted to prolong the American epoch by engaging in its most emblematic activity: war. Like America’s other recent wars, however, his are meaningless and deleterious, and only hasten the world’s fragmentation into rival systems. It is no longer possible to speak of a single order endowed with an official, liberal ideology; now there are several, morally equivalent, great powers, none of which can claim that their own values are those of the world. If any of those powers has the edge, in terms of moral prestige, it is probably the Communist—and determinedly illiberal—autocracy.

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Those departed conditions will not return. The West will not become industrial again. Nor will it re-subdue Asia and regain its stranglehold over the global economy. And if there is a next global capitalist superpower—which is unlikely—it will not be Western or liberal; nor will it share Britain and America’s monocultural and Messianic attitude to the world.

The most likely outcome for our “new 1914,” therefore, is that liberal ideas, practices and institutions continue to wither. Not only will the structure of Western societies become less and less apt to support them, but the pent-up legacy of the previous liberal era—which was substantially built on the export of poverty, war and ecological destruction—will undermine them still further. Primarily as a result of migration on a far greater scale than what we know today.

And yet liberal values—in the radical sense—are more important than ever. “Equality” could not be more urgent when 50% of the world owns about 2% of wealth—and when the global elite is ever more able to translate financial power into formal political status. “Liberty” is a crucial concern in an age when not only are authoritarianism and bigotry on the rise, but war is also returning as a normal state procedure. “Fraternity” also seems an essential corrective when electorates are clustering at extremes, and states tend to blame structural problems on minorities and foreigners.

Current events remind us that nation-states in their raw form are merciless engines. Without the constraints imposed by democracy, on the one hand, and international diplomacy and law on the other, they represent a serious threat to human security. Liberal conceptions of inter-state relations offer the only hope, meanwhile, that the society of states might cooperate effectively to establish a framework for peace, trade and climate stability.

Liberalism is a religion of the state—and states are the actors best equipped to restore it. Can they develop a redesign that is viable in a low-growth, low-employment era? That is only possible if they are able to reconstruct themselves on more socialist lines, and to appropriate a much greater share of capitalist profits for themselves and for their citizens. When it becomes clear that the politics of xenophobia cannot reverse the decline in circumstances, there might be room for more visionary movements, whose aim would be not to package techno-feudalism attractively for social-media-addled electorates, but to redirect economy and technology toward grand social objectives.

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States would still not be able to create high-paying jobs out of nothing, and their new liberalism would have to engage honestly with the West’s greatly altered employment future. The attraction of liberalism was always “progress,” for which there was tangible evidence in an era of rapid growth, scientific advance and large-scale public investment. But perhaps we can rethink “progress”: there might be no jobs, but there is so much work to be done! Western nation-states might use untapped human capital to develop the spiritual qualities they conspicuously lack—to de-specialise social thought, artisanal production, and old-age care, for instance, and bring them back into life.

At the international level, this state-led liberal rebirth would require an enlightened Great Power to convene a conference of nations not unlike those taking place at the end of World War Two, in order to strike out a new deal for international trade, law and human rights. Liberalism would be stripped, this time, of its Christian core, its superpower dependency, and its obsession with preserving the transfer of wealth from poor to rich countries; it would also benefit from a reinvigorated institutional design, for which many more countries would have managerial responsibility. Acknowledging not only that world domination by a single superpower is almost unknown in history—and that we are therefore entering a more “normal” phase—but that it is also undesirable, inefficient and undemocratic, this would be a more authentic form of international liberalism, in fact, than anything we have previously experienced.

I am skeptical that today’s Western states are capable of any of the above. The post-1980 project to re-subordinate them to the interests of capital has been far-reaching, and they are not in a position to take radical stands against it. I suspect that the interests of states will continue to diverge from those of their citizens, to the detriment of liberal rights and freedoms.

This leaves the other option: liberalism jettisoned by states, and preserved as a social movement. This is not just a cop-out. When states can no longer be the custodians of political morality, it is crucial that societies keep it alive. In today’s technological conditions, underemployed populations will also be able to build socially-owned networks of considerable power—parallel systems of economy and law which might, among other things, bring together groups from different countries who are nonetheless in identical predicaments, so giving the lie to the blinkered view of states. Those parallel systems would be important, not only in their own right, but also in their impact on the core: Western liberalism has lost its radical ambition, in part, because it no longer competes for moral authority with a Communist bloc.

One thing is certain: liberalism can no longer take the forms it did in the twentieth century. The key intellectual task facing those who still believe in its core values is to find the institutional form it can take amid our greatly changed circumstances.

Rana Dasgupta’s most recent book on this topic, After Nations, is published by Viking in the US and HarperCollins in the UK.