Why a look-back at 2025 is a dispiriting exercise: Anxiety, populism and technology tested our faith in the future

Mint a decade ago under the ominous headline ‘Is the history of the 1930s repeating itself?’ that concluded with: “History is unlikely to be repeated in the same manner, but with capitalism in crisis, and both the Centre and organized Left in retreat, human tragedy of indeterminate magnitude is likely. Whether the post-war liberal order will survive the right-wing onslaught is moot.”Developments over the last decade only fuelled my fears.

I nevertheless looked at the positives in each subsequent New Year message, or at what economists are wont to call ‘green shoots.’ I likened each new year to a new dawn that heralded the end of darkness.Arthur Clough’s poem, Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth, was almost a constant in my New Year messages. While drawing an analogy between the new crop of global leaders and the ‘four horsemen of the Apocalypse’ of the biblical book of Revelation, I also referred to their fiery eyed nemesis mounted on a white steed.Indeed, the defeat of the Taliban and ISIS, and of Trump in 2020, made it seem that the tide was coming in through ‘creeks and inlets’ and that one need not look only at the sunrise in the east, for with it the west looked bright as well.The Taliban, however, fought its way back and the past year saw the triumphal return of a more virulent version of Trump’s MAGA politics.

The famed institutional checks and balances of the world’s oldest democracy are faltering. Similar figures seem to be on the ascendant all over the democratic world.

Green shoots are no doubt also visible in the world’s oldest democracy. The second Trump presidency is less than a year old and already piling up electoral losses.