The fall of Aleppo comes as a suitably awful finale to what's been a pretty wretched 12 months. Assad's victory epitomises, in a sense, the reactionary tide prevailing just about everywhere in this, the Year of the Donald.
The hopes raised during the Arab Spring have, it seems, been crushed, with the Syrian regime consolidating its grip over a nation it has oppressed for so long.
Yet Aleppo also illustrates how little the Right's victories have actually settled. Russian military assistance might have enabled the government to recapture the city. But Assad's no closer to articulating any substantive basis for renewed hegemony in Syria.
The democracy campaign of 2011 emerged in response to poverty and brutal oppression. Assad's violence intensified both, so much so that the Syrian economy (like the nation itself) lies in ruins, while the sectarian divisions fanned by the regime remain entirely unresolved. One war might be coming to an end. But that doesn't mean peace — or even anything like stability.
Something similar might be said about the United States. Because Donald Trump's victory wrong-footed so many pundits, it's easy to lose perspective on precisely what he's achieved.
Yes, in 2017, the White House will be home to one of the more odious political personalities of recent times: a man who presents almost as a parody of the Ugly American. Yes, the new administration will be a rogues' gallery of shonks and bigots, with Trump evidently determined to employ every climate denier, Islamophobe and conman populating the fringes of American conservatism.
Nonetheless, Trump faces an array of problems, serious enough to put real limits on what he might do. As the slow process of counting the 2016 election continues, it's becoming increasingly clear how limited the support base for Trumpism actually is.
On raw numbers, Trump massively lost to Clinton, who now seems to have outpolled him by several million votes. In a context where nearly half of Americans didn't even turn up to the booths, that makes Trump — even before he takes office — one of the more loathed presidents of recent years.
"For every fundamentalist who thinks the new president will restore Christian values, there's a libertarian who hails the Donald as an advocate of unbridled self expression."
Furthermore, Trump lacks the kind of hard ideological nucleus that traditionally has allowed leaders to crash through an initial unpopularity. Think of Margaret Thatcher and her unbending insistence on class war against the unions. Think of the neocons who backed George W. Bush and their instant determination to transform the tragedy of 9/11 into a campaign for regime change in Iraq and elsewhere, a scheme they'd been advocating for decades.
Trump's nothing like that. He's cobbled a program together from whatever ideas took his fancy at the time, and assembled his advisors on the same sort of basis. Some of the Trumpists see their leader as a Randian enthusiast for free markets; others embraced a man who spoke up for protectionism and tariffs. For every fundamentalist who thinks the new president will restore Christian values, there's a libertarian who hails the Donald as an advocate of unbridled self expression. Already, we're seeing clashes between the very different wings of the Make America Great Again movement, something that will only intensify as Trump attempts to actually govern.
That's why Australia provides a pretty good example of what America and the world might expect in the months to come. Famously, Paul Keating described Malcolm Turnbull as a damp squib: 'You light him up, there's a bit of a fizz, but then nothing ... nothing.' It's a good description of what we saw in 2016, as the PM proved himself entirely incapable of articulating almost any agenda whatsoever. But the failure was not one of personality so much as circumstances, with Turnbull bogged down in the morass that Tony Abbott left him.
Abbott, after all, came to power through a strategy not unlike that deployed by Trump: destroying Julia Gillard with an appeal to rightwing populism. But once in office, Abbott floundered, with very little to offer his supporters other than increasingly desperate culture war skirmishes. Turnbull toppled Abbott purely on the basis of the contrast between their personal poll ratings — but ever since then, his popularity's been in free fall.
And why wouldn't it be? Like Abbott, Turnbull lacks either a program or a clear constituency — which is why he, too, has now resorted to increasingly shrill Abbott-style denunciations of refugees and renewable energy. In all likelihood, the Trump presidency will follow a similar pattern, with a fractious and incoherent administration papering over its internal divisions via culture war stunts, media provocations and ginned up scandals.
Of course, Abbott did a lot of damage during his brief and inglorious tenure, and no doubt Trump will, too. But in 2017 we're more likely to face a lame duck president than the almighty totalitarian that some liberals seem to expect.
Which raises a crucial point about the coming year. All over the world, the Right's far less powerful than it might initially appear, with very few leaders presiding over regimes of any great stability. Unfortunately, the Right's biggest asset is often the Left, with progressives seemingly determined to validate all the smears levelled against them.
Again, the US provides an obvious example. Hillary Clinton's defeat at the hands of an ogrish buffoon like Trump should have provoked a profound rethink about the strategies of mainstream liberalism. How, we might ask, had a billionaire indelibly associated with conspicuous consumption managed to paint the Democrats as out-of-touch elitists? Trump boasted of sexual assault, belittled minorities and mocked those he dubbed 'losers' — and yet convinced voters that it was his opponent who looked scornfully down at ordinary people. How was that possible?
"Of course, Abbott did a lot of damage during his brief and inglorious tenure, and no doubt Trump will, too. But in 2017 we're more likely to face a lame duck president than the almighty totalitarian that some liberals seem to expect."
You can see the answer in the increasingly unhinged claims that Putin somehow 'hacked' the election. After all, the argument's not that Russia tampered with voting machines or bribed officials or otherwise manipulated the tally. Rather, sundry politicians have quoted anonymous CIA agents claiming that hackers 'associated with' (whatever that means) Russian intelligence helped Wikileaks divulge the so called 'Podesta files': basically, the email correspondence of senior Democrats.
But even if Russia was responsible for getting access to that data (something that's by no means certain), no-one denies the validity of the emails. They're not fakes or forgeries: they're real documents showing Clinton's links with the corporate interests she railed against during her contest with Bernie Sanders.
Now, if that material was so very damaging as to win the election for Trump, surely that's a reason for a profound re-examination of the Democrats' campaign — that peculiar decision to run a business-as-usual ticket at a time when people so obviously crave change.
Instead, the insistence on blaming Clinton's loss on Russia amounts to saying, 'We'd have won if only we'd successfully covered up the true nature of our candidate!' It's a bizarre and totally self-destructive response, one that not only prevents liberals from examining the real basis of Trump's support but also reinforces the image of progressives as duplicitous elites intent on hoodwinking ordinary voters.
That's the strange contradiction we face as the year draws to a close. The Right's grip on power is much more uncertain than it appears. Yet the Left remains unable to relate to the almost universal hostility to the status quo.
Jeff Sparrow is a writer, editor and honorary fellow at Victoria University.