The Arc of the Moral Universe Doesn’t Bend Itself
In his 2008 victory speech, Barack Obama echoed Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous line: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” That confidence was also reflected in the most influential nonfiction of the postwar era. Philosopher Peter Singer’s The Expanding Circle (1981) argued that humanity’s moral concern has and would continue to widen — from kin and tribe to eventually encompass all sentient beings. Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) and Enlightenment Now (2018), along with Michael Shermer’s The Moral Arc (2015), documented falling violence and rising living standards, crediting them to the steady spread of the Enlightenment and liberal values. Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992) declared liberal democracy “the final form of human government”, while John Judis and Ruy Teixeira’s The Emerging Democratic Majority (2002) predicted a durable US center-left coalition fueled by the rising numbers of college-educated professional and nonwhite voters.
Liberal optimism and the belief in moral destiny became the overarching creed of Western politics. But that creed has been shattered. Whether and how we pick up the pieces will determine what the future of democracy, prosperity, and human rights looks like.
Even as hopefulness about exporting liberalism abroad began to fade — starting with the failures of forced regime change in Vietnam and Iraq and compounded by the rise of the Chinese Communist Party — the domestic narrative of inevitable progress remained strong. In the US, major advances in civil rights and liberties, especially for LGBT people and racial minorities, seemed to reinforce this conviction. Democrats came to see themselves as the party of social advancement, with young voters as their natural base. And, for a moment, the numbers seemed to bear that out.
According to research from Tufts University, Obama won voters aged 18 to 29 by a 34-point margin in 2008, compared to +7.3 among the general electorate. He followed with +23 in 2012 (versus +3.9). In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the youth vote by an 18-point margin (versus +2), and in 2020, Joe Biden won young adults by about 24 points (versus +4). A similar pattern appeared abroad. In Britain’s 2016 Brexit referendum, Ipsos MORI found that 18- to 24-year-olds backed “Remain” by a 50-point margin and 25- to 34-year-olds by +20, while the national result narrowly favored “Leave.”
These results fostered a sense of demographic inevitability. The Guardian and The Financial Times framed Brexit as a betrayal of the young by the old, while Ruy Teixeira, writing in Vox, described Donald Trump’s 2016 win as “riding on demographic borrowed time.” Forbes half-jokingly declared that “Angry Old People Shouldn’t Be Allowed to Vote.” The narrative was so strong that even right-wing populist victories could be dismissed as temporary backlashes, the dying protests of an older and whiter generation.
In the past few years, however, confidence in liberal inevitability has been rapidly fading, a trend brought into sharp focus by Trump’s 2024 win. Signs of strain were visible as early as 2020, when Democrats began losing ground with some racial and ethnic groups, young men started trending increasingly conservative, and skepticism of left-wing cultural politics spread beyond the margins. By 2024, the trend had fully crystallized: Democratic strategist and data analyst David Shor noted in the New York Times that “young people have gone from being the most progressive generation […] to becoming potentially the most conservative generation that we’ve experienced maybe in 50 to 60 years.” Indeed, in 2024, Kamala Harris carried 18- to 29-year-olds by just 4 points, a dramatic drop from Biden’s margin, and lost young men specifically by 14 points.
This illiberal shift goes well beyond party politics. A 2025 report by the non-partisan think tank The Future of Free Speech found that only 47% of young American adults (18–34) believe offensive or controversial speech should be permitted, compared to 70% of those over 55. With regard to socially liberal speech, the report highlights that support among young voters for statements that are supportive of gay and bi relationships fell by 20 points (from 79% to 59%) between 2021 and 2024. And support for allowing insults to the American flag among young Americans dropped from 71% in 2021 to just 43% in 2024 (this figure is 64% among adults aged 35 to 55 and 72% for Americans over 55).
Source: The Future of Free Speech.
Alarmed, Democrats have started to search for explanations and ways to reverse these trends. Weeks before he stepped down amid clashes with the party’s old guard, DNC Vice Chair David Hogg announced a $20 million effort in April 2025 to recruit younger candidates, arguing that the Democrats needed “generational leaders” instead of incumbents who are “asleep at the wheel.” NextGen America’s Victoria Yang told The Guardian that Democrats had neglected young voters’ top concerns — housing, education, and affordability — and urged a pivot toward economic populism and authentic engagement on platforms like TikTok and YouTube.
Even now, much of this discourse still implicitly treats the youth margins of the Obama-Clinton-Biden era as the norm, casting the current rightward shift as a puzzling aberration. Yet globally and historically, it is hardly uncommon for the young not to be a particularly liberal demographic.
A joint Israeli-Palestinian poll in September 2024 found that only 8% of Jewish Israelis aged 18 to 35 supported a two-state solution, compared to 38% for Jewish Israelis 55 and older. In the last German election, the far-right AfD party won a record 27% of men aged 18 to 24 compared to 20.8% for the electorate as a whole. In France’s June 2024 European Parliament elections, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally won 32% among voters under 34, compared to 30% overall. And in the 2025 South Korean election, Lee Jun-seok of the far-right Reform Party was the frontrunner among young men in their 20s, capturing 37.2% of the vote. By contrast, among men 40 and older, Lee Jun-seok received only single-digit support — for example, just 5.3% among men in their 40s.
Historically, this is not unusual either. Around the world, youth movements have often driven explicitly illiberal causes: Germany’s Hitler Youth, Croatia’s Ustaše youth, the Soviet Komsomol, China’s Red Guards, and Islamist student organizations like Afghanistan’s Muslim Youth, which helped lay the foundations of modern jihadist movements.
Even in the US, a reliably Democratic youth bloc is a relatively recent phenomenon. In 1984, Ronald Reagan won voters aged 18 to 29 by 22 points, outperforming his already commanding 18-point national margin. In 1988, George H. W. Bush carried the youth vote by about 6 points, roughly matching his overall lead.
Moreover, even if we acknowledge that the world in general and Western societies in particular have become more liberal, less violent, and more humane over time, it does not follow that every movement claiming the mantle of liberalism, progress, or social justice will be looked back on that way. Our collective memory focuses on successful social justice movements, such as Civil Rights or same-sex marriage, but that doesn’t mean that every cause that once claimed to “expand rights” or promote “social justice” is remembered favorably today.
For instance, in the early 20th century, restricting reproduction among the “unfit” was promoted by progressives as a way to empower women, improve public health, and reduce poverty. Prestigious universities from Harvard to Berkley taught eugenics as a legitimate scientific discipline, and figures like Margaret Sanger, Alexander Graham Bell, and Theodore Roosevelt were among its leading advocates.
More recently, in the 1970s, a petition signed by French intellectuals, including Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre, called for decriminalizing sex between adults and minors under the age of 15. In the UK, the National Council for Civil Liberties proposed lowering the age of consent to 14 or abolishing it entirely. In the US, the group NAMBLA advocated the same. Across these countries, advocates framed their proposals as a natural extension of sexual liberation and civil rights.
What counts as “progress” is inseparable from the values of the present. Imagine a culture that believed berries were sacred or morally significant and thus banned eating or picking them. By its own logic, that culture would have a “wider moral circle” than ours. Yet few today — including Peter Singer — would call that moral progress. Our sense of progress is thus often circular; it reflects who we, today, believe deserves rights and what causes we define as just.
Furthermore, many moral debates are less about being for or against expanding rights than about whose rights take precedence. Abortion is a clear example: both sides claim to be defending fundamental rights, but they define the rights and the right holders differently.
Over the past decade, progressives have framed a wide range of policies, from climate action, trans rights, and voting reforms to quirkier causes like net neutrality, as an extension of the Civil Rights Movement. This rhetoric can be galvanizing, but it also can erase nuance. It’s no coincidence, for instance, that in a Joe Biden tweet days into his presidency declaring transgender equality “the civil rights issue of our time,” the very next sentence reads, “there is no room for compromise when it comes to basic human rights.”
Such moral absolutism reached its peak in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd. In that understandably charged environment, even minor dissent could be cast as a moral failing. The aforementioned David Shor, for example, was fired from Civis Analytics (a progressive polling firm) for sharing research showing counterproductive consequences of violent protests.
This absolutist rhetoric, along with the uncritical bandwagoning it encouraged, shaped the 2020 Democratic primary in ways that continue to reverberate today. Bernie Sanders faced fierce backlash for appearing on The Joe Rogan Experience and for touting Rogan’s endorsement of him. This backlash likely helped steer the world’s most popular podcast in a pro-Trump direction. Meanwhile, the Democratic candidates — including Kamala Harris — competed to embrace increasingly radical positions, from decriminalizing border crossings and providing state-funded gender-affirming care for undocumented immigrants in prison to supporting “defund the police.” For Harris, these positions, often sharply at odds with her record as a prosecutor and senator, left her weakened in the 2024 presidential election and contributed to Trump’s victory.
That victory, and the collapse of the narrative of liberal inevitability that followed it, has left Democrats and liberal-minded people with a challenging but necessary task: to rebuild trust not through moral certainty and demographic assumptions, but through pragmatism and compromise. Achieving meaningful progress requires changing minds and a willingness to engage seriously with differing perspectives and ideas. This is an unspoken but integral ingredient baked into the notion of a moral arc of history. Somewhere along the way, liberal values stopped being political norms, and delusions of destiny overtook the grueling and sometimes uncomfortable work of politics. The arc doesn’t bend toward justice because of some law of nature. What bends it is persuasion. It always has been.
Published Dec 12, 2025
