Just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history

March 11, 2025 2:03 AM

Fukuyama’s pining for past ideological struggles suggests that the Last Man would eventually get bored with technocracy, consumerism, and the stultifying constraints of middle management—and seek new monsters to fight. America’s flirtation with an authoritarian leader who promises he alone will fix the nation’s problems and restore the country’s past glory is a manifestation of this phenomenon. The greatest challenges to liberal democracy would not come from new ideological competitors but rather from complacency. from Francis Fukuyama Was Right About Liberal Democracy [The New Republic; ungated]
posted by chavenet (22 comments total)

love that title!
posted by nofundy at 3:53 AM on March 11 [1 favorite]

I feel like I would need to read Fukuyama's book, and not just an article about his book, to decide whether he was right, but kicking off with criticism from Christopher Hitchens certainly predisposed me to agree with Fukuyama. Man, that guy was a fucking asshole. I'm sure if he were here right now he'd be talking about how Trump isn't so bad and Jordan Peterson makes some good points, actually, he just needs to relax and drink more.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:41 AM on March 11 [8 favorites]

Oh, a Fukuyama article. Some people may opt to take a shot, I'll re-read Mark Fisher. Given it's a TNR Fukuyama article, maybe I'll take the shot and re-read the Fisher.
posted by A forgotten .plan file at 5:16 AM on March 11 [9 favorites]

For all of liberal democracy’s faults—and Fukuyama has hardly been reluctant to raise them—no serious competitor has emerged to capture people’s imagination or seriously challenge it. To the extent that liberal democracy has faltered, it’s from its own failings not because a better alternative has emerged.

Well, this completely misses the one competing ideology that's stomping all over our faces:

1930's—40's style Hitlerism.

It's back again and with a vengeance. In America. In parts of Europe. An, most of all, in Russia.

Worst of all: it's popular.

One of the most widely held assumptions in the immediate post-Cold War period was that the coming era would lead to more, not less, conflict. A year after “The End Of History?” John Mearsheimer wrote that a coming wave of regional and sectarian conflicts would make us “soon miss the Cold War.” [...] All these gloomy predictions proved amazingly wrong.

How far away from Ukraine does one have to be to hold onto this idea, in 2025?
posted by UN at 5:40 AM on March 11 [14 favorites]

Feels like this was written mostly before the inauguration, with a few bits about the US added in later as a minor acknowledgement of the *ahem* changing situation.
posted by biffa at 5:51 AM on March 11 [7 favorites]

The author and his smug self-congratulation bring to mind Johann Eck or Theodor Wolff before they and their ideological certainties were swept into history's dustbin. The timing and content of this article would be comedic if the resulting existential threats wrought by the very ideology he lauds weren't so serious. End of history, indeed.
posted by smithsmith at 5:52 AM on March 11 [7 favorites]

In a 2014 reappraisal of his article, Fukuyama conceded that he misjudged the challenges in building effective and responsive democratic governments. Democracies live and die, he said, by their ability to provide basic services, economic prosperity, and security to their citizens—and many were failing at that crucial task.

Moreover, democratic institutions are “often rigid and conservative” and susceptible to capture “by powerful political actors.” In short, democracies can be as easily corrupted as an authoritarian system, undermining their legitimacy and pushing voters toward leaders who offer easy solutions. Liberal democracy might be the dominant political form, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be distorted into denying political and human rights.

I mean, this seems like it accurately captures some aspects of the current American situation. The country is currently being exploited by authoritarians who are offering falsely easy solutions to the problems of providing basic services, economic prosperity, and security, while actually diminishing our ability to have all of those things.
posted by limeonaire at 6:30 AM on March 11 [8 favorites]

Let's not forget the verb Fukuyaming, which is when someone says something so wrong that everybody rushes in to correct them, thereby making the fukuyamer very famous.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 7:39 AM on March 11 [8 favorites]

does the article address that, at least in America, liberal democracy might have had a better chance if one party wasn't constantly undermining it for 30-50yrs (depending on when one starts the clock)?
posted by kokaku at 7:40 AM on March 11 [5 favorites]

For all the challenges facing liberal democracy these days, the factions striving to destroy it are not even trying to present a credible alternative. In that sense, history is over, and we just have a temper tantrum by people who feel inadequately respected by the system, as well as an existential threat from global warming and peak oil. This isn't "history" we're going through. It's a societal embuggerance.

And the tantrum really does appear driven by "Last Man" ennui.
posted by ocschwar at 7:54 AM on March 11 [3 favorites]

As I understand it, Fukuyama’s book was so wrong when it was released that people mopped the floor with him, conceptually. And yet here we are, several volumes of history on, discussing what has to be the centrist dad’s favourite philosopher. The problem is that Fukuyama - and this article - assume that liberal democracy as practiced now (or whenever they prefer) is a Panglossian “everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds” triumph. There’s no mention of neo-Nazis, or the CIA supporting military regimes, or anything that goes against this self-congratulatory message. It’s embarrassing to have to debate these ideas with a straight face
posted by The River Ivel at 8:48 AM on March 11 [10 favorites]

but wait there's more

we will look back on the good old days when people at least had to spend time to read these bad ideas

now they can just plug into Joe Rogan. Tell me we're not doomed
posted by ginger.beef at 8:59 AM on March 11 [6 favorites]

I mean, this seems like it accurately captures some aspects of the current American situation. The country is currently being exploited by authoritarians who are offering falsely easy solutions to the problems of providing basic services, economic prosperity, and security, while actually diminishing our ability to have all of those things.

My first (worst) impulse at seeing folks repeatedly vote against their own well-being is that maybe we as a population are a little too dumb and gullible for democracy. But it’s not really a fair playing field with the current warped media landscape and illiberal political representation systems. We’ve always had an ill-informed and mostly ignorant populace. There’s greater wealth concentration, and so a feeling that things are getting worse. Europe for the most part hasn’t gone insane and by most measures they’re more democratic.

Our U.S. political system like the game Monopoly, it’s an early attempt that had a front runner advantage but with multiple serious design flaws that make the experience unpleasant.
posted by leotrotsky at 9:07 AM on March 11 [3 favorites]

Fukuyama’s pining for past ideological struggles suggests that the Last Man would eventually get bored with technocracy, consumerism, and the stultifying constraints of middle management—and seek new monsters to fight

Reminder for anyone who wants to resume Fukuyama bashing.
posted by ocschwar at 9:57 AM on March 11 [1 favorite]

Sometimes I wish the Scandinavian model of Social Democracy only added a bit of aggressive evangelical belligerence to it.

To the extent that it worked (valid opinions of which are widely varied), capitalism only worked as well as it did because Soviet/Early Chinese-style communism were enough of a threat to its existence that it kept at least a bit of its own worst tendencies in check. Post Cold-War, there's nothing even trying to keep capitalism honest, so it isn't bothering to be.
posted by tclark at 10:15 AM on March 11 [2 favorites]

Europe...most measures they're more democratic

Maybe most, but maybe not the most salient.

I happen to like SRW's characterization as wealth as a stockpile of future claims, which gives the rich at least some semblance of rationality.

Across place and time, it seems that compounding returns to existing dominant parties is the law of the jungle regardless of the mitigating political strategy.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 10:39 AM on March 11 [1 favorite]

We’ve always had an ill-informed and mostly ignorant populace.

And, lest we get carried too far into self-satisfied sneering of the Laschian “civilized minority” variety, we would do well to remember that this is and has been very much by design.
posted by non canadian guy at 11:48 AM on March 11 [4 favorites]

Haven't read this yet, but just as an exercise, I tried CTRL+F for:

- inequality
- propaganda
- wealth
- race

Zero hits for any of them. Maybe they had some reason not to explore the idea that the decay of American democracy was driven by a propaganda campaign funded by wealthy plutocrats who chafed at the restraints of civil society imposed by structures created when there was less economic inequality, and the idea that "all men are created equal" was taken seriously as a foundational principle of our society...

Or, I guess, it is possible that it just never occurred to them.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 11:56 AM on March 11 [4 favorites]

Really should read: the idea that "all men are created equal" was taken at least somewhat more seriously as a foundational principle of our society...

The editors apologize for this oversight.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 12:07 PM on March 11 [2 favorites]

I feel like biffa nailed it: the guy wrote this maybe in February 2020, put it in a drawer for four years, and modified a couple of paragraphs to make it look like he'd thought about Trump.

In support of this theory: "there is no pining among the public for military adventurism undergirded by extreme ultranationalism, which defined the fascist regimes of the 1930s and 1940s"... can someone actually think this in the face of Putin's or Netanyahu's warmaking? Or the Republicans' wet dreams of invading Greenland and Panama?

But I do agree that Fukuyama will last... because the world will either be far better or far worse in 2100, and his ideas will look ridiculous either way.
posted by zompist at 4:40 PM on March 11 [2 favorites]

does the article address that, at least in America, liberal democracy might have had a better chance if one party wasn't constantly undermining it for 30-50yrs (depending on when one starts the clock)?

Doesn't need to. As the article points out, liberal democracy right now is still more prevalent around the world than it was in 1989. Lots of Asian , Latin American, and African countries took a liking to it.

And look at the challenges posed to it in the US. Are the MAGAts proposing a credible alternative to liberal democracy? No. They're having a tantrum because liberal democracy didn't need them to be in charge, and they feel that they deserve to be in charge.

Which is kind of the point of what makes liberal democracy awesome: that it doesn't need those people to be in charge.

We are in a crisis right now because we have a huge bulge of people slightly my age or older, who feel that the current system doesn't respect them, because it doesn't. In Olden Times (TM), men my age would start collecting small gestures of respect for the time they spent keeping the Elks Lodge afloat, or things like that. Today, these are people who have been Bowling Alone, and so they don't get the small kudos that mollified their predecessors. Neither do I. The Elks Lodge has denied me the recognition I deserve for the trifling reason that I never set foot in one. More seriously, I am diagnosably introverted, and would not enjoy being the center of attention, but I'm old enough to look back at my adult life and see it was misspent. In enough other people
it translates to rage.

This embuggrance is an existential threat to the American republic, and to civilization itself, but it does nothing to discredit Fukuyama. And what's more: he predicted this. In The End of History.
posted by ocschwar at 9:00 PM on March 11 [3 favorites]

In a vague way the good parts of Fukuyama are when he sounds sort of like Walter Benjamin.The angel of history and whatnot.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:03 PM on March 13