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

While global economic growth has settled at a little above 3% over the last few years after recovering from the covid crisis, uncertainty arising from US President Donald Trump’s tariffs hangs over the global economy, haunted as it is by the century-old ghost of America’s Smoot-Hawley tariffs.

Indeed, the fate of the entire post-war order currently hangs in the balance.

Man doth not live by bread alone. There has also been a growing unease for some time and a somewhat sombre state of mind.

There was a sense that the core values I have cherished since my growing-up years—of individual freedom of expression, social equality, humanism, harmony and religious universalism—were under threat.

Despite their outsized potential, recent advances in technology like social media and AI have created new challenges.

They have accelerated socio-economic inequalities and created a growing disgruntled underclass that enabled populist demagogues to ride to power on a form of belligerent nationalism that has divided rather than united people.

These new technologies created new means of control and made civil society more divided, angry, combative and disrespectful, often within the same family.

Trump and the ‘Make America Great Again’ ((MAGA) phenomenon were symptomatic of these developments that had echoes all over the democratic world, including India.

In the wake of such developments, I wrote an opinion piece in 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. But while Trump might go, Trumpism and the MAGA movement that spawned it are not going anywhere.

Meanwhile, the resolve to fight global warming weakens by the day. Hot on the heels of unending strife in Africa and the endless war that is destroying Ukraine came the horrific genocide in Gaza.

These disheartening developments make it difficult to look at 2026 with renewed hope.

It is a conundrum of history that despite long-term progress, people are always dissatisfied with the present. Golden Ages all lie in the past. We also need to be cognizant that humans are imperfect beings, with the capacity for both good and evil.

The philosopher and thinker Isaiah Berlin called this the ‘crooked timbre’ of humanity. Prophets and spiritual leaders have over the years endeavoured to draw out the good within us.

The spirit of the current age, or zeitgeist as Germans might put it, is not heart-warming as baser instincts are seemingly ascendant.

But we have been there before and individual acts of kindness are everywhere. Our belief in the basic goodness of humans need not waver despite this crooked timber.

To paraphrase the urdu poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz, though the night seems long and dark, it is after all only night, and dawn will surely break through.

But people also make their own history and it is for us to do our bit to amplify the light by drawing out the best not just in ourselves, but in others. So,

Ring, ring the bells that still can ring,

Forget that perfect offering;

For there’s a crack, a crack in everything,

That’s how the light gets in.

With that message from singer-poet Leonard Cohen, here is wishing readers a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

The author is a retired Indian Administrative Service officer and former secretary, Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council.