Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History and the Last Man" changed political discourse forever. Peter and Michael peel back his muddled history and fluffy rhetoric, revealing several more layers of muddled history and fluffy rhetoric.
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Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History and the Last Man" changed political discourse forever. Peter and Michael peel back his muddled history and fluffy rhetoric, revealing several more layers of muddled history and fluffy rhetoric.
Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod
Where to find us:
Sources:
Peter: Michael.
Michael: Peter.
Peter: What do you know about The End of History?
Michael: I mostly know that 80% of the arguments about it were about the title, not the actual book.
[If Books Could Kill Theme Music]
Peter: Before we talk about the essay and the book, we should probably talk about Francis Fukuyama. He's a political philosopher who starts to work at the RAND Corporation in 1979. Fukuyama is also doing-- he works for the Reagan Administration in the State Department, the Bush administration, the Bush I administration. And in the summer of 1989, he publishes a little essay called The End of History?
Michael: Oh, summer of '89. So, before the wall came down.
Peter: It is. It is before the wall came down. The wall comes down, I think towards the end of the year, November.
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: And, the Soviet Union is teetering, but still won't formally dissolve for a couple of years. There's an understanding that at this point, the Cold War is ending. There's this lingering question in everyone's mind of, “What comes next? What comes next for all of us? What comes next for America?" And The End of History is Fukuyama's attempt to answer that question, and his answer really captures the imagination of political elites especially, and really defines how American politicians, Western politicians, and academics look at the world for the next quarter century.
Michael: You could not get away from this book.
Peter: Yeah. I was in college in the mid aughts, and it was assigned by more than one professor.
Michael: I read this book twice, once in grad school and once in other grad school, [Peter laughs] and I barely remember it. I think a lot of that comes from his writing style.
Peter: Yeah. I mean, look, Fukuyama is a smart guy, but he revels in the safety of abstraction.
Michael: Right.
Peter: I'm not an opponent of political philosophy, I enjoy it. But there is a type of dumb person that thrives in the realm of political philosophy because philosophical analysis provides so much abstraction that you can readily hide the fact that you are not able to accurately describe the world.
Michael: Also, Peter, I don't know if this, but I have a master's degree in political philosophy.
Peter: I did not know that.
Michael: And what you're saying about people not knowing what the fuck they're talking about is exactly like my grad school experience.
[laughter]
Michael: I remember just being like, “What do you mean? What exactly do you mean, please?” And people not being able to articulate it.
Peter: I have a political science degree, so I'm kind of a STEM guy.
Michael: The hard science and the soft science.
Peter: Now, the thesis is best summarized by a quote from the original essay. “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, but the end of history as such. That is, the endpoint of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."
Michael: We did it, gang. We came up with the ideal way to run a country.
Peter: I know it's crazy, but I think we got this. [Michael laughs] I think we actually got this human society thing forever. So, yeah. The initial essay is just 15 pages or so, published in a little conservative journal called The National Interest. The book comes a couple years later, 1992, and it's called The End of History and The Last Man. So, no more question mark.
Michael: We're making statements now.
Peter: Yeah. He's getting cocky.
Michael: I have been looking forward to this episode because I always thought of him as someone who I don't agree with. Like, I think that the central thesis of his book is wrong, but I also think that it contains some genuine insights, and a lot of the discussion and criticism of his book did, in fact, seem like it was coming from people who thought that he was saying that stuff wasn't going to happen anymore. [laughs] See, Francis, something happened. Your book is wrong. That's not really what he was saying.
Peter: Yeah, no, I think that's right. A lot of the criticism I saw was a little bit of off base and mischaracterized his work. The ways in which he was wrong were much more subtle, put it that way. He takes care to say, "I'm not talking about the end of things happening. Humanity has sort of decided upon a structure of governance for itself." What's behind this thesis is the idea that originated, at least in Western philosophy, with Hagel, who articulated this idea of the dialectical view of history, which just means that history has a narrative arc. There's a beginning, there's a middle, there's an end, and it ends when society meets mankind's most fundamental needs and wants.
Like, Marx was a proponent of this dialectical view. His belief was that the course of history is defined by class struggle, and the endpoint is a stateless communist society. Fukuyama is proposing something conceptually similar with a different endpoint. Two world wars have been fought, the result of which he believes the defeat of fascism, and now he's seeing the Soviet Union fall. So, he is witnessing, in his mind, a point in history where Western liberal democracy is not only ascendant but is the final stage of human governance. Alternatives have been vanquished in the battlefield of ideas.
I don't want to get too deep into his discussion of human nature, but he believes that liberal democracy satisfies mankind's innate desire for recognition, and that's why it's fundamentally appealing to people, and that's why it has prevailed and why there is no next step.
Michael: I have a huge fetish for Theory of Everything books. These books like The End of History because they're always wrong. [Peter laughs] They're always wrong in such fundamental ways. Just like as a methodology, here's the one true narrative. They never hold up to specifics.
Peter: Yeah, I enjoy a narrative. I think it can be useful. But there's only so far you can zoom out. And Fukuyama has zoomed out impossibly far. That's the problem with the type of abstraction he uses where you get this essay, it's a short essay, makes his quick point. And then, I glance at the book and it's 400 something pages. I was like, “Oh, he's going to use data to support his essay.” [Michael laughs] No.
Peter: Naïve, Peter, that was deeply naive.
Michael: That was Peter three weeks ago.
[laughter]
Peter: A young boy with his whole life in front of him. No, it was actually 400 pages of extrapolation on the essay. Each of those 15 pages in the original essay yanked into, like, 50-- It just goes on and on and on. The same idea rephrased over and over again.
Michael: I remember this from his future books too, that both of them-- I mean, they're big. They're like bricks. Both of them easily could have been a New Yorker article. He does a lot of, in this essay, "I will," like setting the table stuff. Does he do that in End of History too, where like, the first four pages of every chapter are him, like, describing what he's about to do?
Peter: Yes, yes.
Michael: And then he describes the exact same thing again in, like, 20 pages. And then he does, like, “What I've just described is,” and then he describes the same thing in, like, another four pages.
Peter: When you're bullshitting this much, you have to remind people what you're talking about.
Michael: It's incredible and then you look back on the chapter and you're like, “Well, he only gave me, like, one example of what he was actually talking about.” There's no actual information in these chapters. It's just like prose.
Peter: Oh, so much prose man. He's trying to write a book about the entire structure of human society and why he believes liberal democracy both has prevailed and will continue to prevail. When the thesis is that broad, it's hard to know where and how to start critiquing it. But I think when you glance at the thesis, a couple of major threshold questions pop up. Namely, you're saying liberal democracy is the final form of human government, but how are you defining liberal democracy?
Michael: How does he answer that?
Peter: He defines it, he says, “The state that emerges at the end of history is liberal insofar as it recognizes and protects through a system of laws man's universal right to freedom and democratic insofar as it exists only with the consent of the governed.” So, right off the bat, we're working with a definition that is simultaneously vague and clearly untrue, at least around the margins.
Michael: Right, because he's describing it in these super idealized terms that, "It recognizes our deepest desires, and everybody gets to participate." or whatever. But then, you look around at actual liberal democracies, and all of them are doing that to varying degrees. None of them are actually reaching this high-minded definition that he's set, even though he's trying to describe the real world with this.
Peter: He is incredibly credulous about the extent to which countries that claim they are liberal democracies are actually either liberal or democratic. A good example is he will describe aspects of the United States as inherent to the United States while writing off other very real aspects of the United States as not inherent. He says the US is fundamentally egalitarian. In making that argument, he acknowledges disproportionate black poverty, for example. But he says that's not fundamental to the US. It's just the legacy of slavery and racism. But why is egalitarianism fundamental to America while racism is not? The Three-Fifths Compromise was in the fucking Constitution.
Michael: But it's basically this thing that we saw when all the Abu Ghraib stuff came out, where George W. Bush was like, “We do not torture.”
Peter: [laughs] Right.
Michael: "Yeah, we tortured a bunch of people and yeah, it was US Government policy and everything, but we're not the kind of people who do that. Give me a break."
Peter: Right. It's the international policy equivalent of your dog bites someone, and you're like, “[gasps] He never does that.”
Michael: Yes.
Peter: In the book, he makes an argument that there are more liberal democracies now than in 1790. He says that there were three in 1790, France, Switzerland, and the United States. I get what he's going for here, but is that right? Was the United States a liberal democracy in 1790? Does it make sense to call a country where only white male landowners could vote and one out of every, what, seven or eight people was a slave? Is that a liberal democracy? I don't know. I don't really think so.
Peter: Well, okay, I remember very vividly this part of the book, and at least from my now 15-year-old memories of the book, I actually thought that this was one of the better parts of it and one of the more convincing cases. I think it's a much more deep insight when you look at the post-World War II world, if you look at the 1960s and 1970s, most of Latin America was under some form of dictatorship, Spain, Portugal, the entire USSR. A huge number of people who used to be living under totalitarian regimes are at least nominally living under democratically elected regimes. I know that's a blurry distinction or whatever, but there is actually a pretty big difference between living under Franco and living under modern Spain.
Peter: Completely agree and I think that the good faith read of his argument is that democratic values are originating and spreading. Not necessarily that all these countries are embracing them in full. But there's this problem that he starts to run into where if you make that argument about the early US, it is espousing democratic values, and while it's not really embracing them in full, it's taking steps towards that. I get that. But what he ends up doing is then sort of failing to ask the important questions about the later-stage democracies, about whether they are in fact furthering democratic and liberal values.
So, to give an example, there are a couple of chapters where he describes what he calls, “the weakness of strong states,” meaning the decline of authoritarian governments across the globe, especially in the post-World War II era. His basic claim is authoritarian governments are losing their grip on power because the people yearn for liberal democracy. He mentions the example of Latin America, which had a surge of democratic governance starting in the 1980s.
This is why debunking this book is so fucking annoying because yes, that is true in a sense, but he's also hiding the ball when he has this discussion. Because he starts in the 1980s. And if you're asking yourself why the 1980s, probably because if you go back before that, a lot of the history of Latin American politics involves the United States orchestrating violent coups that placed authoritarian regimes into power. I'm going to send you a little excerpt.
Michael: He says, “The 1982 Falklands Malvinas War precipitated the downfall of the military junta in Argentina and the rise of the democratically elected Alfonsan government. The Argentine transition was quickly followed by others throughout Latin America, with military regimes stepping down in Uruguay and Brazil in 1983 and 1984, respectively. By the end of the decade, the dictatorships of Stroessner in Paraguay and Pinochet in Chile had given way to popularly elected governments.” So, look at that. Everything's coming up democracy.
Peter: [laughs] So, look, I know that you're not a historian, and neither am I, but do you know what literally every single one of those authoritarian regimes has in common? [Michael laughs] They were put into place or materially supported by the United States.
Michael: Nice.
Peter: He specifically mentions the fall of Pinochet in Chile as a win for liberal democracy. But Chile had a long democratic tradition that was purposefully and violently interrupted by the United States, which Fukuyama considers like an OG bastion of liberal democracy. If you wanted to look at the Pinochet regime and say, “Well, this is a good example of how authoritarian governments struggle to hold on to power,” that in and of itself isn't particularly offensive to me. What's offensive is when you basically give almost no examples of your thesis in your [Michael laughs] fucking 450-page book. And when you do, you take an incredibly complex story that involves a huge amount of malfeasance by the United States, and you just compress that down to authoritarian states lose power. That might be a forgivable oversight if you're a college freshman writing baby's first poli sci paper, [unintelligible [00:15:30] but this dude worked in the State Department under Reagan and Bush.
Michael: Yeah. [laughs]
Peter: If you worked at the State Department in the 1980s, you would come to work and there was like a big button on your desk that said, “Genocide.” And if you would just smack that button over and over for 8 hours, punch the clock, and go home.
Michael: He's doing reply-alls on like, "Should we kill this guy?" emails. He knows what's up.
Peter: It takes a certain kind of rotten brain to be a literal State Department employee pointing to Latin America as proof that liberal democracy sort of organically triumphs over any ideological opponents.
Michael: So, I guess it's like you go into a neighborhood and you bulldoze a bunch of homes and you put up tennis courts. And then, like, ten years later, you're like, “Oh, my God, everybody's playing tennis. These people love tennis.”
Peter: [laughs] People love tennis these days.
Michael: I guess tennis is just the best sport.
Peter: Hard not to notice that people love tennis more than homes.
Michael: I remember reading something years ago about mass shootings. They looked at every single mass shooting in the United States and they came up with I think it was, like, five typologies of mass shooters. It was the family annihilator, the give-me-attention something, something. There were these types of shooters. And I think that would be a more accurate way to talk about the ways that during those couple of decades, countries went from authoritarian regimes to, “liberal democracies,” because that is a real shift in the world.
But for him to basically say that there's one thing that happened seems really silly because we're talking about Uganda and Chile and South Korea. I don't think you have to necessarily take it down as granularly as every single country is individual, and you can't pull any themes out of it. But also saying that there's one theme also seems equally disingenuous.
Peter: Yeah, it's not entirely that he is necessarily wrong about the ways in which authoritarian governments struggle to hold on to power. I do believe that authoritarian governments struggled to hold onto power in various little ways, and that can manifest in the collapse of those governments. It can manifest in the tightening of the yoke. There's all sorts of shit that can happen. And this is sort of something you saw all over the world at the time. The United States was not pro liberal democracy. It was anti-communist, antisocialist. And so, to the extent that democratic countries were producing left-wing governments, the United States was stepping in and trying to interfere. That's something that just does not get addressed in the End of History and it drives me fucking insane.
Michael: We need a segment on the show every time we cover an international affairs book just called It's Kissinger, [Peter laughs] actually.
Peter: Yeah, his head spinning into frame. Oh, God, I really just got so angry.
[laughter]
Michael: Fuck this guy.
Peter: I have adrenaline. Okay, I really lost my ability to articulate stuff, and I was just like, "Fuck."
Michael: We need to do one of those self-help books after this. One of those mindfulness books that'll help you calm down using science.
Peter: I would like to sort of shift my vibes from angry, snarky lawyer to Gwyneth Paltrow.
Michael: Yeah. Get a smoothie, Peter.
Peter: So, fascism and communism, those are the biggies, the other two. Obviously, a major thesis of his is that both of them are more or less at this point, done for good. Not that they would never appear again, but that they are not in serious competition for global ideological domination. Fukuyama really seems to think that the military defeat of fascist states in World War II is enough to signal that fascism is dead.
Michael: Oh, interesting.
Peter: He says, “Fascism was destroyed as a living ideology by World War II. This was a defeat, of course, on a very material level, but it amounted to a defeat of the idea as well. What destroyed fascism as an idea was not a universal moral revulsion against it, since plenty of people were willing to endorse the idea as long as it seemed the wave of the future, but it's lack of success.” He points out that no significant fascist nations arose after World War II.
Michael: Right. Nobody looked at fascism and was like, “Let's do that.”
Peter: Right. Look, I think that's a little too clean cut of an argument. You can say that there are degrees to which the regimes of Pinochet, for example, to use that example again, or like Peron were fascist. They certainly had significant elements of fascism. But more importantly, the fact that many of the governments popping up across the world in the Cold War era were either communist or hard right capitalist is a direct result of the fact that, again, they were being propped up by the Soviet Union and the US. He describes all of these Cold War power struggles, again, as if they were just taking place on the battlefield of ideas and not the result of these powerful interests trying to very purposefully shape the world.
Michael: It's also hopelessly naive about the nature of fascism.
Peter: Yes.
Michael: Fascism isn't the kind of "idea" that gets defeated in the marketplace of ideas, like, "My arguments were so good that no one did fascism anymore." Fascism draws upon deeply human impulses to blame societal others for your problems and to allow a strong man to manipulate your emotions. If he's writing this in 1992, this is as the rise of Slobodan Milošević is happening. It's frustrating [laughs] that Fukuyama is looking at this and he's like, “Oh, we defeated fascism. We don't need to worry about fascism coming back." Oh, it doesn't work. Well, it works in the short term. It works really well in the short term, and it works really well if you're a fascist leader.
Peter: It's not really an idea in the same way that liberal democracy is. Fascism is predicated on this ingroup declaring themselves the inheritors of the nation's power. How do you convince someone out of that? You're not like, "Well, what if other people had power and you had less?" [Michael laughs] I think you're misunderstanding what they're trying to do. They're trying to take the power because they don't fucking care.
Michael: There's something kind of bleak about the fact that there's this huge tranche of, I think, intellectual elites, the foreign policy establishment, whatever you want to call it, who seem to still think that politics is a battle of ideas.
Peter: I do wonder if End of History was just like his justification for the way we got here, because anyone in his position, a RAND Corporation, State Department employee, knows that the ascendance of these ostensibly liberal countries in the Cold War era was a brutal undertaking. And if you had a hand in that brutality, it might be comforting to tell yourself a little story about how what actually happened was that the best, most appealing ideas triumphed over their competitors. That's my pet theory about what brought Francis Fukuyama to this point where he writes this book. He had to write it because he could not face God. That's why, 30 years later, I had to read it for a podcast.
[laughter]
Peter: I almost didn't want to talk about his analysis of economics because he's out of his depth in large portions of this book, but maybe none more than his economic stuff. He talks as if there's no question that capitalism reflects economic liberation. Obviously, that's just like hand waving and assuming away every critique of capitalism that has ever been, and it just completely adopts this right-wing framework where free markets mean free people. There's a line worth pointing out from the original essay. He says, “Marx asserted that liberal society contained a fundamental contradiction that could not be resolved within its context, that between capital and labor. This contradiction has constituted the chief accusation against liberalism ever since. But surely, the class issue has actually been successfully resolved in the west.”
Michael: What? That's the whole quote?
Peter: I wish I could tell you that there's another couple of lines that really explains what he said trying to say here, but there's really not. He gives a little more explanation that he says, “The root causes of economic equality do not have to do with the underlying legal and social structure of our society, which remains fundamentally egalitarian.”
Michael: Whatever.
Peter: What he's saying is that, yeah, there are problems, but they're not fundamental. They're not inherent to our system. Yeah, so anyway, that's a little snippet you can keep in your pocket the next time. See an unhoused person who needs money for food, you can just say, “Hey, don't worry, bro. The class issue has been successfully resolved in the West.”
Michael: But then, what's so interesting about that though is that the extent to which the class issue has been resolved is almost entirely a function of socialist structures that we have placed for the redistribution of wealth.
Peter: [laughs] Right.
Michael: I guess you could call it a triumph of capitalism if you want to, but it's a triumph of capitalism plus redistribution and high taxes on wealthy people. It's not like, "Oh, capitalism just happened to solve this thing." There's no scenario under which capitalism itself would provide money for unemployment, for example, or for old age.
Peter: I think that what he's actually saying is that, "Society has agreed that Western capitalist, liberal democracy is the winner. And yes, inequality and poverty persist. But those people who have come out on the bottom of our system, they're just the natural and organic losers and [Michael laughs] I don't give a shit." They don't factor into this global consensus that he's describing. They're just losers. He's basically making this very common conservative argument that the fact that someone is impoverished or suffering is not something that you actually have to care about unless the conditions were unfair to begin with and they refuse to acknowledge that they were of course. That's the argument being made. He just sort of dresses it up by using terminology like fundamentally egalitarian.
Michael: It's funny that in all of the discussion of this book and the fact that it still appears in so many undergraduate syllabi and stuff, I don't think that it's come across how fundamentally conservative it is.
Peter: He's a conservative, he's a conservative. And he was responsible in part for the ascendance of the neoconservatives in the 90s and their takeover of the Bush administration. The neoconservative mindset that led to the Iraq War was something that Fukuyama contributed to immensely. The idea that democracy is the best system and therefore we should be spreading it across the globe by force if necessary, that's something that was extrapolated from Fukuyama and his peers to the point where he ends up having to distance himself from them.
Michael: Oh, yeah.
Peter: He does a lot of that where a few years later, he has to write an essay being like, “I don't totally agree with what those guys are saying.”
Michael: "All my friends keep becoming incompetent fascists. It's strange. I look around on my Facebook page, everyone's a fascist now. Odd."
Peter: "Some people took my ideas and ran a little too fast with them."
[laughter]
Michael: It's hard to explain the experience of reading this book. I imagine that it's basically the same thing as getting a very mild concussion or [Michael laughs] when you stand up too quickly after sitting down for a long period of time. It really is a slog. The opening chapters are about Latin America and the fall of the Soviet Union. You feel like maybe he's going to be talking about history in a meaningful way. But no, those are the only chapters that are that. It gets rough real quick and then it never stops. [Michael laughs]
Most of the book is completely forgettable because it is very dense philosophy stuff. And he does one of those things that philosophers do where they make up a philosophy word, a word that's meant to synthesize a bunch of complicated things and then starts throwing that word around recklessly.
Michael: Doing the old Gladwell.
Peter: [laughs] By the end of the book, you're reading sentences that, like, don't make sense because they're both hyperabstract and also using words that you just learned that have really vague, broad meanings.
Michael: Nice.
Peter: To give the biggest example in the book, Fukuyama uses the word "thymos" or "thymus," which originates with Plato, to refer to the human desire to be recognized. This goes along with his theory of why democracy succeeds, to fill that fundamental desire for recognition. Plato defines thymus as almost like an instinct that we have something that is in conflict with our reason. Fukuyama defines it differently. He says it's, “The seat of our judgment of worth.” There's a chapter called, The Rise and Fall of Thymos. There's another called The Thymotic Origins of Work. Now, look, I don't want to sound like anti-intellectual, but this is just fucking gibberish. It's just gibberish.
Michael: Well, he's just redefined the word recognition as thymos, right?
Peter: Right.
Michael: Is it doing anything more?
Peter: I don't think so. I think that what he's trying to say is that we all have this. It's not just a need for recognition. It's something that's fundamental to our souls.
Michael: Right.
Peter: So he's pulling this super abstract term "thymos" from Plato, redefining it to suit his needs in a way that-- by the way, I checked in with various experts, and they're all like, "We don't know why he's doing this." [Michael laughs] And then, he uses the term in some form 243 times throughout the book.
Michael: Wait, really?
Peter: Yes.
Michael: [laughs] What?
Peter: That's more, by the way, than they say the word "fuck" in The Departed. [Michael laughs] Just to give you a sense of where we are. I'm going to send you an excerpt because I think it's important to hear some of this out loud to understand what it feels like to read this book.
Michael: He pulls a book out of a box, and it says, “Papa, this will help.” [Peter laughs] Okay, he says, “The desire for recognition arising out of thymos is a deeply paradoxical phenomenon because the latter is the psychological seat of justice and selflessness, while at the same time being closely related to selfishness.” [exhales] Okay, “The thymotic self demands recognition for its own sense of the worthiness of things, both itself and of other people.” Oh, I'm back on Maintenance Phase. This is some health grift, like he's about to sell me supplements.
Peter: This, for 450 pages, [Michael laughs] is what reading this book is like, Michael. I mean, I want to give the guy some credit, and I'm going to imagine that if I thought about this for a bit, it would be coherent, but this is the worst fucking type of writing.
Michael: “Thymos is the psychological seat of justice and selflessness, while at the same time being closely related to selfishness.” I guess this is what you mean by you can't really debunk this stuff. No, it's actually closer to selfishness. [Peter laughs] What can you even say here. There's nothing he's saying-- Goddamn it. See, now you've done to me what has happened to you, because now I'm staring at this fucking paragraph. Closer to the psychological seat of justice?
Peter: Oh, yeah.
Michael: It's just--
Peter: Oh, my God. I'm sorry. I'm so happy that you're experiencing this now because this is what happened to me.
Michael: The thymotic self.
Peter: I understand the need every now and then to delve into abstraction. It can be hard to understand things like love without abstraction. But when you just do this page after page after page, you can't tell me that the reader is learning something. You just can't, you just can't. Ah, anyway, I just wanted you to suffer with me. I didn't really have more to say about this.
Michael: Yeah. Thank you for bringing me into this dark tunnel that you've been in for the last couple of weeks.
Peter: That's why, by the way, I have nothing to say about the last half of this book because I was just ripping through the pages, being like, “Again? We're still doing this? Is there anything happening? Am I learning something? What's going on?”
Michael: As I recall, that's where he makes the argument, that liberal democracies are the best or whatever.
Peter: Yeah, that's right. I mean, although he's sort of constantly making it and never making it. [laughs] He's always touching on the ways in which he believes that liberal democracies are superior, but he always falls back on that same basic argument that it is appealing to these base human desires, the desire for recognition. And that is why liberalism and democracy succeed, because they feed those desires and people need those things. All of his arguments circle back to that point. I don't want to get into the human nature stuff, but I don't hate the argument that's a big part of the appeal of democracy. And I'm a proponent of democracy. I don't want to sit here shitting on democracy.
Michael: On record.
Peter: I'll go on the books.
Michael: But I think what his problem is, is that he's seeing this recognition as something that can only lead to good outcomes. If you look at Milošević, the Balkan example, a lot of what he was doing was recognizing people's Serbian identities. "Hey, you've been tamped down, and there's these minorities that are trying to take all of this from you." That's a form of recognition too.
Peter: Completely agree and that's why the book is so just so arrogant. This whole idea to evolve as a species for millions of years. Try one form of political organization for like 200, only a few decades of which are even a good faith effort. Then, declare that you have solved the problem of ordering society as if all of history is a Disney movie and we're now just in this happily ever after phase.
Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Peter: This is an analogy that will probably not resonate with most of our fans. But when a sports team wins a championship--
Michael: I'm already confused.
Peter: I knew this might not hit with you, Mike.
[laughter]
Michael: Walk me through it.
Peter: There's something that happens to the fan base where they become convinced that you will win every championship for the next several years, and they forget that it's hard to do, and there's a lot of variables. That's what it feels like. It feels like this book is the day after you win a championship, being like, “We're going to win next year too.”
Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Peter: It's the same vibe and even worse because he's publishing it. To look at a million different interconnected events across the globe and think that you could articulate a comprehensive theory of what's happening, publishing this book titled, like, Society, an Explanation.
[laughter]
Peter: Come on, man. Come on.
Michael: I don't know if he's ever reckoned with this, but I feel like he's right in that the world has become more liberal democratic, but he hasn't reckoned with how much he helped bring about the world that we have now, where a lot of countries have quietly backslid into authoritarianism because they still look like liberal democracies on the surface.
Peter: Right. There's this real complacence that this thesis breeds. History is marching toward a single future, and therefore, you don't really need to worry about these nascent threats so much. Things will work themselves out. You think about just how quickly the tide has turned on LGBT rights, where even with popular acceptance being super high, it really feels like we're losing.
How did that happen? I think if I could sum it up quickly, it's because a lot of liberals forgot that they were in a fight. Fukuyama does this very jarringly when he talks about Apartheid, which he says failed because of a loss of legitimacy among white South Africans. He does not mention the years of struggle and protest by black South Africans, doesn't mention Nelson Mandela who got out of prison between Fukuyama publishing the essay and publishing the book. There's a detachment that makes these people, I guess I would say amoral in a way.
He never has like put himself out there in any meaningful way, and whenever someone took his ideas and ran with it, it was always awful. He has, at no point in his career, fought for anything other than the basic idea that liberalism and democracy are good. I've digested an enormous amount of his work, and I still barely know what he believes in any meaningful sense.
Michael: It also was very smart of him to write an unreadable book because nobody's going to go back and find specific passages that debunk him. This is the Paul Ehrlich move, where like even when you make specific predictions about the future, "There will be large scale famines," and then those famines don't happen. All anybody remembers is like, "This guy seems like a smart dude. He really has the finger on the pulse." And you never fall out of polite discourse because nobody goes back and actually reads your specific words. And in Fukuyama's case, no one understands what the fuck he was trying to say.
Peter: Right. You can even see how the discourse plays out where someone's like, “Hey, you had a book that said liberal democracy was going to be the basic form of human government forever, more or less.” And then, he gets to be like, “Aha, now you didn't understand. What I said was that the thymotic response to liberal democracy is such that--” and then you're just like, "What the fuck." He gets to take you into a place where you're totally uncomfortable because he's literally created his own vocabulary.
Michael: Peter, are you saying that thymos isn't the psychological seat of justice and selfishness while at the same time being closely related to selflessness?
Peter: What I'm saying is that the thymotic self demands recognition for its own sense of the worthiness of things.
Michael: [laughs] We both have this fucking text in the window in front of us, just staring at it, my head tilted like a golden retriever the whole episode like, what the fuck is he talking about.
Peter: It's so unfair that we're not allowed to call someone like this stupid. It's less offensive to me to just be bad at math--
Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Peter: --than it is to write something like this.
Michael: I feel like Fukuyama is less of an interesting beast than the kind of person he is and the times that birthed him. This is like the formation of the ideas industry and this kind of fetishization of ideas. Ideas are going to save us. And I think one of the ways you remain popular in places like Davos, you can't really get down in the muck of actually wanting anything and you don't want to actually do any fighting for these ideas because all of a sudden, people are going to pull back and be like, “Oh, it seems like you're doing politics whereas this is ideas.” But then, what's the point of an ideas industry if it doesn't actually become policy somewhere. These people want the seriousness and the credibility of people who are meaningfully linked to politics, but they don't want to actually do the boring stuff of supporting one political outcome or another.
Peter: Right. He's Dr. Manhattan on Mars, like, "I'm tired of being caught in the tangle of these people's lives."
Michael: That's actually really a good metaphor. Yes. He's just like watching everything like the fucking magi.
Peter: And in general, it's hard not to look at the post 2016 era of international politics and not think, "It seems like maybe the whole communism, fascism, capitalism thing hasn't been quite hashed out." The thesis took its initial hit on 9/11, which really opened up this new narrative of civilizational struggle and the Great Recession hits, and many neoliberal economies and cultures have shown signs of fracture that never really repaired after that.
If I could summarize quickly what I think he missed here, it's like, will liberal democracy provide what it promised to provide? He thought that if it didn't, we would simply tinker with it until it did. You steadily improve upon the system, but what actually happens is that after many decades of unsuccessful tinkering, inequality worsening, cost of living not being matched by wage growth, all of these things, many people come to like the fairly reasonable conclusion that maybe the problem is systemic. He thought that these were just minor tensions that would be resolved, but maybe they are base issues that weaken the legitimacy of the liberal order over time.
What's weird is there is an incredibly poignant part of his essay that I think is spot on. He says, “The end of history will be a very sad time. 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.”
Michael: Oh, God, that's bleak.
Peter: It is, and a very prescient description of the neoliberal malaise of like the 90s and 2000s. And if he had framed this essay as a prediction of what the next couple of decades would look like rather than the next couple of centuries, I think you could argue that he was on point or that he was getting at something very real.
People are coming and saying, “My life sucks,” and Fukuyama is just tapping the sign, like, "Well, we are a fundamentally egalitarian country, [Michael laughs] so the problem has been solved." There's only so long you can tap that sign before people are like, fuck that sign. Shit sucks for me. I've listened to a bunch of interviews with Fukuyama and read some pieces by him where it feels like he should be answering the question, “Was your thesis wrong?”
Michael: Right.
Peter: And I've never heard him say no.
Michael: Okay.
Peter: But I've heard him make a ton of concessions.
Michael: Oh, issuing correction on a previous post of mine regarding thymos.
Peter: So, 2022 was a big year for Fukuyama because Russia got itself into a little bit of trouble.
Michael: Oh, yeah.
Peter: In October, he publishes a piece for The Atlantic titled More Proof That This Really Is The End of History.
Michael: Yes. Go, girl. Give us nothing.
Peter: Did you read this?
Michael: I did read this. I was going to do my little shtick, live tweet reading it and highlight passages and being like, "I don't know that I agree with this stuff," but I couldn't fucking highlight anything because he's not saying anything in it.
Peter: It's trying to grab water.
Michael: But then, I don't even understand how Russia invading Ukraine proves his point. I feel like it unproves his point because this is like the rise of authoritarianism.
Peter: No, no, no. The problem for Russia, of course, is that they're not doing well.
Michael: Okay.
Peter: I'm sending you an excerpt from the new essay where he lays out again his thesis.
Michael: Okay, “No authoritarian government presents a society that is in the long term, more attractive than liberal democracy and could therefore be considered the goal or endpoint of historical progress. The millions of people voting with their feet, leaving poor, corrupt or violent countries for life, not in Russia, China, or Iran, but in the liberal democratic West, amply demonstrate this.” [Peter laughs] What?
Peter: So, this is Fukuyama trying to reset the discussion a little bit.
Michael: Right. He's doing his Fukuyama thing where he's saying a bunch of true facts, but he's using them to reach a conclusion that is not justified by them at all. He's basically saying that people don't like living under dictatorships, which sort of depends on the dictatorship. Some ingroups are actually quite happy to live in authoritarian states.
And then, he's like, “Oh, well, everybody's leaving, so you can tell they don't like living under dictatorships.” But people leave countries for a really wide range of reasons. One of the highest outmigration rates in the world is Lithuania because it's in the EU and people can just really easily move to other countries and make more money. It's not a dictatorship. And he has to know this. World immigration trends are not driven by one factor.
Peter: Yeah, he's like, "People are leaving Iran," and it's like, "Well, we have used sanctions to completely cut them off from the rest of the world." I mean, that's true in some regards, but isn't really a good example.
Michael: Right.
Peter: I don't know, I'm half Iranian and so this sort of makes me lose my mind a little [Michael laughs] more than it usually would.
Michael: You have the control F ready as soon as you open these things.
[laughter]
Peter: It's just sort of like, come on, you can't discuss the economic situation in Iran as the manifestation of ideology. He has to write this piece because it's been 30 years since he published the book and he sort of seems to be wrong. Liberal democracy appears to be on the decline globally, not permanently ascendant, and he's subtly changing the discussion by saying, "No authoritarian government presents a society that is in the long term more attractive than liberal democracy," constantly pushing it further into the future. His thesis did not predict what is happening globally right now. If he were honest, he would be like, “I missed something here. I was a little too conclusive or whatever.” Instead, he's like, "One day, it'll be liberal democracy forever."
Michael: God. It's the political philosophy equivalent of self-driving cars where they're just always five years away for like a good Sonic The Hedgehog 3D game. Maybe the next one.
Peter: He makes this case in the early 90s that breeds a complacency that I think you can credibly argue leads to liberal backslide just a couple of decades later. And then, he writes about liberal backslide, like, “Oh, this is bad.” He recently did an interview with a Vox podcast, and he was asked about Chinese communism, sort of, “Is that a model that is a threat to liberal democracy?” He said, “Yes, Chinese Communism could prevail.” He said, “I don't pretend to have any insight into the future.” And I almost jumped off my fucking roof. Yes, you do, motherfucker. You did pretend.
Michael: No, I wouldn't be so presumptuous.
Peter: I read your stupid 450-page book about predicting the future, and then you're going to tell me that you don't pretend to have any insight?
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: You bastard.
[laughter]
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