Ian Shapiro, Sterling Professor of Political Science and Global Affairs at Yale, opens his DeVane Lecture course on political change since the early 1990s. Delivered in fall 2019 to Yale students and the public, this first session lays out the arc from the euphoria after communism's collapse to what Shapiro calls a present politics of fear and resentment. He previews the course's main threads: the decline of trade unions and the enlarged political role of business, shifting attitudes toward parties amid rising inequality and middle-class insecurity, new forms of authoritarianism, and the durability of the unipolar order that followed the Cold War. The lecture draws on material from his book After the Fall, and sets up the questions the rest of the course will pursue about where global politics goes next.