[Editor’s Note:

In eras when progress was still possible, History played the role of witness — recording what a people built. But in the Trump era, public life has turned backward, not forward, and the work of government stewardship has collapsed into sabotage. Career civil servants are leaving government in record numbers because leadership has been replaced with duplicity. This essay imagines History itself joining the exodus — resigning not because the work is complete, but because those entrusted with the nation’s trajectory have abandoned it.]

History’s Exit Interview: Notes from the End of Progress

[ 🎧 Listen to the narrated edition of “History's Exit Interview: Notes from the End of Progress” (8 min): https://dunneagin.substack.com/p/af315745-9f43-41fa-b903-86d2e53339fb---]

Somewhere between the ruins of Enlightenment optimism and the latest GOP fundraiser, History called it quits. The old clerk packed up its ledgers of revolutions, reform bills, and suffragist marches and said, “I’m done.” After 21-plus centuries of steady service, the narrative of progress has filed for early retirement.

You can hardly blame it. Progress used to mean indoor plumbing, civil rights, vaccines, and maybe a moon landing or two. Now it means Elon Musk live-streaming himself reinventing the truck. Conservatives once promised efficiency through markets; today, they promise deliverance through outrage. The Right no longer sells prosperity — it sells resentment with a customer-loyalty program.

What Krugman calls the Right’s “rejection of progress” isn’t philosophical anymore; it’s commercial. Regression pays. There’s money to be made in denying every discovery since Newton. The old conservative creed—fiscal restraint, civic virtue, moral seriousness — has been replaced by a performance economy of grievance. The modern Right has discovered that if you can’t govern the future, you can monetize the past.

 The result is a nation of nostalgia investors, pouring capital into imaginary eras that never existed. “Make America Great Again” is less a slogan than a futures contract in regression, guaranteed to yield emotional dividends for those who fear the modern world. What passes for political philosophy on the Right is now an Etsy storefront of vintage hatreds, repackaged for mass consumption.

Meanwhile, liberalism, according to The New Yorker’s anxious theorists, wanders through its midlife crisis like an aging academic trying to stay relevant by misquoting John Rawls. The Left no longer dreams of transformation; it drafts management plans for despair. The technocrats aren’t leading revolutions; they’re supervising entropy. Their rallying cry might as well be: “We can slow the decline—within budget.”

This is how civilizations fade now—not with a bang but with a brand strategy.

The old idea that history possessed direction, or that democracy contained within it the seeds of self-correction, has been replaced by a politics of mood. Once upon a time, reason was supposed to win the argument. Now it’s lucky to get a parking space. The Future of History crowd imagined democracy as a perpetual motion machine of self-improvement. But perpetual motion is a fantasy—entropy wins every time. The fuel of liberal democracy was always belief: belief that people could learn, adapt, and progress. The Right has discarded that belief as naïve, and the Left, exhausted, seems embarrassed to defend it.

Trump didn’t invent this malaise; he simply monetized it. He turned cynicism into a lifestyle brand. If the twentieth century was about industrial production, the twenty-first is about emotional extraction: mining rage instead of coal. He understood that attention — not truth, not policy, not history — was the last natural resource worth drilling. The Republican Party, once the custodian of conservative principles, became the extraction firm.

That’s the plain truth of Trumpism — the current aberration of conservatism turned carnival. It’s politics as nostalgia therapy: a promise to make America feel young, white, and uncomplicated again. Its theology is simple: every social advance is a personal insult. Every change is evidence of betrayal. And the faithful line up to tithe their outrage in exchange for the warm illusion of control.

In this theology, cruelty is the sacrament. Every policy becomes a punishment, every bureaucratic failure an act of divine retribution. A government of sadists by consent. The conservative imagination, once concerned with preserving order, has been replaced by a fantasy of purification. It no longer wants to conserve; it wants to cleanse.

Liberalism, for its part, stands at the rail murmuring that “we can do better,” while the ship of state lists sharply toward idiotocracy. The guardians of moderation — the Manchin brigade — are busy hosting symposiums on “rethinking the center” as if geometry could fix moral collapse. They write essays about “saving liberalism” the way Victorians wrote obituaries for family dogs — long on sentiment, short on survival techniques.

The new liberal hero is not the reformer or activist but the curator — someone who maintains the exhibit of democracy long after the tour groups have stopped coming. Policy debates read like catalogue notes for an estate sale: “Here we have the last surviving example of bipartisan compromise, found near the Smithsonian cafeteria.”

And still, the absurdity multiplies. Every scandal collapses into a meme; every constitutional crisis becomes a hashtag. Outrage has become so automated that it no longer requires outrage — only the simulation of it. A republic that once prided itself on rational debate now treats attention span deficit as the highest civic virtue.

The normalization of absurdity has reached the point where satire feels redundant. How do you parody a nation whose political class already talks like its own caricature? Late-night comics used to exaggerate. Now they summarize. The daily absurdities of governance — cabinet secretaries moonlighting as pundits, senators quoting conspiracy threads as policy — have erased the boundary between political theater and actual administration.

And yet, through it all, liberal optimism hangs on, a dim pilot light flickering beneath the avalanche. We are told democracy is resilient, that institutions will hold, that the guardrails will save us. But guardrails are useless when the driver insists the cliff is fake news.

 What no one wants to admit is that we’ve reached the cash-out phase of history. The future has been outsourced to algorithms, and the past has gone private equity. Progress itself is now a boutique subscription service: renewable monthly, cancel anytime. And in this economy, despair isn’t a crisis—it’s a commodity.

So, History, exhausted, hands in its resignation letter:

“After centuries of upward mobility and moral experiment, I’ve concluded that humanity prefers reruns. Please forward all inquiries to the Department of Managed Decline.”

It signs off with one last line, underlined in red ink: “If you want to see how a civilization dies, don’t look for collapse—look for comfort.

Because in the end, that’s the genius of our age: we’ve turned decay into entertainment, cynicism into policy, and apathy into patriotism. We no longer build; we brand. We no longer argue; we perform. The Right profits from the ruins, the Left administrates them, and History — poor, overworked History — packs up its desk and walks out whistling the only anthem that still makes sense:

“God bless the free market, where even decline turns a profit.”

~Dunneagin

[Editor’s Note:

In eras when progress was still possible, History played the role of witness — recording what a people built. But in the Trump era, public life has turned backward, not forward, and the work of government stewardship has collapsed into sabotage. Career civil servants are leaving government in record numbers because leadership has been replaced with duplicity. This essay imagines History itself joining the exodus — resigning not because the work is complete, but because those entrusted with the nation’s trajectory have abandoned it.]

History’s Exit Interview: Notes from the End of Progress

[ 🎧 Listen to the narrated edition of “History's Exit Interview: Notes from the End of Progress” (8 min): https://dunneagin.substack.com/p/af315745-9f43-41fa-b903-86d2e53339fb---]

Somewhere between the ruins of Enlightenment optimism and the latest GOP fundraiser, History called it quits. The old clerk packed up its ledgers of revolutions, reform bills, and suffragist marches and said, “I’m done.” After 21-plus centuries of steady service, the narrative of progress has filed for early retirement.

You can hardly blame it. Progress used to mean indoor plumbing, civil rights, vaccines, and maybe a moon landing or two. Now it means Elon Musk live-streaming himself reinventing the truck. Conservatives once promised efficiency through markets; today, they promise deliverance through outrage. The Right no longer sells prosperity — it sells resentment with a customer-loyalty program.

What Krugman calls the Right’s “rejection of progress” isn’t philosophical anymore; it’s commercial. Regression pays. There’s money to be made in denying every discovery since Newton. The old conservative creed—fiscal restraint, civic virtue, moral seriousness — has been replaced by a performance economy of grievance. The modern Right has discovered that if you can’t govern the future, you can monetize the past.

 The result is a nation of nostalgia investors, pouring capital into imaginary eras that never existed. “Make America Great Again” is less a slogan than a futures contract in regression, guaranteed to yield emotional dividends for those who fear the modern world. What passes for political philosophy on the Right is now an Etsy storefront of vintage hatreds, repackaged for mass consumption.

Meanwhile, liberalism, according to The New Yorker’s anxious theorists, wanders through its midlife crisis like an aging academic trying to stay relevant by misquoting John Rawls. The Left no longer dreams of transformation; it drafts management plans for despair. The technocrats aren’t leading revolutions; they’re supervising entropy. Their rallying cry might as well be: “We can slow the decline—within budget.”

This is how civilizations fade now—not with a bang but with a brand strategy.

The old idea that history possessed direction, or that democracy contained within it the seeds of self-correction, has been replaced by a politics of mood. Once upon a time, reason was supposed to win the argument. Now it’s lucky to get a parking space. The Future of History crowd imagined democracy as a perpetual motion machine of self-improvement. But perpetual motion is a fantasy—entropy wins every time. The fuel of liberal democracy was always belief: belief that people could learn, adapt, and progress. The Right has discarded that belief as naïve, and the Left, exhausted, seems embarrassed to defend it.

Trump didn’t invent this malaise; he simply monetized it. He turned cynicism into a lifestyle brand. If the twentieth century was about industrial production, the twenty-first is about emotional extraction: mining rage instead of coal. He understood that attention — not truth, not policy, not history — was the last natural resource worth drilling. The Republican Party, once the custodian of conservative principles, became the extraction firm.

That’s the plain truth of Trumpism — the current aberration of conservatism turned carnival. It’s politics as nostalgia therapy: a promise to make America feel young, white, and uncomplicated again. Its theology is simple: every social advance is a personal insult. Every change is evidence of betrayal. And the faithful line up to tithe their outrage in exchange for the warm illusion of control.

In this theology, cruelty is the sacrament. Every policy becomes a punishment, every bureaucratic failure an act of divine retribution. A government of sadists by consent. The conservative imagination, once concerned with preserving order, has been replaced by a fantasy of purification. It no longer wants to conserve; it wants to cleanse.

Liberalism, for its part, stands at the rail murmuring that “we can do better,” while the ship of state lists sharply toward idiotocracy. The guardians of moderation — the Manchin brigade — are busy hosting symposiums on “rethinking the center” as if geometry could fix moral collapse. They write essays about “saving liberalism” the way Victorians wrote obituaries for family dogs — long on sentiment, short on survival techniques.

The new liberal hero is not the reformer or activist but the curator — someone who maintains the exhibit of democracy long after the tour groups have stopped coming. Policy debates read like catalogue notes for an estate sale: “Here we have the last surviving example of bipartisan compromise, found near the Smithsonian cafeteria.”

And still, the absurdity multiplies. Every scandal collapses into a meme; every constitutional crisis becomes a hashtag. Outrage has become so automated that it no longer requires outrage — only the simulation of it. A republic that once prided itself on rational debate now treats attention span deficit as the highest civic virtue.

The normalization of absurdity has reached the point where satire feels redundant. How do you parody a nation whose political class already talks like its own caricature? Late-night comics used to exaggerate. Now they summarize. The daily absurdities of governance — cabinet secretaries moonlighting as pundits, senators quoting conspiracy threads as policy — have erased the boundary between political theater and actual administration.

And yet, through it all, liberal optimism hangs on, a dim pilot light flickering beneath the avalanche. We are told democracy is resilient, that institutions will hold, that the guardrails will save us. But guardrails are useless when the driver insists the cliff is fake news.

 What no one wants to admit is that we’ve reached the cash-out phase of history. The future has been outsourced to algorithms, and the past has gone private equity. Progress itself is now a boutique subscription service: renewable monthly, cancel anytime. And in this economy, despair isn’t a crisis—it’s a commodity.

So, History, exhausted, hands in its resignation letter:

“After centuries of upward mobility and moral experiment, I’ve concluded that humanity prefers reruns. Please forward all inquiries to the Department of Managed Decline.”

It signs off with one last line, underlined in red ink: “If you want to see how a civilization dies, don’t look for collapse—look for comfort.

Because in the end, that’s the genius of our age: we’ve turned decay into entertainment, cynicism into policy, and apathy into patriotism. We no longer build; we brand. We no longer argue; we perform. The Right profits from the ruins, the Left administrates them, and History — poor, overworked History — packs up its desk and walks out whistling the only anthem that still makes sense:

“God bless the free market, where even decline turns a profit.”

~Dunneagin