Writing in 1989, Francis Fukuyama argued that the world was reaching “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” His thesis has remained controversial ever since, often criticised as triumphalist and even as an extension of orientalism, but it is its confidence about Western democracy that reads most strangely today. If liberal democracy is the final form of human government, its current practice gives little cause for triumph. In an age of TikTok and the viral feed, politicians on both sides of the spectrum increasingly campaign through memes, deepfakes, and manufactured outrage. As the U.S. midterms approach, this is a crucial moment to consider how politics is being portrayed and delivered by both the Democrats and Republicans, and to ask what this pattern will cost American democracy.

A brief scroll through TikTok, not historically a conventional political tool, illustrates the pattern almost immediately. The official Republican account offers a steady stream of it. One recent video sets a montage of clips of Tim Walz to Madonna’s “Material Girl,” captioned, “2 years since the worst VP pick of all time,” turning a serious question of governance into a punchline about a pop song. Another repurposes a clip from the film Mean Girls, in which the character Regina George writes in her “burn book” that a classmate is “the nastiest skank b**** I’ve ever met. Do not trust her. She is a fugly s***.” The account overlays the passage with the comment, “Fauci going home to his diary today after being obliterated in his hearing,” casting a public-health official as the villain of a teen movie. Turning to the Democrats’ official TikTok page, one does not find a more elevated use of the platform. A recent video features Elon Musk dancing erratically under the caption, “nurse he’s out again.” Another zooms in on a visibly sweating Donald Trump and simply asks, “why is he so sweaty,” captioned “bruh.” The format is shared and identically juvenile, yet remains the official communications of both major parties.

If the parties’ TikTok feeds show contempt as entertainment, the debate stage shows where such activity became normalised. Presidential debates, the most scrutinised events of the electoral calendar, have themselves been increasingly saturated with personal attack, allowing the lack of respect for political opponents to become increasingly emblematic of democratic process. Going back to the Presidential debates in 2024 between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, personal attacks became a staple. Biden said that Trump had the “morals of an alley cat” after claiming that Trump had slept with a porn star. The new rules meant that candidates’ microphones were muted when they were not speaking, and this certainly limited some of the personal jabs. However, Trump still managed to mock Biden’s age when the latter trailed off at the end of a sentence, commenting, “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence” before adding, “I don’t think he does either.” From social media mockery to the debate lectern, the register is the same.

The consequences are not subtle. Axios reported a Republican supposedly close to Trump’s political operation saying, “It’s going to be a hate election,” adding that, “voters have to hate the Dems more than they hate us. And we have material to work with.” The emphasis is not on producing better politics or promises but inducing more hatred for their opposition. This is exactly what the undermining mimicry seen on social media is setting the groundwork for: normalising ridicule. The Georgian Republican Majorie Taylor Greene departed Congress in January, citing that she realised she was “part of this toxic culture.” According to Roll Call, Greene’s transition away from being a Trump loyalist was cemented at a memorial service for Charlie Kirk, where Trump stated, “I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them.”

Reversing this will not come from a single reform. It begins, instead, with two shifts in responsibility: one falling on the public, the other on politicians. For the former, the most fundamental step is to withdraw the reward. These tactics migrate from the debate stage to the feed because they work–because contempt draws clicks, and clicks are what the platforms and the strategists are chasing. Crucially, this means even mockery and outrage are a form of engagement; to hate-watch a post is still to sustain it. Voters on both sides therefore hold more power than they often realise. The principle at stake is not partisan. It is whether public debate remains a contest of ideas, or becomes a spectacle engineered to keep the electorate angry and distracted.

The second step, and arguably most effective, comes from within the political process. These tactics lose their force and sustenance when a politician’s own allies refuse to tolerate them, because an attack loses its potency when the people expected to support it do not. This requires something from politicians that will cost them. It means declining the easy attack, refusing to amplify an opponent’s viral humiliation even when it could play well in the court of public perception. Even more difficult, it will require naming that behaviour as unacceptable when it comes from one’s own side. Politicians have a responsibility to redirect all these manufactured sensations back to the issues that are being buried. It means treating official accounts as instruments of communication, not weapons, and re-establishing a bar that serious politicians will not stoop below.

With the midterms approaching, the incentive to inflame and distract is even sharper. The danger is that a tactic adopted because it works becomes the permanent feature of American politics, each voting cycle slightly more debased than the last. The cost will not be borne by any one party but by democracy itself. Every manufactured outrage drowns out a real debate; every viral humiliation trains voters to expect spectacle rather than substance. Fukuyama’s certainty about liberal democracy was always questionable. What should trouble us now is that its own practitioners are proving him wrong for reasons he never anticipated.