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Recovery, though, came at a cost. Austerity politics reigned, placing heavy burdens on the poor and working class as governments slashed social programs. In the US, the government bailed out banks and corporations but not people; as a result, economic inequality widened. So too did a sense of pervasive unfairness. The financial industry swindled the entire global economy, and seemingly no one was held accountable.

While that sense of unfairness and struggle sparked an appetite for democratic socialism in countries like the US, where it had long been sidelined, it was far more successful in feeding nationalist movements that blamed cosmopolitan elites and non-white immigrants for stagnation and decline.

Blame-the-immigrants became a powerful platform for movements across the globe, a sharp rebuke to an era of growing international cooperation. Especially after America’s go-it-alone invasion of Iraq, international agreements and alliances seemed more important than ever.

Yet the 2010s brought a growing rejection of international cooperation, as a new reactionary nationalism spread across the globe. That new nationalism was more often than not an explicit rejection of a commitment to greater global trade and partnerships, underpinned by a strong antipathy toward non-white and Muslim migrants.

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The promised Muslim ban in the US, the new anti-Islam laws in India, the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Uighurs in China, the migrant crises across Europe, Australia, the Middle East and Central America - by and large these have not been met with coordinated refugee assistance and meaningful applications of international human rights law. They have instead become part of a broader attack on pluralistic democracy.

Yet nowhere has the false promise of the early 2010s been more profound than in the world of social media. The 2000s brought us a smorgasbord of new platforms – Facebook in 2004, YouTube in 2005, Twitter in 2006 – with endless potential. Social media’s rise was lauded as the democratisation of media. The gatekeepers were gone: anyone could publish their thoughts or release a video or podcast without any outside interference. Surely a new meritocracy would emerge.

A new democracy, too. The Arab Spring showed social media’s revolutionary side, its ability to help empower a democratic uprising in unexpected places.

That is not, however, how things turned out. By the mid-2010s it was increasingly clear that social media was also a powerful tool for racist and authoritarian movements. Vulnerable to disinformation campaigns and adept at radicalisation, social media platforms have helped destabilise democracies in ways few people anticipated at the decade’s start. At the start of the 2010s, we worried Facebook might make people narcissists. Now we worry it might make them fascists.

For all the tarnished hopes of the 2010s, there is still some reason for tempered optimism. Democratic uprisings didn’t stop with the Arab Spring. In the US, the Black Lives Matter and MeToo campaigns used social media to force ignored injustices into the headlines. People have organised to protest migrant abuse, racist legislation, climate inaction, government corruption and economic inequality.

Progressive populism challenged right-wing nationalism in the 2010s, but it was a decidedly minor note in a decade dominated by democratic decline. Still, it matters that people took to the streets and to the ballot box to resist the institutional collapse happening around them.

Because as bleak as things may look now for proponents of democracy around the globe, the story is not yet over. The past decade has shown how fragile democracy can be, but also reminded people why it is worth fighting for. Whether the 2010s will be remembered as a warning sign or a death knell for democracy depends on the choices we make in the decade now beginning.

Nicole Hemmer is a regular columnist based in the United States where she is Associate Research Scholar, Obama Presidency Oral History Project, Columbia University.