Re:Francis Fukuyama: Paths to Depolarization
by nh23423fefe on Wednesday August 10, 2022 @03:14PM
(#32417041)
I didn't realize I replied to you in 2 different threads lol.
I'm going by his articulation on a recent podcast with Chris Hayes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY9yBZm_57w
He would say that its not that liberal democracy is some teleological final state. But more like a local optimum that we can't hill climb out of. There simply aren't different ideas about how to organize states "beyond" democracy.
I think the shift is subtle but important. It implies a lack of ideas as opposed to a "prediction" about the consequences of 1991.
> Fukuyama argues that history should be viewed as an evolutionary process, and that the end of history, in this sense, means that liberal democracy is the final form of government for all nations. According to Fukuyama, since the French Revolution, liberal democracy has repeatedly proven to be a fundamentally better system (ethically, politically, economically) than any of the alternatives, and so there can be no progression from it to an alternative system. Fukuyama claims not that events will stop occurring in the future, but rather that all that will happen in the future (even if totalitarianism returns) is that democracy will become more and more prevalent in the long term.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...