Dr. Steve Turley: The liberal order’s legitimacy collapsed not from external attack but from internal hollowing

2026-02-01 - 16:05

The future belongs to civilization states and an alliance between technology and tradition, says the popular American scholar Dr. Steve Turley, an American scholar and public intellectual, has become one of the most widely recognized analysts of the political and cultural realignments shaping our time. Trained as a classical guitarist and later earning a doctorate in theology, Turley’s path is unusual. He moved from the lecture halls of academia to the front lines of the new media landscape, where he built a large global audience through daily commentary. His work blends formal training with a plainspoken style that has made him accessible far beyond academic circles. Turley first gained attention for his argument that liberal globalism has entered a long decline. In its place, he sees the rebirth of enduring forms of identity. His books and videos examine this shift through concrete examples: electoral realignments, the rise of traditional and religious civilization-states, and the growing rebellion against managerial elites. According to Turley, liberal globalism rests on a shrinking population base, while culturally rooted and faith-driven groups are demographically expanding, creating the long-term foundations for a post-liberal world. Before becoming a full-time commentator, Turley taught theology, philosophy, and rhetoric for many years. This background has shaped his measured and historical tone. He often returns to the idea that political change follows deeper cultural and spiritual currents. For his readers and viewers, this brings context to events that might otherwise appear chaotic or disconnected. This interview explores his perspective on the forces reshaping the West and the wider world. What experiences in your early life and education formed the worldview you bring to your work today? I’ve always been enamored and captivated by civilization in its highest expressions. I was very artistic as a kid; I fell in love with Michelangelo’s paintings and sculptures and did my best to replicate them on canvas with my own oil paint set. I soon became obsessed with Gothic cathedrals and their design. At around 12 years of age, I moved on to music, particularly Bach, and went on to get my first degree in classical guitar at Peabody Conservatory. It was while I was at Peabody that I immersed myself in theology and discovered the philosophy behind this rich tradition of Western civilization. I then got my first full-time job as a teacher in a classical school, where I taught theology, Greek, and rhetoric. It was during my doctorate studies that I discovered a growing field of study known as civilizational studies, and that’s when I found how everything I learned beforehand all came together in this wonderful civilizational synthesis. Read more The multipolar revolution you missed: The alliance everyone forgot is shaping Eurasia’s future Which thinkers first convinced you that the world was moving away from a universal liberal model? Back in 2008, I came across a fascinating book titled Anthony Giddens: The Last Modernist by the sociologist Stjepan Mestrovic, who convincingly argued that the liberal globalist world that Giddens had devoted so much intellectual thought and energy towards building and sustaining was coming to an end, and a post-modern world, centered on culture and identity, was already emerging. The classic geopolitical expression of this thesis was of course Sam Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, where he argued that world order was moving away from ideology (the bi-polar world of Western liberalism vs Soviet Communism) and toward identity (the multi-polar world of civilizationalism). Guillaume Faye’s Archeofuturism provided the raw framework: his diagnosis that liberal modernity was not evolving but collapsing, and that survival demanded a synthesis of archaic values with technological mastery. And perhaps most recently, Zhang Weiwei’s civilization state concept offered the empirical validation for how these various social and geopolitical theories were awakening around the world, most particularly with the rise of neo-Confucian China. What was the clearest early sign for you that the unipolar order was beginning to fracture? The theorists such as Huntington, Faye, and Pat Buchanan were all writing about the inevitable fracture in the early 1990s. But for me, there were three events that conclusively indicated that the unipolar world was cracking. The 2014 annexation of Crimea marked the first real irreversible breach. This wasn’t merely territorial – it was civilizational. President Putin invoked the baptism of Kievan Rus in 988, positioning Russia as the Third Rome inheriting Byzantium’s mantle. While Western elites dismissed this as nothing more than manipulative propaganda, they missed the core signal: a major power was reorganizing its legitimacy around its own territorial hegemony based on religious-historical continuity rather than liberal democratic norms. The second sign was China’s 2015 declaration of cyber sovereignty. When Beijing asserted that nations have an absolute right to regulate internet activities within their borders, it wasn’t fundamentally about censorship – it was about civilizational control over cyberspace. The split internet wasn’t a bug; it was the architecture of civilizational spheres reawakening through technology. The third indicator was the 2016 Brexit vote paired with Trump’s election. Brexit represented the first time a globalist institution like the EU actually contracted and shrank. And Trump ran on a political platform that promised to dismantle the liberal international order. These weren’t isolated populist spasms but the first mass democratic repudiations of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, as he himself has admitted. The liberal order’s legitimacy collapsed not from external attack but from internal hollowing – its own populations voting against its continuance. How would you describe the deep cultural currents driving the transition from a globalized world to a civilizational one? The main current is the worldwide rise of populism. But what’s so interesting is that the kind of populism we’re seeing today goes way beyond politics. Populism today is a financial force. It’s a social force. It’s a technological force. It’s a cultural force. Today, populism permeates every aspect of our societies and our lives; it extends even into the beer we drink; just ask Bud Light! I see two major streams converging into the sea of populism: civilizational populism and techno-populism. Civilizational populism is a political force that leverages cultural identity as its primary mobilizing tool. It’s the “us versus them” of entire civilizations, not just political parties. In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has turned Hindu nationalism from a fringe ideology into the mainstream. In Russia, Vladimir Putin and Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church have merged nationalism with faith, defining the “Russian world” as a civilizational space built on Orthodoxy, Russian culture, and historical memory. In Hungary, Viktor Orban has positioned himself as the defender of Christian Europe against “Muslim intruders” from the East and “godless” liberalism from the West. Read more From psychiatric ward to Nobel prize: How a Jewish outcast became a great Russian poet But there’s a parallel force to this civilizational populism known as techno-populism, comprised of all the ways in which digital technologies, particularly cyberspace and the internet, are increasingly freeing populations from the old liberal order and its gatekeepers. The key here is that we have entered what’s often referred to as the Third Industrial Revolution, a digital revolution and the age of cyberspace that’s quickly bypassing the old liberal structures that dominated the Second Industrial Revolution. For example, the internet is enabling us to bypass the legacy media in much the same way that email and texting bypasses