The defeat of political movements rarely follows the decisive ending imagined in literature. Even when an authoritarian leader loses power or an electoral movement suffers a major setback, the political ideas sustaining it do not necessarily disappear. That distinction is central to an analysis published by Germany’s Die Zeit, which argues that the recent electoral difficulties facing Donald Trump and other right-wing political figures should not be mistaken for the end of the movements they represent.
The article, written by Mark Schieritz, deputy editor of Die Zeit’s politics section, uses the destruction of Sauron in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings to illustrate the difference between fictional and political endings. In Tolkien’s third volume, the ruler of Mordor is finally destroyed when a vast shadow rises against the clouds, is caught by a powerful wind and is blown away. His disappearance is followed by what Tolkien describes as a great silence.
Political opponents are sometimes imagined to meet a similarly definitive end. The defeat of a political leader is treated as the destruction of the movement associated with him, with supporters and political organisations expected to disappear alongside their leader. But, Schieritz argues, this is not how contemporary political movements operate. Donald Trump was not permanently defeated by the latest electoral developments, nor were the Republicans decisively eliminated. The same applies to Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Flávio Bolsonaro in Brazil, whose political fortunes have also faced setbacks.
Unlike the fictional creatures in Tolkien’s work, political supporters cannot simply be treated as enemies to be eliminated. Nor can their ideas be prohibited merely because their political representatives lose elections. Electoral defeats may weaken particular leaders and parties, but they do not necessarily remove the social and ideological foundations from which those movements draw support.
The expectation that major political conflicts eventually reach a final conclusion has shaped interpretations of modern history. The end of the Cold War, the decline of neoliberalism and the apparent retreat of right-wing populism have all been associated at different times with predictions that one political era was giving way permanently to another. Yet the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 did not bring history to an end, contrary to interpretations associated with political scientist Francis Fukuyama. His argument was never that international conflict would disappear altogether. Similarly, the first election of Trump as US president in 2016 did not mark the definitive triumph of authoritarian politics, even as authoritarian forces gained influence in several countries. Their subsequent electoral setbacks do not necessarily signal their final defeat either.
Schieritz suggests that the assumption of permanent political progress may need to be reconsidered. In his book Rebellion: How Antiliberalism is Tearing America Apart – Again, American political scientist Robert Kagan presents US history as a continuing confrontation between liberal and illiberal forces. The balance between the two has shifted repeatedly, with one gaining influence before the other regains ground. These transitions have not always been peaceful.
The American Declaration of Independence established universal rights within the liberal tradition and assigned the state responsibility for protecting them. However, conservative and reactionary movements have repeatedly challenged those principles, including slaveholders in the southern states. Kagan interprets Trump’s rise as something more fundamental than ordinary competition between political parties: a rebellion against the liberal principles embodied in America’s founding documents.
The expectation that liberal democracy and market economics would continue advancing gained particular strength among generations who experienced the political stability of Western societies during the decades after the Second World War. For those born in the 1960s and 1970s, several major developments appeared to confirm a sustained movement towards democratic institutions and international cooperation. These included the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, the end of apartheid and the introduction of free elections in South Africa in 1994, the establishment of the World Trade Organisation in 1995 and the creation of the International Criminal Court in 1998.
That period also produced a political and cultural atmosphere in which ideological conflict appeared less central to public life. Schieritz refers to Nirvana’s 1990s hit Smells Like Teen Spirit, particularly its famous line, “Here we are now, entertain us”, as an expression of the cynicism and boredom associated with a society that largely assumed the world was orderly and moving in the right direction. However, the consensus-oriented political culture of the post-war decades was historically an exception rather than the normal condition of political life. Following the combined catastrophes of war and fascism, Western societies had little appetite for further ideological experiments.
The reasons for the breakdown of that consensus remain difficult to establish conclusively. However, research suggests that the international financial crisis following the collapse of investment bank Lehman Brothers in 2008 played an important role in the subsequent rise of populism. The Kiel Institute for the World Economy examined nearly 100 financial crises across 20 democracies dating back to 1870. Its findings indicated that, following such crises, the electoral support of parties on the far right increased by more than 30 per cent compared with their long-term average.
One explanation is that financial crises are widely perceived as evidence of elite failure. Government-funded bank rescues, particularly when public money is used to prevent financial institutions from collapsing, can conflict with basic perceptions of fairness. Schieritz suggests that the timing of the populist wave was therefore significant: it began with the Brexit vote in a country particularly affected by the financial crisis, before Trump’s first presidential victory.
The resulting pattern has altered the significance of electoral competition. The sequence of Barack Obama, Trump, Joe Biden and Trump again demonstrates how quickly political control can change. Rather than marking a permanent victory for one political direction, each election can reverse the outcome of the previous contest.
This also represents a departure from the political stability associated with the major centrist parties of earlier decades. In post-war Germany, the replacement of Helmut Schmidt by Helmut Kohl did not fundamentally threaten the continuity of the Federal Republic. Today, Schieritz argues, elections have become contests in which much, potentially everything, is at stake.
The Trumpist movement is therefore unlikely to disappear with the defeat of its current leader. Schieritz argues that it will seek new political vehicles, with or without Trump, just as other political ideologies have repeatedly found new organisations and leaders through which to maintain their influence. Although the liberal camp has secured an important electoral victory, the political struggle described in Die Zeit remains unresolved.
