American Abroad Terminator 2: Gloom on the Right

By Strobe Talbott

In 1989 Francis Fukuyama wrote a recondite essay on political philosophy for a small neoconservative quarterly, the National Interest. It caused a sensation, largely because of its title: "The End of History?"

Well, like that other terminator, Fukuyama is back, this time with a book. The End of History and the Last Man, to be published in the U.S. this week and in 12 languages around the world next month, has earned advance raves from various worthies of the right, including George Gilder, Charles Krauthammer, Irving Kristol and George Will. The book is certain to be widely discussed, as the original article was, although probably not so widely read. Its 418 pages are dense with difficult words and concepts, many of them borrowed from Plato, Hegel and Nietzsche. (For a definition of megalothymia, see page 182; for a metaphysical discourse on what The Bonfire of the Vanities tells us about the zeitgeist, see page 329.)

Yet the thesis is simple enough. After millenniums of evolution, revolution and war, the forces of freedom are finally triumphing over those of dictatorship. The bad news is that the combination of market economics and elected government, now breaking out all over, is the best we can do; since we have arrived, we have nowhere else to go. We may end up "secure and self- absorbed," suffering from "the boredom of peace and prosperity," devoid of the "striving spirit" that gives humanity its sense of direction. Homo politicus is on the brink of becoming "the last man" -- the ultimate couch potato, "less than a full human being, an object of contempt."

Fukuyama's dark musings about the future are rooted in his view of the past, especially the past 40 years. Like many others, he exaggerated the threat of communism. Now he is exaggerating the significance of its disappearance, and he is worried that without a clear-cut, epic struggle between good and evil, we will go soft and flabby.

Throughout the cold war the American right defined itself, its opponents, the national purpose and the life of the planet in terms of the Great Other, the global menace centered in Moscow. The McCarthyite witch-hunts of the 1950s grew out of a wildly unrealistic fear that the reds could take over the country. In the early '60s, many Western experts were slow to recognize the Sino-Soviet split because it contradicted their belief in a monolithic enemy. In the '70s, conservatives argued that leftist tyrannies were ascendant in the world and impervious to the kind of internal reform and people power that has now toppled the Soviet Union.

Part of the fallacy then, which Fukuyama perpetuates, was an obsessive focus on ideology. Of course ideas can be wonderful, or terrible, and potent; you don't have to be a Hegelian to know that. But Fukuyama invests abstractions -- comprehensive categories and grand postulations -- with more weight than messy reality will support. For instance, in a chart intended to show how the number of "liberal democracies" on earth has grown, he includes Singapore, where there are laws against chewing gum and failing to flush public toilets; Sri Lanka, where murderous ethnic and religious violence continues nonstop; and Colombia, where narcoterrorists butcher judges and parliamentarians in broad daylight.

At the same time, he gives short shrift to the spread of Islamic fundamentalism and the resurgence of nationalism, seemingly because neither phenomenon fits his paradoxical thesis that mankind is entering a state of grace and risking terminal boredom. To cope with the awkward fact that the red star still flies over the head of 1.2 billion Chinese, he argues that the Beijing regime no longer qualifies as totalitarian; it "has become just another Asian authoritarian state." This distinction would not impress the victims of Tiananmen.

Fukuyama's point is that even in China, where communism remains the official line, it has lost its "dynamism and appeal" as an idea marching through "History." He is so much under the influence of 19th century German philosophers that he sometimes capitalizes Important Nouns. That quirk is telling: Fukuyama takes the intellectual underpinnings and pretensions of political movements more seriously than almost any politician does. The perfect example is his treatment of communism. That doctrine long ago proved to be a recipe for the accumulation and consolidation of raw power by a conspiratorial elite, not a monument to the theories of Marx -- or, for that matter, of Hegel, whom Marx admired almost as much as Fukuyama does. In fact, the more successful avowed communists were in practice, the more cynical they were about the theory.

As many of its own practitioners came to recognize, communism was a bum idea. In the U.S.S.R., it barely survived the threescore years and 10 that the Bible prescribes as the mortal life-span. Its passing should free our "striving spirit" to concentrate on all sorts of other challenges, such as the growing conflict between the haves and the have-nots and the need to refine liberal democracy, not just in places like Sri Lanka but in the developed world as well. So Fukuyama can cheer up. The continuation of history will be plenty interesting.