You said he's a "hack," I'm saying it's relative. If Fukuyama is a hack, then that doesn't leave many public intellectuals left.
Anybody really worth listening to is probably not going to be as corporate friendly as Fukuyama so they probably wont get much of an airing on the mainstream media.
There’s lots of good criticisms to be made of the system. But there’s also a serious intellectual case for why systems that facilitate people getting the material things they want is a good thing. To write that off completely is intellectual laziness; a desire to wish away the difficult parts of your own position.
I also think that while the suggestion is facile on the surface, there is something more psychologically substantive —I’m not sure it’s sufficient but it certainly would help.
The root of our issues in the US is the selling out the lower classes’s potential by the government and industry to offshoring, thus reducing their economic power and outlook.
Of course if we hadn’t pursued globalization we’d be less advanced and things would be more expensive —imagine a kind of Switzerland, but while the potential is less open ended the lower classes and the middle classes would be less diverged from themselves as well as from the wealthy. So an executive to staff disparity might be 10x instead of 100x.
Can you name just one civilization with staggering inequalities which has not been subject to social conflict?
> The root of our issues in the US is the selling out the lower classes’s potential by the government and industry to offshoring, thus reducing their economic power.
I don't think this argument holds. The US was the theatre or major class struggle long before the neoliberal offshoring waves. Popular riots and massacres by the local authorities is nothing new, see for example the battle of Blair Mountain in 1921: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
More to the point, the GDP/capita in the USA has kept growing over the years despite offshoring. The fact that some parts of the population struggle to feed themselves is due to conscious wealth-capturing schemes from the rich and government-friendly corporations. Or as Warren Buffet once put it, "Actually, there’s been class warfare going on for the last 20 years, and my class has won".
When the people realize how duped they've been with empty promises and scapegoats, they are bound to loose their shit and be at someone's throat.
As Buffett alludes to, this is recent. In the last 30 years -as a consequence of offshoring. Cobbling shoes and pickin up garbage ain’t glamorous but they're a living. All the mills closing shop in the south affected working class black employment, in the northeast it affected working class white employment. But add up all the industries affected.
Now we’re beginning to offshore food. The laborers who used to cross the border for jobs now have jobs in their own countries which may be better may be worse…
It’s all done by a greedy gov and greedy industrialists who turned to globalism and away from supporting local economies to the detriment of the lower and middle classes.
Sweden has rather high level of wealth inequality (about the same level as the US) while being quite stable politically and socially.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_in...
There are riots in Sweden too [0], and what some consider to be terrorist activities from the far left to the far right [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Riots_and_civil_disor...
Also, with regard to Sweden, they have been a destination for poor refugees who on average integrate less than ideally into their society, given social, economic, political and spiritual differences between host country and new arrivals.
That argument makes no sense: a lot of people have very exotic tourism in Paris, New York, or in Guadeloupe. Yet for those who look beyond the surface the situation is shocking and on the right day of BLM / gilets jaunes protests you may believe the entire society has lost their shit (when in fact it's just the logical conclusion of a tiny minority of officials/businesses exploiting the entire population).
There are no societies, especially unequal or not, without social conflict. If there are no external enemies internal ones will swiftly be found.
“Only the dead are safe; only the dead have seen the end of war.” George Santayana
If the US fixed its city planning, stopped pushing every family to have many cars and managed its health care system with even minimal efficiency the data would look much different.
Offshoring is a bad argument, because that has happened in many places to a large extent and the results are not that American.
In any case, I agree that selling out the lower classes for is pretty much guaranteed to make them angry, resentful and susceptible to the charms of right wing populists wanting to ascend to power upon a platform of blaming one or more convenient minority scapegoats.
like 99% of history is monarchies and dictatorships, democracy is a blip on the radar
Yet he's arguing both here and elsewhere about how to defeat liberal democracy's new domestic and foreign opponents.
It seems pretty clear from this essay that he thinks that polarization is a surface level issue best dealt with by tweaking "how we talk to each other" across the political divide rather than addressing the underlying structural issues that indirectly trigger a deep level of anger and resentment like staggering wealth inequality.