"The earlier part of the twentieth century was defined by liberal democracy’s struggle against its rival ideologies of fascism on the right and communism on the left: to the point of hot and cold wars alike. Tocqueville’s “empire” of democracy, by which he meant its indisputable influence as an ideally, largely won those battles in the way that Western society was reassembled after the Second World War. The defining issue of our own era has therefore been something else entirely: more a full-throated struggle over democracy itself, a struggle to reconcile democratic equality with liberal freedom in an age of capitalist globalization. To tell the story properly we must discard the conventional narrative frame of the twentieth century: for its threads weave most meaningfully together not in 1945, nor even in 1989, but in the early 1970s, at the very point in which fascism and communism, as state forms, also finally began to yield their grip. It is there that the changes giving shape to the political order we have all been living through first set in. In the half-decade between 1968 and 1974 an entire era—the postwar era—came to an end and something else began: our present age. There was no single year of upheaval, though 1971, for reasons that will become clear, cusps this change. There was no singular break, either, between some uniformly experienced before and after. But amid a perfect storm of crises that befell both East and West alike, the very structure of democracy that had sustained the Western nations through the first half of the twentieth century appeared suddenly to have run its course. That wider constellation of crises included the most dramatic transformation of the world economy since the Great Depression, and a fracturing of territorial sovereignty which, for the best part of two centuries, had underpinned national and international politics alike. It included the upheaval of rapidly modernizing societies at home, whose citizens suddenly demanded of their governments what their governments could not provide. The response to those crises in the East, we know well, was more repression at home and more credit from abroad to shore up their failing regimes: a path that ultimately led to the collapse of the entire communist system. But what of the response tin the West. As historians are beginning to document, something more radical happened: the West underwent “regime change.” From around 1971, on the back of the social upheavals of the late 1960s, with the Nixon administration in America at its most reckless and radical groups rising across Europe; with people marching on the streets and a crisis in the international economy, the postwar consensus unraveled and the institutional arrangements of the liberal democratic order began to be reconfigured."