Has History Ended?

It happens on a fairly regular basis now. From time to time someone trots out the tired and shopword thesis proposed by one Fancis Fukuyama and declares it to be truth. This time, the author is one Michael Cohen, writing in The New Republic.

The thesis was that history has ended and that we won. Assuming that history was a struggle between authoritarianism and liberal democracy, the end of history occurred when the latter emerged victorious. Excuse the simplification, but Fukuyama’s Neo-Hegelian spirit is basically warmed over Biblical eschatology. 

In truth, it’s an old Enlightenment idea, described clearly by Carl Becker in a book called The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers. The great thinkers might have thought that they were overcoming religion. In truth, they were simply describing it in different terms.

The end of history is like the stories of the end of days. The result, to Fukuyama, is that everyone now believes that liberal democracy is the best way to govern human beings.

Which is manifestly untrue.

One feels obliged to remark that, in the world of subliminal suggestion, if you are told that liberal democracy is the future you are more likely to believe that you should be a liberal democrat.

One also feels compelled to note that, as Michael Cohen remarks in his essay, that liberal democracy has not arrived in Russia or China or the Muslim world. That is, the majority of people on the planet have not embraced liberal democracy.

Cohen notes this fact:

Then there is the case of China, a “market-oriented authoritarian state.” in which widespread demands for recognition have largely failed to materialize. Fukuyama has argued that China’s lack of democratic accountability has led to corruption, mismanagement of the economy, and government crackdowns intended to suppress political dissent. Similar phenomena have occurred in other authoritarian states like Russia and Iran. All that is true, and more than three decades after publication of “The End Of History?” China has become less free and more authoritarian and is not remotely close to adopting the tenets of liberal democracy. The perpetuation of Chinese market authoritarianism is a direct rebuttal to Fukuyama’s optimism.

As you know, China increased its per capita GDP by 3000% over the past four decades. It did not do so while having elections and ensuring human rights. As for the notion that the people of China might be yearning for democratic elections, we can examine the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989. 

Not so much because the regime crushed the student rebellion mercilessly but because all of those who insisted, according to good Hegelian thinking, that the repressed impulse toward democracy would necessarily lead to the overthrow of the authoritarian regime, were manifestly wrong.

Rumor has it that the people of China, while they witness the American political system, express happiness with their own.

As Donald Trump is wont to declare, the people running China are seriously intelligent and competent people. We cannot say as much about all of our own recent democratically elected leaders.

Fukuyama was wrong. He has every right to be wrong, but let’s get over our jejune attraction to liberal democracy and liberal democrats.