Opinion
Francis Fukuyama didn’t get annoyed with me for accusing him of being almost unAmerican. Probably the world’s most famous political scientist, he was born in the USA and lives there still. I wasn’t charging him with treacherous loyalties or politics but of an almost unAmerican modesty.
He is, notoriously, the author of The End of History and the Last Man, published 34 years ago and still selling in many languages around the world. The first half of the book’s title has been used by the leaders of the great powers and high school debaters and innumerable others in between. Not to embrace it but, almost universally, to reject it. “It might be the most maligned, unfairly dismissed and misunderstood book of the post-war era,” wrote Paul Sagar of King’s College, London.
Critics denounced the idea that liberal democracy’s triumph over communism could have delivered the ultimate model for society – “the final form of human government”. The concept of the “end of history” was rejected by dictators and democrats alike. Including Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden. Margaret Thatcher is supposed to have heard the book’s title and expostulated: “The end of history? The beginning of nonsense.”
Fukuyama has borne all this stoically, patiently. “I have been asked several times a week over the past three decades whether I wished to recant my argument,” he writes in his new book. “None of the individuals asking have read more than the title of my essay or book. In particular, none bothered to read the last five chapters of my book, which dealt with the problem of the Last Man.”
He’s never attacked his critics personally or rushed to defend himself. Famous American public figures are not known for their restraint. But that’s only the beginning of his modesty. He might well have titled his new book I Was Right. Because he has never argued that events, history-making events, would cease. He has never claimed that economic and political liberalism would go unchallenged. Only that events wouldn’t produce a better alternative. For the simple reason that the main locomotive of history is the human struggle for recognition.
Where Marx said it’s all about material gain, Fukuyama says that it’s truly about our craving for recognition of our fundamental dignity. “For most of human history, this led to an unequal contest between masters and slaves, until the advent of the French Revolution, which established the principle of equal recognition as the only rational solution to the human problem,” says Fukuyama.
It’s not a new idea. The ancient Greeks called this innate desire for recognition “thymos”. The phrase “the end of history” itself is taken from the work of a Russian-born philosopher, Alexandre Kojeve, who died in 1968. Funnily enough, Margaret Thatcher mocked Fukuyama’s title but actually shared his conclusion that political and economic liberalism are the best form of human organisation. Biden, too, yet he feared China’s challenge to its survival.
And who is offering a better vision for the organising of society? Right-wing populists are good at demolition but unable to build anything better. “These right-wing populist parties aren’t good at governing and they don’t deliver what they promise,” Fukuyama tells me. “Look at Brexit. They didn’t change the level of immigration one bit.” Trump, of course, is the prime exhibit. Promising no new wars and lower prices, he’s delivered the exact opposite.
And the left has no coherent vision, either. Young Americans are reviving talk of communism: “The word is being thrown around by kids who don’t know what it means.” Progressives in the US, notably the Democratic Socialists of America, have a nonsensical grab-bag of what Fukuyama calls “small bore” ideas like free bus rides and taxing billionaires together with unrealistically radical proposals to “defund the police” and abolish the Senate.
Doesn’t China present an alternative model to liberal democracy? “There are still big questions about both the political and economic sustainability of the China model. If they are still doing well relative to the US in another generation, then I would concede it may be a real alternative, though one that will be hard to universalise.”
So how to explain today’s wild political thrashings? “The absence of plausible visions for a better future society means that politicians and activists have to whip people into panic over how bad the present it.” A “focus on real reform is boring”. The great struggles of ideology and history had been fought and won, and now people “struggle for the sake of struggle”. “We see this now on both the extreme right and left”.
Fukuyama acknowledges that extreme inequality is a problem that needs redressing. But populist anger, he says, is “driven much more by resentment against a society that does not distribute respect equally”. It demands a redistribution of respect. That doesn’t require a revolution.
Which brings us to the Last Man. His new book is titled In the Realm of the Last Man, a place we’ve been living in for some time now. “The problem,” according to Fukuyama, “is that the peace and prosperity brought about by a liberal order based on equal recognition is not enough for many people. “They do not want to be recognised as the equals of every other person on earth; they want to be recognised as superior in some respect.” Fukuyama nominated Donald Trump as the standout example, even in his original book.
Not content with thymos, Trump demands megadoses of thymos, a condition Fukuyama calls “megalothymia”. He didn’t foresee Trump as president but, as Paul Sagar attests, “he got closer than most” in recognising the personality that would thrive In the Realm of the Last Man. Fukuyama’s modesty is such that, in his new book, he doesn’t remind us of this prescience.
Australia, after a 10-year lag, seems to be approaching American levels of populist anger. Fukuyama, who has travelled a number of times to Australia, offers this as his only advice to us. The mainstream parties, he says, “ought to think about alliances” with One Nation. “That defanged populist parties in Austria, Denmark and the Netherlands. It’s distasteful but it reduces their impact.” Perhaps that’s why Pauline Hanson rejects the idea of any coalition with the Liberals.
Fukuyama’s suggestion of enfolding the far right is the exact opposite of the German “firewall” policy, under which mainstream parties refuse any coalition with the far-right Alternative for Deutschland.
Fukuyama notes the attack on Australia’s Helen Haines last week, a symptom of “social” media and political anger. He says he fears more violence could follow the US midterm elections next week: “There’s a lot of anger and hidden violence in the way we deal with each other. If the Republicans lose control of Congress, Trump won’t move to the centre and be more reasonable. He will accelerate his threats and the crazy things he wants to do to his enemies. “I am a little worried about this period after the midterms. It’s surprising that there haven’t been more acts of violence and attempted assassinations.”
A final measure of his modesty is his generosity in attributing his success to others, including an Australian intellectual, the late Owen Harries: “Owen played an important part in my life.” As the editor of a Washington journal, Harries spotted Fukuyama’s talent and commissioned him to write the essay that formed the basis for The End of History and the Last Man.
Accused of modesty, Fukuyama just chuckles: “Imagine if I were Donald Trump.” The world is oversupplied with Trumps. Even America’s voters seem to be reaching the same conclusion.
Peter Hartcher is political editor and international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
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