Brexit. Trump. In Britain, the country’s membership in the European Union is rejected in a referendum. In America, a maverick anti-establishment political outsider wins the presidency. These results are monumental political upheavals in the two countries, with consequences that reach beyond their shores and throughout the world.

Britain and America are the world’s core democracies. These countries have been bearers of a political-economic venture that has come to define the meaning of modern democracy. In 2016, to the surprise of winners and losers alike, the idea that the future is liberal and that history is moving in that direction, has suffered a defeat from which it may not soon recover. What was lost in these tests was finally a set of ideas.

Read the article in the Cairo Review.