A World-Historic Chance

The Right is freaking out because we could be on the brink of proving that egalitarian, pluralistic democracy is possible. A glass-half-full interpretation of our moment.

By Thomas Zimmer, July 13, 2026

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This moment will stick with me for a while. Last week, I was invited to give a talk at the “Academy by the Sea” on Sylt, the largest of Germany’s islands in the North Sea. The Academy is part of a network of adult education centers across the country, offering people the chance to enroll in a large variety of courses or engage with any topic imaginable via public lectures and events. My talk was scheduled as an evening lecture as part of the Academy’s summer program. Enrollees spend several days, perhaps even weeks at the Academy, which is located in the island’s northwest, far away from Sylt’s busy, overly crowded tourist hotspots; it is nestled in the dunes, feels beautifully secluded from the rest of civilization, with direct access to miles and miles of some of the most gorgeous beaches you’ll ever see.

To be honest, I almost felt bad about giving my talk – to force people who come to the island to combine vacation and education to think about Donald Trump. Or rather: Where Trump’s rise sits in the larger context of U.S. history. For 45 minutes I talked about the struggle over national identity and who gets to define “America,” who gets to belong, and who gets to be included in “We the People.” And as you might imagine, it wasn’t exactly an uplifting conversation. The discussion went long; we were about two hours in when the Academy’s director wanted to call it a night. But that’s when a woman sitting in the first row, right in front of me, spoke up. I had noticed several times throughout my talk that she was visibly wrestling with the story I was presenting, clearly affected by what I was describing. And now she insisted that we couldn’t possibly end like this – after several questions dealing with the Supreme Court, and tech elites, the extremists who will come after Trump, and the so-called liberal international order that all prompted me to emphasize that there was not going to be a return to “normalcy” anytime soon, that America was going to face the challenge to rebuild and reconstruct (rather than merely restore) if and when Trump was finally removed from power. No, I couldn’t possibly release everyone into the night like this. She demanded I give the audience something else: There had to be something people could do, something to carry us all forward?

I admit my instinct normally is to reject these kinds of questions. I try hard not to overstep and stick to my actual expertise. I am not a politician; I don’t have any experience in organizing or political activism. I offer my analysis and hope to contribute to getting the diagnosis right, for whatever that’s worth. But in this moment, perhaps because the setting was so distinct from the kinds of environments where these talks usually take place, I did feel an obligation to offer something more. Not some clearcut answers I don’t possess, or simplistic recipes dressed up as “lessons from history,” and certainly not some willfully naïve progress gospel. But a reminder that the situation is not hopeless – that there is, in fact, a glass-half-full interpretation of our moment in world history. That we could be, as dangerous as this situation is, on the brink of proving, perhaps for the first time ever, that a truly democratic society under conditions of multiracial, multi-religious, gender-egalitarian pluralism is indeed possible. 

And so, I made my case: The anti-democratic radicalization of the Right has not been fueled by a sense of strength, but by a pervasive sense of weakness. They are feeling their backs against the wall. And they are reacting to something real: Our “Western” societies have indeed become more pluralistic, less white, less overwhelmingly Christian. In that sense, it was not the perfectly stable liberal democracy that suddenly fell into crisis (because such an order had never existed), but white Christian patriarchal dominance – what the Right likes to call the “natural order” – that has been coming under pressure.

The fact is that reality has been moving away from those who refuse to imagine “America” as anything other than a land defined by white Christian patriarchal domination. And no matter how loudly they insist to be representing the “will of the people” in pushing back against these developments, their reactionary ideas are opposed by a stable majority. According to the latest survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and published under the title “Competing visions of America at 250,” (Abre numa nova janela) almost two thirds of Americans prefer religious pluralism over the idea of a Christian nation; almost eight in ten Americans want the country to be a racially diverse nation with people from all over the world as opposed to a nation of and for white people “with Western European heritage.”

These are impressive numbers, from a high-quality study and confirmed over and over again in other survey data. The clear majority don’t want to live in MAGA land. 

Such data needs to be contextualized, certainly. We must wrestle with what it can and cannot tell us about the political and societal conflict, with how to relate it to the MAGA regime’s brutal rollback of racial and social progress and to broader tendencies of a reactionary sentiment in matters of race and gender beyond just the MAGA Right that have shaped American society recently.

But we must not dismiss these clear indications that a strong majority of Americans is opposed to MAGA’s war on pluralism. If we do, we not only fail to understand that the key threat emanates from a radicalizing minority. We also fail to counter the ubiquitous sense of decline and the temptations of despair and cynicism by reminding ourselves that we are confronted with a world-historic chance. In a way, we have never been closer to finally realizing the promise of egalitarian democracy that is entailed in the idea that “all men are created equal.”

So, let us grapple properly with the survey data that seeks to capture the majority’s affirmation of pluralism, with the countervailing forces of reaction and resentment that are tearing America apart – and let me try to make the best possible case that the glass is actually half-full.