I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why everything feels like it’s unraveling. You know the feeling when you look at the news, and it’s just chaos. Trump returning to the stage in the US, the brutal war in Ukraine, and China and Russia openly flipping the table on the world order we built after WWII.

It’s exhausting, isn’t it? But looking at it through a historian’s lens, I don’t think the world is broken. I’m afraid it’s just returning to normal.

For the last 80 years, give or take, we lived in a bubble in the West. We convinced ourselves that liberal democracy was the finish line and that everyone, yes even Russia and China, would eventually want to be just like us. But that was a fantasy. We forgot that history is usually about raw power, not rules. What we are seeing now with Putin and Xi isn’t “madness”; it’s classic Great Power behavior. They are pushing back because they can, and because they never actually agreed to our version of the world.

But that doesn’t explain why we are tearing ourselves apart from the inside, right?

I think the real culprit there isn’t a politician; it’s the internet. We built a machine that gives us infinite information but zero context. A machine where even the village idiot has a loud voice that can be heard globally.

Twenty years ago, we trusted institutions because we couldn’t see their mistakes. Today, every failure is livestreamed. We aren’t smarter; we’re just angrier, more cynical, and struggling to tell the village idiots apart from the experts. That’s why people are voting for “burn it down” candidates. When you lose faith in the system and the experts, you stop looking for a mechanic and start looking for an arsonist.

It reminds me of something Plato wrote 2,400 years ago. He warned that democracy is fragile. He said that when a society gets drunk on absolute freedom and ignores all norms, it eventually descends into chaos. And when the chaos gets too loud, people stop caring about “liberty” and just want a strongman to restore order.

We aren’t going back to the quiet stability of the 90s. That world is gone. We are waking up in a new reality where democracy isn’t the default setting anymore, but something we actually have to fight for—both against empires abroad and our own cynicism at home.