The twenty-first century is a strange land. Whole armies of publications seek to answer its strangest question: fewer than three decades after defeating communism and declaring itself unassailable, why is the Western liberal order sinking into a political and economic morass of its own making?

Why are its citizens now deserting liberal democracy in droves and increasingly attracted to extremist views and authoritarian-style politics? Why are liberal markets regressing into levels of inequality rivalling that of the nineteenth-century Gilded Age? Why does the West appear headed towards a second financial crisis as early as a decade after the first shattered global markets?²⁶ Why (in the ultimate rebuke to liberalism) Donald Trump? When future historians look back, they will undoubtedly see these questions as seminal to understanding our strange times.