What the libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard dubbed the welfare-warfare state has held sway in the US, and in the West generally, since the run up to World War II. The "welfare" part of the equation describes the growth of the State as the source and guarantor of social equity, while the "warfare" side describes the role of the State – in this case, the American State – as the source and guarantor of the "international order."

For the past half century or so this system has proved impregnable to would-be challengers. Indeed, the solidity and seeming permanence of this state of affairs was so convincing that certain of its champions theorized that we had reached, at long last, "the end of history" – that future developments in political and social science would merely refine and perfect the social democratic status quo, which would slowly but surely spread over the entire globe.

Yet history stubbornly refused to recognize its supposed endpoint. Things kept … happening, until, today, this supposedly immortal status quo is threatening to break apart in the face of populist rebellions from below.

The populist revolt currently shaking the American political landscape, and similar eruptions in Europe, herald the same sea change, albeit with somewhat different degrees of seismic intensity. In the United States, where a right-wing populist movement led by now President-elect Donald Trump has scored a major upset, the insurgents have stormed the fortress and seized the inner sanctum of the ruling elite – the White House.

Trump defeated his Republican opponents and Hillary Clinton by attacking what he called their "globalist" agenda and promised to put "America first" – a slogan that described his anti-Establishment politics to a tee. "Globalism," or the idea of the American welfare-warfare state as the epicenter of a world system, perfectly encapsulates the ideology of the political class at "the end of history" – and captures the hubris that was their undoing.

Having supposedly achieved socioeconomic and moral perfection, our rulers embarked on a crusade to export their achievement to the rest of the world: and yet this was hardly a new idea. A similar crusade was undertaken by Woodrow Wilson in his war to "make the world safe for democracy," and his successors continued the same mischief through World War II and the cold war.