The Schwartz Window, Revisited

Eight years on, it's clearer now which direction history has turned...

Saying “I told you so” is a tedious routine. And yet, it’s important to do so now, as normie liberals around the world, across the North Atlantic, are finally waking up to the reality of what Trump and Trumpism represents, both for themselves, and for the future in general.

During the the 2017-2021 period, such people desperately wanted to believe that what they were living through was just a parenthesis in an otherwise unbroken period of movement toward a technocratically managed future in which the norms of liberal democracy would hold and big planetary problems would be tackled rationally. Had Harris eked out a few hundred thousand more well-placed votes last November, they might have been able to sustain that belief — hell, they might even have been right. But now that Trump has returned, with a literal vengeance, the proverbial scales are falling from their eyes.

A new era is upon us, and its contours are just coming into view.

Eight years ago, I tried to assess where all this was headed. Since I didn’t then feel confident predicting where things would land, I instead resorted to proposing a way to think about the relative “openness” or “closedness” of the future. My thinking was informed by Thomas Kuhn’s epochal 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which famously posits a distinction between “normal” and “revolutionary” scientific research.¹ According to Kuhn, normal science is what proceeds most of the time: there exists a “paradigm” which frames a series of assumptions about the world, which in turn implicates a downstream set of assumptions about what counts as a scientifically-worthy question, as well as what sorts of data should be used for assessing those questions, and who is qualified to participate in conversations about the scientific questions. Pointedly, every scientific paradigm does what sociologist Thomas Gieryn has labelled “boundary work,” excluding other sorts of questions, data, and participants from “legitimate” or “respectable” scientific discourse.²

The brilliance of Kuhn’s conceptual framework is how he then points out that, in the course of doing normal science, researchers over time begin to uncover “anomalies” that are not explicable within the paradigm’s framework of assumptions. These are often ignored, or dismissed as results of fallibilities of measurement, or become the subject of ever more elaborate theorizing within the framework of the existing paradigm. Eventually, however, someone comes along and says, “Wait a minute, if we cast aside assumptions X, Y, and Z of the existing paradigm, then we can explain these anomalies!”

This is the “revolutionary moment” in scientific practice — the moment when Ptolemaic geocentrism gives way to Copernican heliocentrism, or Newtonian mechanics gives way to Einsteinian relativity (to take two, well, paradigmatic examples). These are moments of high excitement, as bold new understandings of the world and thus avenues of research heave into view.

What exactly it will all mean is unclear at first. Eventually, however, the post-revolutionary order gets settled, a new paradigm is established, and normal science recommences within the new horizon of assumptions. The new paradigm consolidates as people realize “There is No Alternative” — the phrase Margaret Thatcher used as she began to amalgamate neoliberalism into the “normal science” of late 20th century governance.

Seen from a human and social point of view, there is a dark side to such revolutionary moments in science. Because the new paradigm typically renders irrelevant much of the work that had been done under the old paradigm, it is almost always resisted by the old guard that refuses to accept the radical revision of assumptions that had subtended their life’s work. They themselves, in some sense, are rendered irrelevant by the new paradigm. Depicting the social process that accompanies such paradigmatic succession, Kuhn quoted Max Planck’s famous observation that, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it”³ — a line often paraphrased as “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”

In describing such scientific succession patterns with the term “revolution,” Kuhn was of course drawing an analogy to politics. In turn, my own sense in 2017 was it might be useful to turn Kuhn’s description of paradigmatic succession in science back toward politics to help make sense of Trump’s accession to power, and rightwing anti-establishmentarianism more generally and globally.

As I saw it already eight years ago, Trump was clearly a would-be revolutionary figure, in Kuhn’s sense. He facially rejected, indeed embodied the rejection of, a whole series of assumptions that has long been foundational to the practice of small-l liberal democratic politics at home, as well as international relations writ large. Trump performed a whole different way of politics: no longer would it be about Habermasian reasoned discourse, Millian compromise between competing interests, Kantian ideas of human universalism, or Benthamite assessments of the most efficient way to achieve agreed upon ends.

In the eight years since, I’ve also thought a lot about Max Planck’s famous quote. Planck’s point is that the old guard in some cases cannot even understand the new paradigm. It’s too far outside their cognitive framework. They react in confused anger toward what they see as barbarians ripping apart a carefully constructed and indeed beautiful scaffolding of ideas. Many of them, at first, hope the challengers will just go away.⁴ Observing liberals in America and in Europe reacting to Trump’s first term, I saw so many performing the Planckian point: superannuated politicians claiming that we just had to defend democracy against this rising horde, not realizing that the rules of the game were fundamentally changing. Like scientists in a dying paradigm, such politicians themselves (and their bureaucratic enablers) have been rendered irrelevant by the new paradigm.

Eight years ago, I wanted to ask: where is all this going? To say that we were in a “revolutionary moment,” in Kuhnian terms, was to observe that the range of possible futures was itself opening up. Here is what I wrote eight years ago, riffing off a key idea in scenario planning methodology, namely “the official future”⁵:

To better get a handle on how wide open the future seems today, it’s useful to draw on the concept that the futurist Peter Schwartz once dubbed “The Official Future.” For any human group, be it a family, a corporation, or country, there exists a set of (usually unstated) shared assumptions about what is going to happen in the future. For a corporation or nonprofit organization, for example, this Official Future might entail a sense of what lines of business one plans to be in, how much growth to expect, or where the business will be conducted. For a country, the Official Future typically consists of assumptions, for example, about peace (or enmity) with certain neighbors, about the durability of the constitutional order (or lack thereof), or about how the economy will be organized (and to whose benefit). If national identity describes how a people looks backward together, the Official Future defines how a people looks forward together.

In the United States for much of the last quarter century, the Official Future might be described this way: Domestically, the United States was destined to remain what it had always been: a two-party multicultural federalist democracy, dedicated to capitalism, technological optimism, and creating better lives for our children; likewise, internationally, the United States would remain the center of the global order as well as the world’s greatest military power, what Madeline Albright called “the indispensable nation,” dedicated to promoting economic growth, democracy, and human rights the world over.

As Schwartz pointed out, the Official Future always entails a certain degree of wishful thinking, and arguably self-delusion. When the assumptions embedded in the Official Future are named explicitly, we can readily recognize that they may not, in fact, be entirely reliable. The future, after all, is inherently uncertain, especially over the medium to long run. An unwillingness to challenge the assumptions of the Official Future can lead to strategic blindnesses. At the same time, however, the Official Future is a necessary form of delusion. It represents a kind of ideological glue that holds a collectivity together by defining a shared horizon of expectations. It makes social and political peace possible, and creates a basis for collective action.

Today in the United States, a year after Donald Trump’s improbable election, an event that the Official Future had declared was categorically impossible, the post-Cold War Official Future has collapsed. For better or worse, the aura of inevitability associated with old Official Future has evaporated.

In its place have emerged a bewildering array of plausibly possible futures. Today in Washington and across the country it is not uncommon to hear even “reasonable people” articulate political possibilities that a couple of years ago would have been confined to science fiction novelists and the tinfoil milliners of Reddit or 4chan. Mainstream TV channels and prestige publications give an earnest hearing to theories of how U.S. democracy could be abrogated into some sort of quasi-fascistic dictatorship, perhaps in the wake of a major terrorist strike on the homeland, subtended by some sort of race war. Others envisage the possibility of the wholesale dismantling of the Federal government, or even the collapse and breakup of the United States. And yet others are discussing an explicit embrace of “socialism,” focused on major wealth redistribution and state-managed delivery of universal basic income and services.

Now, it’s true that many of these possible futures seem to be imagined and discussed less by advocates (though there certainly are advocates) than by people who fervently oppose such outcomes. But the significant point is that all of these possible futures no longer seem like mere political pornography, but instead have come to be perceived by even “reasonable folks” as live possibilities.But the significant point is that all of these possible futures no longer seem like mere political pornography, but instead have come to be perceived by even “reasonable folks” as live possibilities. Indeed, a central reason that politics today arouses such passionate intensity is that the gaping range of plausible outcomes makes the stakes seem enormous.

It’s not just on the domestic front that politics are wildly unsettled and the range of possible futures vastly expanded. Internationally, fears of nuclear apocalypse are higher than at any time since the depths of the Cold War, at least according the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which since the dawn of the nuclear era has been maintaining a “doomsday clock.” The United States’s seventy-year run as global hegemon seems in doubt, not least because the President seems intent on ripping up as many as possible of the international agreements which have institutionalized that hegemony since the end of World War II. The future of the European Union seems more uncertain than ever. But what will fill these voids seems entirely uncertain: A rising China? “A world of chaos”?

In short, as the old Official Future has collapsed, the range of credibly possible futures has exploded. For political insurgents, the meagre, stale, forbidding ways of custom, law, and statute have fallen away and the budding rose of possibility is abloom. For veteran political observers, by contrast, the sensation is something more akin to intellectual vertigo.

Eight years ago, I sensed that we were no longer in the “normal” political world of liberalism. Trump’s ascension to the White House in 2017 signaled that the paradigm of the old order had entered a crisis. As I said above, it seemed then as if a broad range of futures for the United States were still possible — everything from democratic socialism to outright fascism.

During his first term, Trump mainly limited himself to railing against the bankruptcy of the Obaman political paradigm. While he was sure that old order was done, and needed to be seen off, he and his minions didn’t yet have a clear idea of what an alternative, post-Trumpian political paradigm would look like. from 2015 to 2020, “Make America Great Again” remained a political catchphrase in search of a policy platform. Which in no small measure is why Trump lost the election in 2020.

Then, starting 2021, Joe Biden tried promote the Green New Deal as a way to overcome the crisis of the old order. That too failed to work, not least because Biden himself could not shake the impression that he was living relic of that old order, unable to roust either himself or the bureaucracy to perform at a higher level — a sense that even switching to Kamala Harris’s “vibes only” campaign could not shake.

Meanwhile, Trump in 2024 ran a campaign that now explicitly proposed a radical departure from the old paradigm. Despite the campaign’s official disavowals, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 was “a blueprint for tomorrow’s world” based on “revolutionizing governance for a new era.” (A recent analysis by the New York Times “found more than 60 major moves that Mr. Trump and his administration have made in his first 23 days, including executive orders and agency memos, that align with proposals in the blueprint.”) This program is now being operationalized by Elon Musk’s Orwellianly-named Department of Government Efficiency,⁶ which at lightning speed is moving to eliminate many government functions and replacing professional civil servants with people who under the old paradigm would never have been remotely been considered viable. The Heritage Foundation has helpfully compiled a database of tens of thousands of ideologically (if not operationally) vetted footsoldiers, ready to be deployed to backfilled the cashiered civil servants.

Just as with a scientific revolution, the Trump revolution is calling into question basic political assumptions about how the world works, which in turn implicates downstream assumptions about what is a worthy object of governance, what sorts of data and reasoning should be used to assess governance, and who is qualified to participate in governance. No longer is there the assumption that the role of government is to mitigate collective risks connected to (for example) epidemic disease, pollution, or technological risks. No longer is it expected that in order to hold a senior governance position one must have relevant expertise or decades of experience managing the systems and assessing the data. No longer are credible accusations of moral turpitude (or, in the case of Trump himself, actual criminal convictions) considered disqualifying for office. Instead, it is the old guard, that held onto and promoted such now-ridiculed views (only as a way to maintain their power, in the view of the revolutionaries) that is to be lustrated, purged, hounded, and excluded.⁷

Despite the efforts of the Biden administration to exploit the openness of the Schwartz Window to push for leftist dreams, they were doomed to failure by their continued obeisance to the old order’s quaint rituals of respect for Congress and the courts. We can now see that the actual direction of historical change is toward Trumpism — something genuinely new despite drawing on elements on Caesarism, Bonapartism, Fascism, Peronism, Berlusconism, Putinism, and so on.

Where all this lands remains uncertain. Domestically, there are basic questions about what sort of country the United States will be in a few years time: who will qualify as a resident or a citizen? what sort of authority will the government have? what sorts of constraints will exist on corporate power? what will be the role of religion? what sorts of liberties will and won’t obtain? Similar uncertainties are opening up internationally: the radical internal transformation of the world’s leading superpower is precipitating a post-“liberal,” post-“rules-based” international order. (More on that in a forthcoming Foreign Policy piece.)

If we cannot predict with confidence exactly how this revolution plays out, we can at least know one thing: all revolutions, whether scientific or political, eventually come to an end and synthesize into some “new normal.” At some point, the “Schwartz Window” will close. There will consolidate a new paradigm with a new consensus about how the world works, about what within that world should be governed, about how that governance should be implemented, and about who should be responsible for it. While socialist and globalist options seem definitively off the table, the character of the post-Trumpian equilibrium remains to be determined.

1. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press, 1962) is the one book everyone should read. There is a very good reason why it is the most cited book in the history of the social sciences.

2. Thomas F. Gieryn, “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists,” American Sociological Review 48: 6 (1983), pp. 781-795.

3. Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers (Philosophical Library, 1950), p. 33.

4. This complacent hope by the old political guard that the challenge of Trumpism would simply recede is what future liberals, if there are any, will see as the signal failure of the Biden administration, namely not to use the January 6th insurrectionary moment to hound Trump into political oblivion by any means necessary. The lack of urgency with which the liberal establishment politically investigated and then slowly brought a federal case against Trump in a sense was the most basic proof that they did not recognize the radical, paradigm-shifting nature of the Trumpian challenge. They evidently believed that a radical challenge could be met with the old order of legal battle. In a sense it was a perfect enactment and proof that old order could not rise to or even recognize the requirements of the moment. It cost them everything.

5. The concept of “the official future” was first elaborated in Paul Hawken, James Ogilvy & Peter Schwartz, Seven Tomorrows: Toward a Voluntary History (Bantam Books, 1982).

6. Just as the Holy Roman Empire, famously, was neither holy nor roman nor an empire, so the Department of Government Efficiency is neither a department nor governmental nor about efficiency.

7. This process of revolutionary overturning recalls Vilfredo Pareto’s famous law of the “circulation of elites,” e.g. when one elite overthrows another. As Pareto observed, the supplanting elite almost always does so in the name of vox populi, which helps explain why the displaced elite often passively acquiesces to its supersession. Indeed, Pareto observed, this form of political pathos goes back to ancient times: “Elites often become effete. They preserve a certain passive courage, but lack active courage. It is amazing to see how in imperial Rome the members of the elite committed suicide or allowed themselves to be assassinated without the slightest defense, so long as it pleased Caesar. We are equally amazed when we see the nobles in France die on the Guillotine, instead of going down fighting, weapon in hand.” (Pareto, The Rise and Fall of the Elites, Bedminster Press, 1968, p. 60)