The iconic refrain in Don McLean’s early 1970s hit American Pie—“the day the music died”—was initially assumed to be a reference to the plane crash that killed the rock pioneers Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, and Richie Valens. But, over the years, many have speculated on a deeper meaning behind the song. Namely, that McLean was lamenting the social upheaval in America stemming from the traumatic events of the 1960s: the Cuban Missile Crisis; the Vietnam War; the anti-war protest movement on American college campuses; and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. He was writing in effect about a postwar inflection point—the loss of American innocence.
Fast forward to 1992 and American political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, argued that liberal democracy was the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution.” With the fall of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, Fukuyama’s argument was celebrated and crystalized in the thinking of many that the West, with its system of government, democratic values, and capitalism, had “won.”
Victories can be fleeting. Events early in the new millennium—9/11, the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Great Recession—tested neoliberalism, which proved reasonably resilient but no longer omnificent. The rise of China, and its economic, military, and diplomatic assertiveness under President Xi, has been testing Western values and leadership for the better part of the last decade. Yet it is recent geopolitical, political, and judicial events that suggest a revival of Don McLean’s refrain may be in order.
