Ian Shapiro, Sterling Professor of Political Science and Global Affairs at Yale, examines the 2016 political backlash as part of his DeVane Lecture series course Power and Politics in Today's World, recorded in fall 2019. He traces the arc from the euphoria after the fall of communism in the early 1990s to the present politics of fear and resentment, weighing economic, demographic, and cultural explanations for the shift. The lecture takes up the broader puzzle of resurgent identity politics and asks what the underlying causes mean for where democratic politics goes next. Shapiro draws on the argument developed in his book After the Fall, which grew out of this course, to connect the 2016 upheavals to longer term structural changes rather than treating them as an isolated event.