In 1960 – just 65 years ago, which is usually the retirement age – the sociologist Daniel Bell (1919-2011) published a text called The end of ideology. It opened a debate that was, in general, serious, substantial, and long-standing; the communicative context of that time, which we would now consider "elitist," allowed for it (today it would surely translate into a couple of "snobs" on X and two dozen anonymous insults). That debate lasted so long, and drew so many replies, that in 1988 Bell published a second text that referred to the first: Return to the end of ideologyThe fact that it came out just a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of real socialism, was considered by some to be a mere coincidence and by others to be a reasoned prediction similar to that made a decade earlier by Emmanuel Todd.
Bell argued that the hegemonic political ideologies of the time, Marxism and classical liberalism, were losing relevance within post-industrial Western societies. The grand ideologies had exhausted their capacity to mobilize and inspire the masses, and social and economic problems were becoming increasingly technical: they required pragmatic solutions rather than abstract doctrinal responses. Bell was obviously referring to the Western world, not to places where people could not freely express their opinions. In the West, there was a minimal consensus "on the acceptance of the welfare state, the decentralization of power, a mixed-economy system, and political pluralism" (it's worth remembering that we're talking about 1960, when Europe and the United States were experiencing unprecedented economic boom). The list Bell proposes is very interesting: "Industrialization, modernization, pan-Arabism, color [blackness], and nationalism." What was the difference? The ideologies born in the 19th century were universalist; The new ones, on the contrary, had a local dimension that was difficult, or even impossible, to export to the whole of humanity.
Some argued then—and later, in relation to May '68, for example—that ideologies hadn't disappeared, but had merely changed form. Bell countered that it was something much deeper than a simple "change of form." In his 1988 text, he considers May '68 not an ideological dispute, but rather a "cultural and generational" one, linked, moreover, to the invention of youth as a specific consumer segment (clothing, music, leisure, etc.) that had taken place in the United States beginning in 1950. In the 1930s, a few decades later, after the successful reconstruction of the Second World War, there were undoubtedly conflictive episodes, but of a different nature.
Sixty-five years later, and echoing the great populist and authoritarian shift that the entire world is experiencing directly or indirectly, how should we assess Bell's ideas? Let's start with two simple questions: can Trump's witticisms, amplified by improvised and overacted U-turns, or the dangerous jolts based on a grotesque mix of tariff-based ultra-protectionism and crazed ultra-liberalism, seriously be considered an ideology? And does anyone believe that the confluence of unbridled capitalism and a single communist party in China is part of any true ideology? It seems to me that both questions answer themselves. And whoever says Trump or Xi Jinping means Milei, Maduro, and many others, naturally. On the other hand, if we look closely at the list of emerging ideologies proposed 65 years ago (industrialization, modernization, pan-Arabism, Negritude, and nationalism), we will only miss the one represented by the new feminisms and environmentalism. In this sense, Bell's diagnosis wasn't entirely wrong, unless we confuse the concept of mentality or language with that of ideology, as often happens. In 2018, I published an essay on emerging populism, framing it as an emotional language, not an ideology. At that time, Trump, Orbán, Maduro, Marine Le Pen, Berlusconi, Beppe Grillo, and Rodrigo Duterte were part of an ideologically impossible whole. They had many things in common, especially in terms of expression and communication, but lumping them together under a supposedly common ideology was, and remains, a huge mistake.
