In 1989, Francis Fukuyama published in The National Interest magazine his essay "The End of History?", which was called to have a worldwide echo, reinforced by his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man. The author proposed an interpretation of the impressive events recently experienced at the end of socialism in the Soviet satellites in Europe and in the Soviet Union itself, which disappeared as a country between the publication of the article and the book. His thesis was that the end of socialism meant the triumph of liberal democracy and the end of an ideological dialectic that had vertebrated the political discussion in the last centuries. The author knew perfectly well that life went on, but he understood that the end of the ideological dialectic ended a period of time and signaled the beginning of another of which we only knew one thing: no one would doubt the failure of the socialist alternative or question liberal democracy.

The more than 25 years that have passed since then have been enough for new events to superimpose themselves on the events that then seemed to mark the future of the world. The students of our Schools do not remember anything about the USSR and they were all born after the publication of Fukuyama's essay : they are another generation. A brief review of what happened in the world during those years can help us understand why there is now a growing feeling that we are facing another change of entity.

The triumph of liberal democracy was also the triumph of neoliberal approaches, which had been claiming to be the solution to social democratic convergence. Those who opposed it denounced it as a "single thought", sterilizing and overbearing. To confront it, movements arose to denounce non-socialist political evils: dictators such as Pinochet, historical grievances of right-wing dictatorships, denunciations of colonialism as a Western sin, indigenist demands, aspirations to multiculturalism, etc. But all this was compatible with the continuation of life according to a outline in which the idea that the West had found the philosopher's stone triumphed: it could guarantee indefinite progress and endless growth of wealth. The instrument in charge of achieving this were the financial organizations embarked on a globalization that ensured their endless escalation of profits.

True, it was not all good news: there were wars, far away, in the former Soviet Union. There were wars closer to home in the former Yugoslavia, and they were not stopped until the United States decided to intervene: Bill Clinton needed an international success for his re-election, and he got it: in Yugoslavia and in Palestine. That was a demonstration that the European Union could do little or nothing, and that the same was true of the UN. The world order was a matter of American intervention. The African genocides in Rwanda and Burundi were a sad confirmation of the same, that the Cold War had not been followed by a new international order but a kind of disorder with a single global power.

So, we tried to continue along this path, until we came up against the emergence of international terrorism of an Islamist nature. Faced with it, the Americans, who for the first time in decades were hit by an attack on their own soil, reacted with a global approach to their defense. The fight proved more difficult than expected, destabilized large parts of the Middle East and Africa, and has led to an exodus of people, highlighting demographic, economic and political imbalances. In the process, the American global power has proved that it is not enough to rule the world.

The problems have not only come from outside. Inside, the triumphant globalized financial system showed part of its miseries in 2008 and generated a serious crisis that is still making its consequences felt today in the rich world: the promise of uninterrupted economic growth with a guarantee of an unlimited future is under suspicion. In reality, for anyone who thinks about it, it is pure folly, but politicians have continued to act as if it were possible. The solution to economic and social ills has always been sought in the fusion of a defense of the great financial, technological and commercial means, accompanied by radical social measures that are more grandiloquent rhetoric than tangible reality for the majority of the population. With food, clothing and perhaps health reasonably satisfied, promises of individual equality and autonomy have focused on issues of sexual orientation that seem to be the frontier for the liberation of biology, while subject of the environment assures us that we will know how to let biology and not human whim rule.

But, little by little, the promises have begun to ring hollow. The citizens of the democracies are showing signs of weariness with the speech of political correctness that has prevailed since 1992. The language articulated by politicians and the media to explain the world and the solutions they have prepared to make things better contrast too starkly with the realization that some things are not improving at all or are getting worse.

The signs are relatively abundant. In Russia, the population applauds Putin's policy of nationalist affirmation without Europe knowing how to react at all. Obama's United States has responded with a sort of mini-Cold War that is baffling public opinion. In Europe, the enlargements of the Union have not brought about an institutional change opening up a new political horizon; on the contrary, the feeling of bureaucratization and organizational rigidity, suspected of lacking democratic legitimacy, has grown. The response to the difficulties in the United Kingdom has therefore led those who denounced the defects of the EU to take on themselves many internal difficulties, many fears and frustrations of a population that is tired of being told one thing and having something else happen. In some central European countries such as Poland or Hungary, the electorate also prefers a clearer language about their own problems. And the final straw has come when in the United States the more politically incorrect candidate has won. Voters want nothing to do with model , which has been presented as a solution for the future. And this against the dominant power: neither the mainstream press, the New York Times, CNN, NBC, nor the glamorous world of show business with Hollywood as its flagship, nor Wall Street, nor the social networks, nor the ideology that focuses its speech on emancipation and justice in sexual identities, have managed to convince Americans. They have other problems and want other solutions.

A return to national interest discourses, a rejection of the negative effects of globalization and a demand for a new approach to problems can be perceived in Western democracies. It remains to be seen whether the response will be pure populism or will it build something new. It is almost forty years since Alexander Solzhenitsyn denounced at Harvard the inability of the West to be an alternative to socialist failure. According to him, the cause was Western materialism, as closed to the spirit as communist dictatorship. We may be at the moment when the confirmation of his thesis surpasses the validity of Fukuyama's diagnosis. History does not stand still.