Observing the fading Highland culture, Johnson concluded that misery is caused "by the corrosion of less visible evils" like domestic strife, rather than rare disasters like invasions. This insight suggests that gradual, internal decay is a greater threat to a society's health than singular, external shocks.

After achieving significant progress in the 1960s, many Americans stopped focusing on the active defense of democracy. This created a void that the radical right filled by offering its followers a powerful sense of agency and a compelling national narrative, which liberal movements had ceased to provide.

Pre-modern societies, including the U.S. founders, based legal and social structures on "natural law"—an understanding of inherent human nature. The modern left's rejection of this concept leads to policies that ignore reality, such as denying innate human tendencies like greed, which ultimately fail.

Both the hard left, which sees modern institutions as corrupt, and the traditional right, which laments the decline of past authorities, are ideologically primed to reject data showing societal progress. For both, positive trends can be seen as a form of heresy.

Daron Acemoglu critiques liberalism's foundation in social contract theories, arguing they impose absolute truths (like Rousseau's "general will") rather than engaging in the difficult but essential process of forging consensus on shared values and priorities.

Traditional center-left parties are losing influence because they lack a coherent agenda to address the modern drivers of voter discontent. Their continued focus on narrow economic solutions is ineffective against the powerful cultural, identity-based, and technological forces that are actually shaping politics and fueling populism.

Left-leaning parties are losing worldwide because they offer economic solutions (e.g., more government programs) to what is fundamentally a cultural problem. Voters feeling existential anxiety from globalization and social change are drawn to the right's message of nostalgia and tradition, not the left's policy proposals.

Since the 1990s, the left has shifted from material concerns like wages to identity politics expressed in exclusionary academic rhetoric. This has actively repelled the working-class voters it historically championed and needs for a majority coalition.

Following the failures of grand social movements and projects like Soviet communism, the 20th-century political left turned away from material and social progress, refocusing its energy on the private self and personal behavior.