Opinion: The End of Trump and America’s ‘Main Character’ Era

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/Reuters If they don’t exactly feel like the end of the world, these days certainly feel like the end of something.

American hegemony, perhaps, although, to be honest, I’m not sure what “hegemony” means.

I would suggest perhaps it’s the end of American hubris, but that doesn’t seem right either because hubris is what we do.

Without an overinflated sense of our own capabilities, what even are we? Part of me roots for an American comeuppance, the same way I root for a snotty kid to get smacked across the head.

Not because I think we’re “bad,” but because every Goliath needs to encounter a David now and again.

Better if, unlike Goliath, we survive our encounter, but no nation ought to have the outsized impact on the globe as our own.

And certainly no nation that has proven itself incapable of behaving responsibly.

So much power concentrated in the hands of so few is, frankly, un-American .

When the Soviet Union fell, we celebrated “the end of history,” as the political scientist Francis Fukuyama put it.

Western liberal democracy was supposed to take root and spread across the world as the endpoint of human ideological evolution.

Not even thirty years later, Fukuyama looks like a goddamned fool.

Or, more likely, people like me who never actually read Fukuyama continually mischaracterize what he meant.

That said, I’m not convinced that democracy is the endpoint when, according to The Hill, 57% of Americans believe democracy isn’t working in America and a further 21% believe “democracy in the United States will end sometime in their life.” Democratic movements are being threatened everywhere.

The “end of history” is looking suspiciously like the beginning of the end.