People in the western imperial core are increasingly aware, even if they'd never admit it, that their grip on the world is slipping. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the 90s, liberals thought they'd won. They thought that they'd become the eternal masters of the world, that they'd get to use the global south countries as sources of raw materials and slave labor forever. For a while, it seemed like they were right, but that sun is setting. China grows more powerful by the day and global south nations flock to it as plans are drawn up for alternatives to the petrodollar. The West's failures in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria show that it is increasingly unable to bend the Global South to its will, while at home, its infrastructure crumbles and its economy lurches from crisis to crisis.

And this terrifies and enrages western liberals. Many of these people are young enough to have no memory of the Cold War. They have literally never experienced a time when the entire world didn't bow to them. Their attitude is summed up fantastically by a quote from Richard Spencer when he got caught on hot mic following the alt-right's failure at Charlottesville:

It's not hard to see why this made headlines. It's shockingly, grotesquely racist and colonialist. It's also, underneath their veneer of civility, exactly what western liberals believe. It was easy for them to keep that mask up when they were winning everywhere all the time, but the more defeats they suffer, the more it will slip.