I’ve just finished Francis Fukuyama’s celebration of the end of the Cold War in 1989: The End of History and the Last Man, published in 1992.
The idea is that the defeat of Communism represents the triumph of “liberal democracy,” and really there is no better plan for government. And if we are at the end of history then it no longer makes sense for men with courage — thymos — to struggle and fight for noble things. So
Men with modern educations are content to sit at home, congratulating themselves on their broadmindedness and lack of fanaticism.
Only of course history has not ended and men still have thymos. Today they become activists and fight for “change.”
To Fukuyama, “liberal democracy” is a combination of liberalism and democracy.
Political liberalism can be defined simply as a rule of law that recognizes certain individual rights of freedoms from government control.
Democracy, on the other hand, is the right held universally by all citizens to have a share of political power, that is, the right of all citizens to vote and participate in politics.
What is lacking from Fukuyama’s analysis is the famous line of Lenin: “who, whom?” Liberalism doesn’t just happen; it’s not just an idea. It is a belief system that was created by men with an agenda who then formed themselves into political movements to implement it.
And — you will hardly believe this — they clearly understood that liberalism would benefit themselves, the rising class of educated men, against the old order of kings and landholders.
Also, his definition of democracy is either naive or dishonest. As Joseph Schumpeter writes at the beginning of Chapter XXIII in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy,
[D]emocracy does not mean and cannot mean the that people actually rule... Democracy means only that the people have the opportunity of accepting or refusing the men who are to rule over them... [D]emocracy is the rule of the politician.
In other words, democracy is a structure set up by the members of the educated class by which politicians are selected to rule, and create lots of Jobs for Educated Gentry in the administrative state.
Let us propose a different narrative to Fukuyama’s idea of the End of History as liberal democracy.
The end of the Cold War in 1989 marked a moment at which Rule by the Educated has triumphed over capitalism, communism and fascism.
Capitalism is no good for the educated class because it does not care what the educated class thinks. Businessmen go about creating things without permission from the educated class. This is wrong.
Communism is no good for the educated class because power and authority is too concentrated in a party elite to allow the full involvement of the educated class in directing traffic. This is wrong.
Fascism is no good for the educated class because power and authority is too concentrated in a charismatic leader to allow the full involvement of the educated class in directing traffic. This is wrong.
Really, the idea that the world should not be ordered for the convenience of the educated in inconceivable.
Anyway, there will be no End of History because there is no politics without an enemy, and so any regime is defined by the kind of war it decides to fight. Let’s see.
The American revolutionaries were defined by their fight against King George.
The French revolutionaries were defined by failure and the co-opting of the revolution by a military adventurer, Napoleon.
The liberal democratic regimes of 1914 were defined by their war against German Kaiserism.
The liberal democratic regimes of 1940 were defined by their war against fascism.
The liberal democratic regimes of 1950-90 were defined by their war against Communism.
The liberal democratic regimes of the post 1989 era are defined by their proxy wars against non-liberal democratic regimes. And when that doesn’t serve they make war on climate and systemic racism.
After The End of History and the Last Man Fukuyama went on to write The Origin of Political Order in 2011, a history of the world up to the French Revolution, and the Political Order and Political Decay in 2014, a history of the world since the Industrial Revolution. He now realizes that there is life after the End of History.
But he cannot imagine a world unsupervised by a wise and evolved educated class directing traffic from on high.
Of course nobody has any idea about the Next Regime. Whabout its politics? Who will be the enemy? And whatabout its religion. What will be Good and what will be Evil?
I have no idea. Nor does anyone else.
But think of the world 300 years ago, when kings were spending about 5 percent of GDP on their nice little wars: Frederick the Great trotting around in Silesia, thumbing his nose at the Austrians. Today, after two world wars, famines, purges, the educated class is spending 35-50 percent of GDP on wars, on the administrative state and handouts.
It doesn’t have to be like that.