In 1999, Francis Fukuyama famously proclaimed “the end of history”: through a synergy of peace, democracy and capitalism, a strong sociological fabric was created, that mankind had never experienced before. An explosion of a global middle class, with constantly rising quality of life, followed in the decades after World War II. Many thought that this process was inevitable, everlasting as well as producing ever more wealth. Today, however, we have to state that we have been thought differently by history: a constant erosion of the middle class in nearly all western democracies lead us into a new historic paradigm, not really foreseen by anyone, one that followed and ultimately destroyed the alleged “end of history”: a renaissance of populist right wing propaganda, something which many intellectuals had previously thought was impossible due to the age of information driven by the internet, which was supposed to enable everyone to see through the lies and propaganda of populism. But in an ironic historical twist, it was just the internet, in the form of social media, that made the rise of right wing authoritarianism possible in the first place.
“Evolution is smarter than you” is a statement of a renowned biologist, meaning a human being with all his/her imagination could not conceive of the clever tricks and turns evolution took through an abundance of time, i.e. billions of years. Maybe history is smarter than any human being as well? No historian, no scholar, no intellectual had predicted or warned us of the process that the last two decades has shown us to be possible.