Back in 1992, Francis Fukuyama wrote The End of History and the Last Man. It is, at this point I think, more criticized than beloved. But with a title like that, how could it not be?
Fukuyama’s thesis is that Western Liberal Democracy had won in a sort of memetic sense of it being the idea that had forced out all the other ideas. The fall of the Soviet Union and the general move of it and its former satellites to Western, Liberal, and Democratic ideas was the ultimate evidence and inspiration.
Criticism of his thesis comes from both the right, believing in an ongoing war of cultural values of ‘the West and the Rest,’ and from the left in its advocacy of what gets sloppily referred to as neoliberal beliefs. Myself, I’m a little unsure. I think that any strong version of his thesis is incorrect. It is too Whiggish for me. But it is a worthy observation if only in a “this is water” sense. Like if we were to discuss a topic like human rights violations in a certain state, that presupposes a whole set of ideas, like human rights and states, that are built out of the idea of Western Liberal Democracy. This is not arguing the uniqueness of it to Western Liberal Democracy,1 but little things like the language and big things like the specifics of the concepts are the ones that evolved or devolved from it. If you are criticizing it, you are criticizing it with its own means. So there is something there.
Or so I thought until I ended up arguing with actual Monarchists online.
America’s Last Election paints a grievous picture of the democratic process. Fraud is rampant, everyone is a crony, and there are significant amounts of racially-motivated violence. And it is a sort of familiar picture to today. The post-truth world looks a lot like the pre-truth one, as the only responsible sort of response to a poisoned information ecology is to shut the thing off.
It is a world that is strikingly different from the recent world, say like 50 years back. But when I think about the situation, I wonder which is the aberration. Why isn’t the modern political situation a return to the ordinary system of how the democratic process looks? The temporary sedate measures brought about by, what, mass media? All that is recency bias.
And in those darker moments like that, I think about the same for Fukuyama’s ideas. Maybe history is going to read this whole couple centuries as that time of weirdos who believed in Liberal Humanism. I do not know, and I do not know that it is possible to know.
- Or that what is unique about it is misidentified, usually with malice. ↩︎
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