The week when the transition team of President-elect Donald Trump named a TV journalist as defence secretary and revealed that the world’s richest man would be heading up a new department of governmental efficiency felt like a harbinger of regime change. Joe Biden was hailed in 2020 by relieved liberals as a course correction after the first Trump presidency. He now looks less like the upholder of America’s eternal mission to spread freedom around the globe, and more like the end of its ancien régime.
Yet today’s ancien régime once promised the world its future. The French writer and politician Fran?ois-René de Chateaubriand spoke for many in 1825 when he described the invention of representative republicanism in the US as “the greatest political discovery” of modern times. “The formation of this republic,” he wrote, “has resolved a problem that was thought to be insoluble”: how to allow millions of people to live together under democratic institutions. The New World presented an ideological alternative to the Old World of bewigged monarchs and reactionary aristocrats, one that showed Europe’s masses an alternative and more inclusive path forward.
From the time when Europe’s Great Power system collapsed in war in 1914-18, grand claims were made for the transformative international power of America. Woodrow Wilson pledged to make the world “safe for democracy”. Hitler warned Europeans that Nazi ideas of racial purity were all that stood between them and godless transatlantic degeneracy. Cold war America aspired to forge a Free World of prosperous mass democracies and President Ronald Reagan famously extolled the US as a shining city on a hill — an open sanctuary at the centre of a world thriving in commercial and cultural exchange.