History
is having its revenge on Francis Fukuyama. In 1992, at the height of
post-Cold War liberal exuberance, the American political theorist
wrote in The End of History and the Last Man: “What we
may be witnessing… is the end point of mankind’s ideological
evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as
the final form of human government.”
Twenty-six
years later, from the US to Russia, Turkey to Poland, and Hungary to
Italy, an Illiberal International is advancing. Fukuyama’s new book
Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment
(his ninth) seeks to grapple with these forces.
Fukuyama,
who studied political philosophy under Allan Bloom, the author of The
Closing of the American Mind, at Cornell University, initially
identified with the neoconservative movement: he was mentored by Paul
Wolfowitz while a government official during the Reagan-Bush years.
But by late 2003, Fukuyama had recanted his support for the Iraq war,
which he now regards as a defining error alongside financial
deregulation and the euro’s inept creation. “These are all
elite-driven policies that turned out to be pretty disastrous,
there’s some reason for ordinary people to be upset.”
“At
this juncture, it seems to me that certain things Karl Marx said are
turning out to be true. He talked about the crisis of overproduction…
that workers would be impoverished and there would be insufficient
demand.” Yet the only plausible systemic rival to liberal
democracy, Fukuyama said, was not socialism but China’s state
capitalist model.
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