SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: The story was: the great ideological struggle is over. Democracy won. Human rights are universal values, not Western ones.

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A generation that grew up after the Cold War was told a specific story.

The story was: the great ideological struggle is over. Democracy won. Human rights are universal values, not Western ones. International institutions exist to protect people everywhere. The world is moving, imperfectly but genuinely, toward a "rules-based order" in which civilians are protected and accountability is real.

This generation was the target audience for that story.

They believed it, many of them, in the specific way you believe things you’re told before you have the framework to interrogate them.

And then they watched Gaza.

And they watched their governments respond to Gaza.

And the story didn’t hold.

Not as a complicated, imperfect story with setbacks and exceptions.

It simply didn’t hold.

The gap between the stated values and the observable behavior was too wide and too public and too thoroughly documented to maintain.

What happens to a generation whose foundational political story fails?

One possibility is disillusionment and withdrawal.

Another is the thing that historically happens when the gap becomes undeniable:

The beginning of a different politics.

One that doesn’t start from the assumption that the institutions mean what they say.

That generation is now here.

That politics has already begun.