Anyone who’s read Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History and the Last Man” knows it’s far more prophetic than its pop culture representation. Published in 1992, in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, his argument was not that liberal democracy would be immediately victorious everywhere and permanently, but that there was no alternative system that could work as well.
He anticipated backsliding against democracy and gave a good description of what was likely to cause it, correctly anticipating it would be driven by right-wingers. That’s why the full book title includes a reference to Nietzsche’s “last man” – an archetype of liberal passivity, seeking mere materialistic comfort, that the German philosopher saw as a slave mentality.
Fukuyama understood that the great challenge for liberal democracies was that they require people to accept universal recognition of all citizens and, in doing so, reject a belief in their superiority to others. For Nietzsche, by contrast, it was that very desire for superiority and dominance that drove human progress.
This need for superiority is core to the philosophy of the modern radical right, for whom Nietzsche is a regular reference point (at least for those who like to consider themselves intellectuals and spend a lot of time online). Techbro and Musk ally, Marc Andreessen, in his “tech-optimist manifesto”, that I’ve written about before, is explicit about this: “Our enemy is Friedrich Nietzsche’s Last Man”.
Their obsessive war against DEI is all about pushing back against liberals’ insistence on universal recognition, for e.g. minorities and women, because they believe it’s a hindrance to economic progress.
Fukuyama also spotted a related, but even more profound, potential flaw in his own argument. He was confident that no country could thrive for long without capitalism, but less so that it needed democracy – so perhaps there was a plausible alternative to liberalism. There were, he noted, countries in East Asia, particularly Singapore and China, that were running apparently successful capitalist economies but without the messiness of democracy:
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