For a couple of years now we’ve kept coming back to the intergenerational tension buried in developed-world budgets: a social contract written for a world that no longer exists, and a political realignment coming on the back of weak balance sheets, technological acceleration and the end of globalism. The Death of the New Deal, the New New Deal, all that. We extended the framework to Europe, which adopted the same cultural, economic and political model on a foundation far less able to handle a radical transition. In our 25 views for 2025 we went so far as to write: “holy moly don’t think people are ready. The protests in France over raising retirement age by two years might look tame compared to what’s coming.”
Well.
Here we are.
The streets of Paris are alight, nativism is on the rise, and if anything, this feels like the beginning of the end of the modern ancien regime. The house view here is that what looks like a cultural revolt is the predictable implication of the death of the modern western economic and social model we’ve been writing about for years. What an American might call the New Deal, or a European might call the post-war order. Or, a little more glibly, the Boomer World Order.
I say this with the honor, dignity and respect the boomers deserve. I was raised by boomers; they taught me everything I know. Boomers inherited the post-war order the Greatest Generation fought for, and spent their careers expanding and defending it.
That order rests on two assumptions that no longer hold.
Western birthrates and lifespans. Social policy was built around worker-to-dependent ratios that fewer kids and longer retirements have since destroyed.
American military hegemony, which let everyone prioritize butter over guns.
