Francis Fukuyama Laments January 6

Today is January 6, a day that will live in…. 

If the media and the Democratic Party has its way, today will become a defining moment in American political history. It will become the moment when the true nature of the Beast was exposed, and when the world entire discovered, not only that Donald Trump was the Antichrist, but that his maleficent ways needed to be shut down and closed off forever.

Those who are peddling the January 6th insurrection narrative are saying that we no longer have external enemies. Our true enemies are lurking within, trying to defeat the Democratic Party, which stands in for liberal democracy.

Then and only then will we see the advent of worldwide liberal democracy, as prophesied by Francis Fukuyama over two decades ago, via G. W. F. Hegel. 

So, we feel an especial frisson to see that said Fukuyama has taken to the pages of the New York Times to announce a new career move. Given how badly his prophecy turned out, Fukuyama is now going to try his hand at screenwriting.

Consider the title of his Times article. He wrote: “One Single Day. That Was All It Took for the World To Look Away from Us.” Seriously, does that sound like the title to a thought piece, or does it sound like a pitch for a movie script. It’s very high concept, just as scripts should be, and it is suitably dramatic. One day that changed the world. OMFG!

But seriously, does anyone still take Fukuyama seriously as a thinker. One would have been interested to hear him, on the first anniversary of January 6th, admit that his Hegelian reverie about the end of history was so much mental drool.

Of course, many people imagine that he is philosophically profound and sophisticated. After all, he was recycling Hegel and we all know that Hegel was a very smart German philosopher. Being German makes you a serious philosopher, no matter your theories. To the less sophisticated I would point out that Hegel was the godfather of Marxism, and we ought, at this late date, to know that every effort to put those theories into practice produced abominations and human catastrophes.

To the pseudo-intelligentsia, it does not really matter. Hegel was a serious philosopher and hitching one’s wagon to his star makes one seem to be a deep thinker. It works especially well for an audience that would not be able to grasp profundity if they fell into it.

Out of mercy, I will pass over the great German thinkers, many of whose reputations are still intact among graduate students, who gave us Nazism. It’s much easier to denounce Donald Trump as Hitler than to think about the course of world history in other than apocalyptic terms.

To be fair, Fukuyama prophesied that at the end of history the battle between liberal democracy and authoritarian government will have been decided, with liberal democracy having been accepted worldwide as the best system. His history feels more like a debating society. Yet, who decides who won and who lost? And what are we to do with those who disagree with history’s final verdict? Should they be canceled?

At times, Fukuyama has seemed to be confused about this, but his initial thought was that history would end when everyone believed in liberal democracy, by which he was obviously suggesting, the rule of liberal democrats. Ever since his first prophetic pronouncement, he has been at pains to rationalize the simple fact that world history, as of this date, refuses to confirm his prophecy.

He meant, for those who are not familiar with it, that a glorious future about to unfold has free elections, human rights, free speech and a free press and a free enterprise system. He even imagined, strangely enough, that America became a hegemonic power because it allows free and open discussion and debate and because it has putatively free elections.

To counter this one would respectfully point out that America became a hegemon by winning two world wars and by leading the world in wealth production. It is almost too obvious to say it, but I will anyway, but military organizations are not run like liberal democracies. Nor, for that matter, are corporate behemoths.

One might suggest that, beginning with Vietnam the American military began functioning more like a liberal democracy than a totalitarian fighting force. From the Ivy League intellectuals who directed the Vietnam War to the lawyers who have exerted outsized influence on more recent military actions and even to the current crop of officers who want to coed-ify the military and to make it more diverse and equitable, the more America has gone woke the more it has lost stature in the world. Isn’t wokery a pure form of liberal democracy, engineered by our philosopher kings?

No one today seriously believes that our rights to free speech have not been damaged by tech behemoths. As for the integrity of our elections, tech titans were clearly involved in censoring news and manipulating minds in order to produce the outcome that they wished.

This does not mean that the January 6 protest was a good idea. I have previously offered my considered opinion that it was a bad idea. It has served as a distraction that the media has been using to draw attention away from the insurrection and riots that consumed major American blue cities in the spring and summer of 2020.

But, was January 6 an insurrection? As of now, to my knowledge, no participant has been charged with insurrection. The Wall Street Journal editorial board, not a cabal of leftist radicals explains that there is plenty of blame to go around:

One lesson is that on all the available evidence Jan. 6 was not an “insurrection,” in any meaningful sense of that word. It was not an attempted coup. The Justice Department and the House Select Committee have looked high and low for a conspiracy to overthrow the government, and maybe they will find it. So far they haven’t.

So, the Democratic left is going all hyperbolic to make a political point. And yet, the Journal is not very charitable toward Mr. Trump, who mistakenly imagined that the election results could be overturned and who ginned up outrage by persisting in saying that the results could be overturned:

None of this absolves Mr. Trump for his behavior. He isn’t the first candidate to question an election result; Hillary Clinton still thinks Vladimir Putin defeated her in 2016. But he was wrong to give his supporters false hope that Congress and Mr. Pence could overturn the electoral vote. He did not directly incite violence, but he did incite them to march on the Capitol.

As for the charge of mounting a coup, consider this. In July of 2017 three senior administration officials, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Economic advisor Gary Cohn trapped President Trump in a small room in the Pentagon. Surrounded by uniformed officers they announced that they were going to take over foreign policy, and that Trump would be limited to domestic concerns. To tell the commander in chief that he will no longer be commander in chief is a coup. Naturally, he reacted, and by all accounts, reacted badly.

Still, if the term coup means anything, that was more of a coup than the events of January 6. Unfortunately, it was not sufficiently dramatic to attract media attention, even though it was dutifully reported by Philip Rucker in the Washington Post.

But, back to our thesis. 

When it comes to democracy, the inconvenient truth is that the validity of elections depends on the loser’s willingness to recognize the winner as legitimate. It is based on the notion of a loyal opposition. Since the American left, accompanied by the Democratic Party and the mass media, refused to accept the 2016 election result as legitimate, it is hardly in a position to say, with Fukuyama, that the 2020 protest destroyed American credibility around the world.

As the saying goes, people who live in glass houses…..

As it happens, Fukuyama recognizes that democracy, and especially liberal democracy, has been in decline ever since he pronounced it victorious.

According to Freedom House’s 2021 Freedom in the World report, democracy has been in decline for 15 straight years, with some of the largest setbacks coming in the world’s two largest democracies, the United States and India. Since that report was issued, coups took place in Myanmar, Tunisia and Sudan, countries that had previously taken promising steps toward democracy.

Yet, Fukuyama has some strange candidates to demonstrate the advent of worldwide liberal democracy:

People around the world looked up to America’s example as one they sought to emulate, from the students in Tiananmen Square in 1989 to the protesters leading the “color revolutions” in Europe and the Middle East in subsequent decades.

From our own aerie the Tiananmen protests looked like a thrust toward liberal democracy. From the Great Hall of the People they looked like an effort to launch another Cultural Revolution As for the color revolutions in the Middle East, they mostly failed. After all, when Egypt voted for a post-Mubarak president, it chose a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. To imagine that this was a step toward universal liberal democracy is absurd. As for Hegel, he seemed to see history ending when Napoleon took over Prussia. If you think that Napoleon was expanding his empire in order to bring liberal democracy to European peoples, you need a serious rethink.

As it happens, Fukuyama does not want to admit that he was wrong. In truth, that is largely what his essay is about. The world is wrong, history is wrong, countries are wrong, but he was right. 

As for what he missed, he notes the following:

The decline of democracy worldwide is driven by complex forces. Globalization and economic change have left many behind, and a huge cultural divide has emerged between highly educated professionals living in cities and residents of smaller towns with more traditional values. The rise of the internet has weakened elite control over information; we have always disagreed over values, but we now live in separate factual universes. And the desire to belong and have one’s dignity affirmed are often more powerful forces than economic self-interest.

Does he believe that the advent of Trump has caused us to live in separate factual universes? Our liberal democrats have largely taken control of the media and the academy. They have filled the American mind with all manner of rot, insisting that they are presenting facts, and claiming that the only reason anyone disagrees with them and refuses to do what they are told is--misinformation.

But then, there is no such thing as a desire to belong and a desire to have one’s dignity affirmed. You are not born with a desire to belong to a family. You are born a member of a family. Idem, as a citizen of the nation. To reduce this to desire is to make a very basic philosophical error.

The problem with the concept is that these are moral principles, not desires. You do not crave dignity; you do not have an appetite for dignity. Your dignity is something that you have and that you may either save or lose. It is roughly the concept that the Chinese define as saving and losing face. If you cease to belong to a social group and completely lose your dignity you will feel morally obligated to recover one or both. But, you do not do so because of a stirring in your loins or your gut. 

In truth, if you suffer from anomie or from the attendant depression you will be afflicted with a condition that involves an absence of desire, of any kind. If you recover your dignity or your belonging you will not do so because you want to do so but because you are following instructions laid down by an authority-- i.e. by a cognitive therapist.

As for Fukuyama’s lame contention that January 6 was a defining moment, a moment when it all fell down, allow him his opinion, highly dramatized, of course:

Up until Jan. 6, one might have seen these developments through the lens of ordinary American politics, with its disagreements on issues like trade, immigration and abortion. But the uprising marked the moment when a significant minority of Americans showed themselves willing to turn against American democracy itself and to use violence to achieve their ends. What has made Jan. 6 a particularly alarming stain (and strain) on U.S. democracy is the fact that the Republican Party, far from repudiating those who initiated and participated in the uprising, has sought to normalize it and purge from its own ranks those who were willing to tell the truth about the 2020 election as it looks ahead to 2024, when Mr. Trump might seek a restoration.

In part, this echoes some similar remarks from the Journal, quoted above. And yet, calling it an uprising or a violent insurrection is incorrect and slightly hysterical.

Throughout the Trump presidency the opposition to Trump was anything but loyal. January 6 was not an uprising. It does not correlate with the storming of the Bastille in 1789. It was a protest demonstration, largely less violent than the protests that had filled our television screens throughout much of 2020. And yet, when BLM protesters rioted and burned down neighborhoods, even fire bombing police stations and attacking police officers, the media and the Democratic Party cheered the exercise of free expression. 

As for America’s reputation in the world, consider a few other salient points.

Why do we imagine that the world’s troublemakers have not taken note of the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, produced by the Biden administration. Do you think that they are going to embrace a political system that places a senile demented old man in the presidency and that backs him up with an incompetent fool. Why would anyone want to emulate a system that gives political power to an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

I could expand the list, but, graciously will not.

Keep in mind, people around the world, beginning with the left-leaning government and the leftist intelligentsia in France has already declared wokeism a species of stupidity that they want to avoid at all costs.

If the BLM riots were what Fukuyama considers to be “good democratic practice,” he is seriously prey to an illusion. He continues to live in an end of days prophecy, one that sees Trump as the Antichrist who needs to be defeated in order to allow the Fukuyamas of this world to pretend to be right, and for the New Jerusalem to descend on our miserable planet.

Fukuyama concludes on this note:

If Americans cease to believe in an open, tolerant and liberal society, our capacity to innovate and lead as the world’s foremost economic power will also diminish. Jan. 6 sealed and deepened the country’s divisions, and for that reason it will have consequences echoing across the globe in the years to come.

I put the word “believe” in boldface, because that is clearly the thrust of Fukuyama’s argument. He is looking for groupthink, for true believers in liberal democracy. As his reputation as a soothsayer lies in tatters along the roadside, it will take more than the QAnon shaman to rescue it.