Fukayama's End of History and the Bush Doctrine
I just finished reading Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, and I must admit to being pleasantly surprised. I went into the work with a dislike of the book absorbed from dozens of leftist writers, who often described it as an unapologetic celebration of the victory of unbridled capitalism. I was amused to see it for sale, therefore, at an airport book kiosk (the selection of philosophy books in airports is truly bizarre), and flabbergasted to find that I agreed with Fukuyama’s main points. There has been an empirical trend over the last two centuries, and both Fukuyama and I are quite happy about it, although I disagree with his characterization of the process of democratization as inevitable in a Hegelian sense (as opposed to just highly probable and highly desirable). We both agree that what drives most people to overthrow authoritarian regimes and install democratic regimes is the desire for recognition, or thymos. We both believe that to some extent the appearance of civil liberties is correlated with economic liberties, although we might disagree about the arrow of causality. And we both fundamentally feel that De Tocqueville was right: there is sometimes a tradeoff between equality and liberty.
However, Fukuyama’s work reminds me of a general malady in philosophy: any sufficiently abstract philosophy can be made to support an author’s political and class interests. He sees the particular form of economic development known as the Washington Consensus as a positive thing, even though it is far from pure economic liberty. He sees military adventures to spread democracy at the barrel of a gun as a good thing, presaging the current Bush Doctrine. Most oddly, he sees efforts to reform and strengthen the United Nations as an evil effort: democracy within nation-states is good, but apparently democracy between nation-states is bad!
Still, fundamentally Fukuyama and I agree about what should be the United States’ goal in foreign policy, to help make the world more democratic, even if we disagree about the means to get there. How sad then that (it appears) the Democratic party establishment has abandoned this noble goal and seems to offer only “realism” as an alternative to Bush’s crusades. We are the party of true democracy at home, as we push to make sure every eligible voter can have their vote accurately counted. We are the party of true democracy abroad, as we push Bush to work through the United Nations Security Council to peacefully restrain Iran’s nuclear program. Why then have we ceded this ideological ground? What is the Democratic party, if we are not the champions of democracy?!
