American Abroad Terminator 2: Gloom on the Right

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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.