Political Observer comments.
Nov 12, 2024
Editor : The Reader must recall the auspicios debut of Francis Fukuyama?
What Is Fukuyama Saying? And to Whom Is He Saying It?
By James Atlas
Oct. 22, 1989
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In Fukuyama’s interpretation, borrowed (and heavily adapted) from the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, history is a protracted struggle to realize the idea of freedom latent in human consciousness. In the 20th century, the forces of totalitarianism have been decisively conquered by the United States and its allies, which represent the final embodiment of this idea – “that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy.” In other words, we win.
Within weeks, “The End of History?” had become the hottest topic around, this year’s answer to Paul Kennedy’s phenomenal best seller, “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.” George F. Will was among the first to weigh in, with a Newsweek column in August; two weeks later, Fukuyama’s photograph appeared in Time. The French quarterly Commentaire announced that it was devoting a special issue to “The End of History?” The BBC sent a television crew. Translations of the piece were scheduled to appear in Dutch, Japanese, Italian and Icelandic. Ten Downing Street requested a copy. In Washington, a newsdealer on Connecticut Avenue reported, the summer issue of The National Interest was “outselling everything, even the pornography.”
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Editor: Or the evolution of Fukuyamism!
The Decay of American Political Institutions
Published on: December 8, 2013
Francis Fukuyama
We have a problem, but we can’t see it clearly because our focus too often discounts history.
Editor: Or its Evolutionay twin:
America in Decay
The Sources of Political Dysfunction
By Francis Fukuyama
Published on August 18, 2014
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/america-decay
Editor: It takes 1369 words before Fukuyama mentions the name of fellow Neo-Conservative, Samuel Huntington of ‘The Clash Of Cilizations’, and the xenophobic ‘Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity!
WHY INSTITUTIONS DECAY
In his classic work Political Order in Changing Societies, the political scientist Samuel Huntington used the term “political decay” to explain political instability in many newly independent countries after World War II. Huntington argued that socioeconomic modernization caused problems for traditional political orders, leading to the mobilization of new social groups whose participation could not be accommodated by existing political institutions. Political decay was caused by the inability of institutions to adapt to changing circumstances. Decay was thus in many ways a condition of political development: the old had to break down in order to make way for the new. But the transitions could be extremely chaotic and violent, and there was no guarantee that the old political institutions would continuously and peacefully adapt to new conditions.
This model is a good starting point for a broader understanding of political decay more generally. Institutions are “stable, valued, recurring patterns of behavior,” as Huntington put it, the most important function of which is to facilitate collective action. Without some set of clear and relatively stable rules, human beings would have to renegotiate their interactions at every turn. Such rules are often culturally determined and vary across different societies and eras, but the capacity to create and adhere to them is genetically hard-wired into the human brain. A natural tendency to conformism helps give institutions inertia and is what has allowed human societies to achieve levels of social cooperation unmatched by any other animal species.
The very stability of institutions, however, is also the source of political decay. Institutions are created to meet the demands of specific circumstances, but then circumstances change and institutions fail to adapt. One reason is cognitive: people develop mental models of how the world works and tend to stick to them, even in the face of contradictory evidence. Another reason is group interest: institutions create favored classes of insiders who develop a stake in the status quo and resist pressures to reform.
In theory, democracy, and particularly the Madisonian version of democracy that was enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, should mitigate the problem of such insider capture by preventing the emergence of a dominant faction or elite that can use its political power to tyrannize over the country. It does so by spreading power among a series of competing branches of government and allowing for competition among different interests across a large and diverse country.
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Editor: Even the stogey Financial Times opened its journalist space to Fukuyama:
Headline: Francis Fukuyama: what Trump unleashed means for America
Sub-headline : The Republican president-elect is inaugurating a new era in US politics and perhaps for the world as a whole
November 7 2024 ( retrived November, 12, 2024)
https://www.ft.com/content/f4dbc0df-ab0d-431e-9886-44acd4236922
Editor: I will supply some selective quotation from the Fukuyama’s essay:
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But the significance of the election extends way beyond these specific issues, and represents a decisive rejection by American voters of liberalism and the particular way that the understanding of a “free society” has evolved since the 1980s.
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When Biden won the White House four years later, it seemed as if things had snapped back to normal after a disastrous one-term presidency.
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Not only did he win a majority of votes and is projected to take every single swing state, but the Republicans retook the Senate and look like holding on to the House of Representatives.
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Classical liberalism is a doctrine built around respect for the equal dignity of individuals through a rule of law that protects their rights, and through constitutional checks on the state’s ability to interfere with those rights.
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The first was the rise of “neoliberalism”, an economic doctrine that sanctified markets and reduced the ability of governments to protect those hurt by economic change. The world got a lot richer in the aggregate, while the working class lost jobs and opportunity.
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The second distortion was the rise of identity politics or what one might call “woke liberalism”, in which progressive concern for the working class was replaced by targeted protections for a narrower set of marginalised groups: racial minorities, immigrants, sexual minorities and the like. State power was increasingly used not in the service of impartial justice, but rather to promote specific social outcomes for these groups.
Editor : How might the reader interperate ‘woke liberalism’ as a new catch phrase? Though Fukuyama is not Eric Partridge!
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The working class felt that leftwing political parties were no longer defending their interests, and began voting for parties of the right. Thus the Democrats lost touch with their working-class base and became a party dominated by educated urban professionals.
Editor: The New Demosrats: the Clintons, Pelosi, Obama and Biden abandoned FDR’s New Deal, reader look to that, as a major factors for the New Democrat’s well deserved defeat! Fukuyama rambels on and on, his facinaion with ‘decay’ is compulsive, not revelatory!
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