"The End of Francis Fukuyama
The legendary political scientist is very much alive, but liberal
democracy is at risk.
By Jerusalem Demsas
..
But how durable is liberal democracy? Although Americans are
experiencing far greater material prosperity than their forebears, fears
of political violence are growing, and the Republican presidential
candidate, Donald Trump, is using authoritarian language. Fukuyama
foresaw the potential for trouble in 1989. “The end of history will be a
very sad time,” he wrote back then. “The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving
of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands … Perhaps this very prospect of centuries
of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.”
..
Demsas: Next week we have the election between Trump and Kamala Harris,
and there are a great deal of normal policy distinctions between the two candidates. And when you look at why people are making their decisions,
they often will point to things like inflation or immigration or
abortion. But there’s also a distinction on this question of democracy
too, right? Why does it feel like there’s this yearning for a more authoritarian leader within a democracy like the United States?
Fukuyama: What’s really infuriating about the current election is that
so many Americans think this is a normal election over policy issues,
and they don’t pay attention to underlying institutions, because that
really is what’s at stake. It’s this erosion of those institutions that
is really the most damaging thing. In a way, it doesn’t matter who wins
the election, because the damage has already been done. You had a
spontaneous degree of trust among Americans in earlier decades, and that
has been steadily eroded. Even if Harris wins the election, that’s still going to be a burden on society. And so the stakes in this thing are
much, much higher than just the question of partisan policies. And I
guess the most disappointing thing is that 50 percent of Americans don’t
see it that way. We just don’t see the deeper institutional issues at
stake.
Demsas: We’re in a time of great affluence—tons of consumer choice,
access to goods and services, bigger houses, bigger cars. George Orwell
once wrote, in his 1940 review of Mein Kampf, that people have a desire
to struggle over something greater than just these small policy details. [“Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have
said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation
flings itself at his feet,” Orwell observed.] Does that desire create a problem for democracies?
Fukuyama: There’s actually a line in one of the last chapters of The End
of History where I said almost exactly something like if people can’t struggle on behalf of peace and democracy, then they’re going to want to struggle against peace and democracy, because what they want to do is
struggle, and they can’t recognize themselves as full human beings
unless they’re engaged in the struggle.
.."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/10/francis-fukuyama-end-greatly-exaggerated/680439/
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