The first quarter
It seems like more time has passed, but in 2026 we've only just entered the first quarter of the 21st century. Twenty-five years ago, there was euphoria. Ten years earlier, the Cold War had ended, and there was talk of the Pax Americana and a new world order in which Western values of democracy and human rights would eventually prevail everywhere. But the optimism was short-lived.
If there's a date that inaugurates the century, it's September 11, 2001, when an enemy, until then marginal and almost invisible, attacked the heart of the West and unleashed the specter of global war. Suddenly the world became unsafe, and Islamophobic paranoia, police checkpoints, and video surveillance proliferated everywhere. If the 20th century closed with the image of people leaping like madmen over the Berlin Wall before the impassive gaze of the police, the 21st century begins with orderly queues at checkpoints, police armed as if going to war.
The world of security and order, which Zweig had already lamented seventy years earlier, was now being lost once again. But this is not the only thing the 21st century has left behind. There is a second date that determines the configuration of the current world: November 8, 2016, the day Donald Trump secured the majority of electoral votes to be elected president of the United States.
Beyond the direct consequences of his policies, Trump is the most evident manifestation of a phenomenon of our century that few people imagined twenty-five years ago: the retreat of democracy. Faced with insecurity, real or induced, people are quick to sacrifice freedom, appealing to the need for control and, moreover, strict laws, thus opening the door to tyrants.
The perception of insecurity and the decline of democracy are maintained by a third factor that, despite going more unnoticed than the previous ones, is perhaps the most serious: the discrediting of the media and the academic world in general, and their replacement, to a large extent, by social networks and other digital products. Although they claim to be a tool for facilitating peaceful relations, social networks are nothing more than a digital space in which a few companies control public opinion through algorithms, at the service of other companies that pay for it. They are a lucrative business that can also be a political weapon. Just as they offer domesticated consumers, they can offer convinced voters (remember the 2016 Brexit referendum).
Freedom of expression and the media, with all their flaws, are the best, if not the only, antidote to tyranny—they are, after all, the first target of any authoritarian regime—and they must be defended. But the media cannot survive solely on the efforts of those who write; they need the commitment of their readers and their support, including financial support. This may seem extravagant to some now, but in the 20th century, people paid to read newspapers. And because they paid, they read them, and this allowed them to understand their surroundings beyond their own particular point of view, a fundamental condition for beginning to recover the democracy that is being taken from us. This will be our struggle in the next quarter of a century.