Boredom at the End of History
This “democratic recession” is characterized not only by the rise of authoritarian great powers like Russia and China, but also by backsliding in many would-be new democracies like Tunisia, Myanmar, El Salvador and Georgia. Most ominous has been the rise of populist nationalist movements in older democracies like the United States, India, and a number of European countries, as well as the apparent loss of confidence in the superiority of democracy as a form of government.
In the United States, this loss of faith is apparent at both ends of the political spectrum. On the progressive left, Gen-Z activists disdain liberalism as an outmoded doctrine of their parents' or even grandparents' generation, a doctrine that has failed grievously to achieve social justice or rein in corporations. Many of them today will refuse to vote for “Genocide Joe” Biden this coming November. On the right, there is a pining for authoritarian power, coming ever more overtly from the Republican Party’s future candidate for president who tried once to overturn an election.
This global democratic backsliding has unsurprisingly led to personal consequences for me as the author of my 1989 article “The End of History?” and the book version The End of History and the Last Man which appeared in 1992. In the article, I had noted a global trend towards liberal democracy that had been gathering steam, a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall.·
The absence of a vision for a systemically better future is apparent on both the extreme Right and Left today. To the extent that the extreme Right has a vision for a better future society, it involves turning the clock back to a time in the past when America was supposedly great: perhaps the 1950s, or the late 1800s, or perhaps all the way back to the period before the Enlightenment when societies could agree on a single religion. But few people want to storm the barricades for the privilege of living, say, in the year 1952.
Something similar is happening on the Left. There are no progressive visions for alternative societies that have not been tried already. The extreme version of egalitarian justice that animated many leftists in the 20th century, Marxism-Leninism, has been exposed as a moral atrocity after the collapse of Communism. The more moderate vision of social democracy has also been tried; indeed, many of its policies have already been happily incorporated into present-day social democratic welfare states. Some extreme environmentalists look to a future of “de-growth” to deal with the climate crisis, but honestly, who is going to risk their lives to get to a world where everyone gets poorer year after year? This does not seem more attractive than the conservative dream of returning to the year 1952 (when indeed we emitted much less carbon than we do today).
The absence of plausible visions for a better future society means that politicians have to whip people into a panic over how bad the present is. What is striking about the protests and critiques of the liberal status quo in today’s America is how disproportionate they are to the lived reality of the protesters. This is nowhere more true than on the MAGA Right. According to Donald Trump and many of his acolytes, the very existence of the United States is at stake in the coming election; if Biden is re-elected, “you won’t have a country any more.” According to Tim Alberta’s recent book on the evangelical Right, many Christian nationalists believe that Christianity itself faces an existential threat and that liberals seek to close down their churches. And many conservatives agree with the notion that we are living under a woke tyranny, in which it is impossible to dissent on a host of issues related to race, gender, sexual orientation, environment, and the like. They say this, despite the fact that they themselves are expressing strong criticism of these very trends.
Francis Fukuyama