The last few years have convinced me that the political ideologies and frameworks that dominated the 19th and 20th centuries are ill-suited for the 21st. The social and economic reality of the modern world would be unrecognizable to the political theorists of the early industrial revolution.

• Blue collar labor politics is in managed decline, both because of growing service sector employment and because of the embrace of right-wing populism by union workers

• Gender, not race or class, has proven to be a more salient and enduring social division as men have fallen behind in education and employment. The “Nationalist Internationale” of the populist right is arguably just as united by misogyny as xenophobia.

• The elderly have swelled in number, and are far more economically and politically dominant than they have ever been in history. This has resulted in a mounting fiscal crisis over old age pensions and impeded social mobility

• Upper middle class urbanites have abandoned center-right parties en masse and many have adopted “urbanism” as an explicit political identity. Consequently the urban/rural political divide has become more important than any regional political divide.

• Widespread social media usage has resulted in a decline of literate culture and a reversion to pre-Enlightenment superstition.

• The internet has proven to be a universal solvent to all cultural or contextual boundaries, shoving us all into a single uni-context.

• Religion, far from being obsolesced by modernity, has demonstrated resilience to technological and social disruption

• The major crises of the century so far - climate change, declining birth rates, and possibly AI labor market disruptions - are poorly addressed by 20th century political institutions

• The nature of capital itself has fundamentally changed, with the highest value-add components being intangibles - intellectual property, data, network effects.

I’m reminded of the late Ancien Regime and the French Revolution, which prefigured the political conflicts of the next two centuries when such divisions were still inchoate. Socialism, nationalism, and liberalism will, at minimum, need to be radically revised to account for the above changes. More likely we’ll need new totalizing theories, as intellectually unfashionable as that might be.

We should not allow ourselves to be imprisoned by the moribund political fashions of 1848.