Ian Shapiro - After The Fall
APA: Shaprio, Ian (2026). After The Fall: From the End of History to the Crisis of Democracy, How Politicians Broke Our World. Basic Books.
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page 107:
... the NTC never became a functioning government or even succeeded in disarming hostile militias once NATO withdrew. The secular moderate coalition government elected in July of 2012 quickly fell apart in acrimonious regional rivalries. The central government was unable to reestablish anything remotely resembling the monopoly of coercive force that is essential to a functioning national state, let alone the pro-American one that Senators John McCain and Marco Rubio, among others, had confidently predicted.
[Note: provide context for this paragraph and the phrase including "monopoly of coercive force" ]
pages 220 - 224:
[context here is a critique of both the Clinton 2016 and Harris 2024 campaigns, and election voting results]
[Harris] seemed oblivious to a truth about economic psychology that Trump grasped intuitively: People's propensity to see the world in zero-sum rather than positive-sum terms varies with their experience. A significant body of research by economists and psychologists shows that older voters, who grew up in an era of high economic growth, are more likely to see the world as positive-sum than younger voters, who have come of age in slower-growth conditions and are more likely to see it as zero-sum. ...
People with zero-sum outlooks are less likely to think that wealth can grow enough for everyone and more likely to believe that people can only get rich at another's expense.
... Attending to the difference between positive- and zero-sum worldviews also helps account for why millions of Americans could identify with Trump as "one of us" when plainly he was not. ... [Trump's] ideology is unremittingly zero-sum. It shapes his approach to trade and geopolitics as well as his America First nativism and relentless hostility to immigration. ... his worldview resonates ....
A trade deficit with China means they are taking advantage of us. An immigrant who gets a job is taking it from an American. NATO is freeloading off the US. Money spent on Ukraine's defense is a rip-off unless they give us mineral rights in return.
... It would be misleading to say that the prevalence of a zero-sum outlook is the cause of nativist and anti-immigrant sentiment that right-wing populists appeal to so succesfully, but it seems clear that the electoral appeal of those sentiments is unlikely to diminish among voters who see the world in zero-sum terms. This creates a dilemma for mainstream parties and politicians who are losing support to the far right.
pages 232 - 233:
Voters' preferences don't fall out of the sky. Economic stress pre-disposes people to see the world in zero-sum terms, but they must be mobilized.
... The mainstream political response to the [2008] financial crisis and its aftermath .... Bailing out financial elites while imposing austerity on the rest of the population expanded the pool of potential voters who could be mobilized by populist candidates. Mainstream politicians ... set themselves up to be marginalized by fringe candidates peddling arguments that resonate with people who have zero-sum worldviews.
WLA: the zero-sum worldview carries a lot of weight in Shapiro's argument at the end of this book. It is used to support government policies that must address near-term economic and living conditions that affect everyone, as one sound way to help people adopt more positive-sum views. say more