In December 2019, I traveled to Hong Kong, where a heavy unease hung in the air. For months, young people had taken to the streets to protest the encroachment of the Chinese Communist Party on what was supposed to be a self-governing, democratic system. On walls they’d scrawled: “Save Hong Kong! If we burn you burn with us!” All the protesters I spoke to knew their movement would fail; it was a last assertion of democratic identity before it was extinguished by a new order which saw democracy as the enemy within.

I met with a government official preparing to resign and told him I was writing a book about the rise of authoritarian nationalism. “The nationalism in the U.S. and Europe is somewhat different,” he told me. “Yours started with the financial crisis in 2008. That’s when liberalism started to lose its appeal, when people saw this wasn’t working. The narrative of liberalism and democracy collapsed. This spilled over into China, too. This is when China started to think — should we really follow a Western model?” We were sitting in a hotel lounge, the invisible forces he described surrounding us: capitalism, but not democracy; cultural elites cloistered away from the working class. “The nationalist movements in East and West were both a response to the collapse of the Western model,” he added.

Everything I’d experienced told me he was right. Eight years serving in the Obama White House after the financial crisis felt like swimming upstream, against the currents of global politics. A radicalized Republican Party rejected liberal democracy at home, mirroring far-right leaders like Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary who spoke about installing “illiberal democracy” (a polite term for “blood and soil” nationalism) across Europe. In Russia, Vladimir Putin set out to undermine — if not dismantle — the liberal order helmed by the United States. In China, Xi Jinping began to shift Beijing’s strategy from rising within that order to building a separate one, drained of democratic values. Barack Obama’s political skills and cultural appeal allowed him to navigate those currents, but they didn’t always transfer to other Democrats.

Donald Trump’s first victory challenged my liberal assumptions about the inevitability of a certain kind of progress: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” For eight years outside of government, I have talked to opposition figures around the world and heard versions of the same story everywhere. After the Cold War, globalization chipped away at people’s sense of security and identity.

In the West, neoliberalism — that blend of free trade, deregulation and deference to financial markets — hollowed-out communities while enriching a global oligarchy. Meanwhile, a homogenized and often crass popular culture eroded traditional national and religious identities. After 9/11, the war on terror was embraced by autocrats such as Mr. Putin, who used it as a frame to justify power grabs while forever wars fueled mass migration. The financial crisis came through like a hurricane, wrecking the lives of people already struggling to get by while the rich profited on the back end. Then social media’s explosion offered a vehicle to spread grievance and conspiracy theories, allowing populist leaders to radicalize their followers with the precision of an algorithm.

The playbook for transforming a democracy into a soft autocracy was clear: Win power with a populist message against elites. Redraw parliamentary districts. Change voting laws. Harass civil society. Pack courts with judges willing to support power grabs. Enrich cronies through corruption. Buy up newspapers and television stations and turn them into right-wing propaganda. Use social media to energize supporters. Wrap it up in an Us versus Them message: Us, the “real” Russians or Hungarians or Americans, against a rotating cast of Them: the migrants, the Muslims, the liberals, the gays, George Soros and on and on.