The Liberal Eulogy
Christopher Clark’s The End of Modernity (Foreign Policy, Summer 2025) performs a kind of historical ventriloquism. He speaks in the voice of the liberal order, looking back on the rubble of the twentieth century’s great institutions and asking what became of the confidence that once carried them. His argument, elegant but evasive, is that we are living through the slow collapse of “modernity,” a term he uses to capture the complex of liberal democracy, institutional legitimacy, and postwar stability that defined the West from 1945 until the first tremors of 1989. His prose moves smoothly across the surface of crisis, but never pierces it. He mourns modernity’s collapse without naming what drove it: capital’s hunger, empire’s scaffolding, the systematic dispossession that made the postwar order possible. Style substitutes for confrontation. The analysis remains clean because the history is kept bloodless. He narrates decline as tragedy rather than consequence. The real story isn’t the death of modernity. It’s the failure of a system to survive the pressures it unleashed.
Modernity Was Never Universal
Clark’s “modernity” is bounded: Euro-American, technocratic, institutional. It’s a world of constitutional governments, sober newspapers, permanent growth, and the slow, stabilising work of party systems. He marks its high point somewhere between the Marshall Plan and Maastricht, and its breakdown across a sequence of aftershocks: Iraq, Lehman Brothers, COVID, Ukraine. But this framing casts modernity as something that worked, then failed. As if collapse were an external disturbance rather than the outcome of intensifying internal contradictions. The truth is less neat. Modernity, as Clark describes it, was a class project shaped by empire, maintained by violence, and ultimately undone by the very forces it once marshalled.
Empire, Extraction, and the Postwar Illusion
The political order he mourns. The welfare states, trusted experts, and coherent narratives, is inseparable from its imperial foundations. Europe’s postwar boom was not only American-funded but globally subsidised through resource extraction, trade inequality, and the outsourced costs of militarised stability. Britain built the NHS while maintaining colonies from Kenya to Malaya. France constructed its grands projets on the back of Algerian labour and African wealth. The United States imposed dollar hegemony while running coups across Latin America and the Middle East. If this was a golden age, it was built on violence, displacement, and racialised accumulation.1
Clark gives us a pacified Cold War, a moment of “baffling simplicity” underpinned by bipolar nuclear deterrence. But there’s nothing simple about Bandung, Vietnam, Chile, Angola. What’s striking isn’t his failure to mention these events, it’s the worldview that makes them peripheral. The West enjoyed “stability” only by exporting its crises. If Europe danced to Strauss on the Ringstrasse, it was because bombs were falling elsewhere. That’s not a digression, it’s the dialectic. The modernity Clark recalls is the surface appearance of a world system whose unity depended on uneven development2 and structural domination3.
Neoliberalism to Authoritarian Rule
He recognises that something broke in the 1990s. That the post-Cold War moment of liberal triumphalism gave way to chaos. But what he describes as rupture was already present in the form. The fall of the Berlin Wall did not inaugurate a new consensus; it exposed the hollowness of the old one. Neoliberalism, far from a betrayal of modernity, was its logical continuation under changed conditions: market universalism replacing welfare compromise, debt discipline replacing class truce. Blair, Clinton and Schröder didn’t break with the old order, they just finished the job. They gave up on class politics and turned the whole thing over to the market. That the parties which once anchored modern democracy have collapsed is not mystery, but outcome. They no longer mediate between labour and capital because they no longer even pretend to.
This is where Clark’s most provocative move comes: the suggestion that Trump is not the negation of neoliberalism, but its mutation. Just as Stalinism was a nationalised distortion of Lenin’s internationalism. But he doesn’t follow this analogy to its conclusion. Trumpism, and the growing bloc of authoritarian regimes with which it aligns, is not an anti-modern aberration. It is the repressive enforcement of neoliberalism’s dying form. Where liberalism once offered inclusion by consumption, it now turns to the politics of exclusion, border fortification, and racial resentment. Growth is gone, so someone must be blamed. Migrants, queer people, protestors, these become the scapegoats for a system that can no longer deliver.
Authoritarian neoliberalism is not a contradiction in terms. It is a coherent strategy of rule, developed to protect capital from the fallout of its own crises. Modi in India, Orban in Hungary, Netanyahu in Israel, are not departures from modernity, but crisis managers for a system that can no longer rule through consent. The dominant class (political, financial, extractive) has not lost control; it has abandoned the liberal mask. Where democratic legitimacy collapses, repression steps in. The state no longer guarantees social reproduction, so it guarantees order. Police, borders4, surveillance, culture war: these are not reactions to chaos. They are the tactics of a class that intends to maintain its dominance, no longer through promises of progress, but through fear, fragmentation, and brute force.
The End of Belief
He is more confident diagnosing the epistemic crisis. Social media erodes consensus. Journalists lose authority. Expertise is replaced by gossip and conspiracy. But again, this is treated as a cultural decay rather than a social response. Why did trust collapse? Because institutions lied. Because experts managed austerity. Because centrists propped up war and called it intervention. The fragmentation of media isn’t just a technical shift—it’s the end of belief in the custodians of truth. Mediatisation gave way to cynicism, not because the public is irrational, but because they are not stupid.
What modernity offered, at its rhetorical height, was a story: that life would get better, that history moved forward, that democracy and markets could be reconciled. That story now rings hollow. Growth is decoupled from wages. Innovation means precarity. Democracy, where it still functions, is captive to capital. Towering above all of this is climate breakdown, the ultimate contradiction, the crisis that makes all others acute.
What Clark mourns as the loss of a forward-moving history was always, for those outside the imperial core, a history of wreckage. Walter Benjamin saw it clearly. In On the Concept of History, he wrote that “there is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” What modernity called progress, Benjamin called catastrophe. A storm blowing from paradise, piling wreckage upon wreckage while the Angel of History looks on, stunned. The progress Clark longs for was always stratified: wealth for some, ruin for others. The factories and freeways were mirrored by famines, forced migrations, and military regimes. For the global poor, modernity wasn’t a story of ascent. It was the machinery of enclosure, wage discipline, and dispossession, dressed up in the language of reform.
Climate as the Final Contradiction
Clark mentions ecological collapse, but only in passing. He doesn’t grasp its dialectical centrality. Climate change is not external to the liberal order. It is the bill for the very model of development that modernity promised. Extraction without limit, growth without end, futures without cost. This is not a metaphor. It’s thermodynamic reality. There are no long-term institutional fixes. You cannot regulate your way out of planetary overshoot5 while maintaining the logic of accumulation. The collapse of trust, the breakdown of parties, the rise of irrationalism. Are all symptoms of a deeper panic: there may be no future at all.
The answer isn’t adaptation within the system. It’s rupture.
Only an ecosocialist programme offers a viable future. Not green growth, not net zero by market mechanism, but a rupture with capitalist accumulation itself. As argued by Anti Capitalist Resistance and the Fourth International, the task is not to “decarbonise” the current system but to dismantle it. We must replace fossil capital with democratic planning, public ownership, and global solidarity. Climate justice without class struggle is a slogan; ecosocialism is strategy.
No Way Back, Only Through
Clark’s final plea is for realism. Neutrality, he writes, is no longer an option. We must choose between pluralist democracy and authoritarianism. But even here, the dialectic is suppressed. The centre cannot hold, not because extremes are pulling it apart, but because the centre itself is exhausted. It has nothing left to offer but deferral and decline. When Clark asks us to defend liberal democracy, he’s asking us to rally behind something already dead.
The task, then, is not to rescue modernity, but to bury it. Not because it failed to live up to its ideals, but because those ideals were always wrapped around domination. What Clark offers is another eulogy. What we need is preparation, for what comes after the collapse.
But this isn’t just a matter of waiting. Crisis doesn’t guarantee transformation. The dominant class has already adapted. The question is whether the rest of us will. The future will not be decided between “pluralist democracy” and authoritarianism, as Clark frames it. It will be decided between capitalism in crisis and organised rupture. Either the left builds the capacity to break with this decaying order, or we live under its armed wing indefinitely.
History doesn’t end, but it doesn’t move on its own. If we want a future, we’ll need to build the instruments that can fight for one. Our collective structures must be rooted in class struggle, internationalism, and climate justice. There must be a material break with empire. The centre is finished. The horizon has to be redrawn.
This isn’t utopianism. It’s the bare minimum. Not hope, but determination. Not progress, but struggle. Modernity was never neutral, it was always stage managed by the dominant class. If we are to escape its ruins, it will not be through mourning, but through rupture, organisation, and fight.
FOOTNOTES
- Racialised accumulation: A term drawing on Cedric Robinson’s racial capitalism, referring to the way capitalism has always sorted, exploited, and dispossessed along racial lines. Slavery, colonialism, apartheid, border regimes—these aren’t deviations from the system but central to how it accumulates. Race naturalises inequality, justifies extraction, and organises surplus populations into expendable labour and disposable lives.
↩︎ - As theorised by Neil Smith and David Harvey, uneven development is not a temporary imbalance but a structural necessity of capitalism. Capital concentrates investment, infrastructure, and political power in specific zones (global cities, imperial cores) while producing underdevelopment elsewhere. This spatial inequality isn’t a glitch to be corrected; it’s how capital expands, extracts, and disciplines. The geography of wealth and abandonment is the geography of accumulation.
↩︎ - Not direct rule, but a system of constraints embedded in institutions, laws, trade regimes, and debt arrangements that reproduce unequal power. It’s how empire operates without colonies, how capital disciplines without needing to occupy. Structural domination doesn’t require coercion at every turn, just rules that only ever work one way.
↩︎ - Global police state: William I. Robinson’s term for the merging of militarised state power, digital surveillance, and corporate capital into a single transnational apparatus of repression. As inequality deepens and legitimacy collapses, systems of control (border regimes, private security, and predictive policing) expand to contain revolt. It’s not fascism in uniform, but a permanent state of counterinsurgency, the global, networked, and profitable.
↩︎ - Planetary overshoot: As Andreas Malm argues, climate breakdown isn’t a natural limit. It’s the result of capital’s refusal to stop extracting. The system doesn’t brake; it accelerates through crisis. Overshoot means we’re already beyond safe thresholds (emissions, warming, feedback loops etc.) but the infrastructure of fossil capital keeps expanding. The problem isn’t ignorance. It’s power.
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