Editor's Note: The End of Trying is an installment of The Satirical Review. The essay examines the intellectual hubris of the post-Cold War consensus and the gradual decline of active democratic stewardship.
When Francis Fukuyama announced the end of history, I thought it was pretentious.
More than three decades later, I still do.
This is not entirely fair to Fukuyama, which is worth saying at the outset. His famous argument was more complicated than the slogan that escaped from it. He did not contend that events would cease, wars would disappear, or human beings would finally behave themselves. He even warned that the triumph of liberal democracy might produce its own peculiar danger: Nietzsche’s “last man,” prosperous and comfortable but increasingly bored with the very society that had made prosperity and comfort possible.
Fukuyama would now like that part remembered.
His forthcoming memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man, returns to the argument and, according to Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times, treats today’s populist revolt not so much as a refutation of The End of History as confirmation of one of its warnings.
He has a point.
But authors do not retain custody of ideas after releasing them into the wild.
And “the end of history” escaped.
It became something larger than Fukuyama’s carefully qualified argument. It became the unofficial slogan of a victorious age.
The Soviet Union collapsed. Liberal democracy had won. Market capitalism had won. The great ideological contest that had shaped much of the twentieth century appeared settled.
There would still be recessions, wars, elections, scandals and the occasional politician caught with somebody who was not his spouse. History would continue producing events.
But the destination had supposedly been reached.
And that may have been the problem.
The danger was never that everybody would read Fukuyama and stop governing the next morning. Intellectual fashions rarely operate with such efficiency.
The danger was subtler: A political culture began behaving as though the important questions had already been answered.
The generation that constructed the postwar democratic order behaved very differently.
Those people knew democracy could fail because they had watched it happen.
They had seen elected governments collapse. They had watched fascism rise. They had seen economic catastrophe become political catastrophe and political catastrophe become war.
They therefore built things.
They built alliances.
They built institutions.
They built social insurance systems.
They built international organizations.
They built rules, norms and habits intended to make another catastrophe less likely.
Not everything they built was wise. Some of it was badly designed. Some arrangements excluded people who should have been included. Some policies eventually required substantial repair.
But they understood something their successors gradually forgot: Democracy is not self-sustaining.
The generation that inherited the postwar order increasingly treated it as though it were.
Liberal democracy became less a continuing political project than inherited infrastructure.
Something to manage.
Something to streamline.
Something to make more efficient.
Something whose continued existence could largely be taken for granted.
Western liberalism put democracy on autopilot, wandered into first class, ordered a drink and congratulated itself on having invented aviation.
Meanwhile, somebody still needed to fly the damned airplane.
The consequences appeared gradually.
Economic globalization created enormous aggregate benefits, which were apparently supposed to comfort the people whose factories disappeared.
Political parties became increasingly professionalized organizations devoted to winning elections while becoming less capable of explaining why anybody should believe in them.
Government accumulated experts while steadily losing the confidence of citizens those experts were supposed to serve.
Institutions developed elaborate procedures for protecting their independence while occasionally forgetting that independence must also produce results people can recognize.
Politics became increasingly good at telling citizens what could not be done.
Then along came people who promised they could do anything.
Donald Trump is not the cause of this story.
He is what happens when somebody discovers the cockpit has been left unattended.
There is a particularly wonderful irony here because Trump actually appeared, briefly, in Fukuyama’s original book.
Fukuyama believed liberal capitalist society had developed peaceful outlets for the ambitions that once produced tyrants. Men possessed by enormous appetites for recognition and power could direct those appetites toward wealth instead.
They could simply become very rich.
Looking back, Fukuyama now acknowledges the difficulty.
Getting rich, he says, turned out not to be enough for Trump.
There, almost accidentally, lies the problem with the entire premise.
Human beings did not become different because liberal democracy won the Cold War.
Ambition did not disappear.
Vanity did not disappear.
Tribalism did not disappear.
The longing for recognition did not disappear.
Neither did resentment, fear, grievance, demagoguery or the ancient human desire to have somebody else to blame.
History did not end because human nature did not end.
The structures of liberal democracy merely provided ways to contain those impulses while channeling some of them toward more constructive purposes.
That required continual work.
And somewhere along the way, too many people decided the work had essentially been completed.
This is why the interesting question today is not whether Francis Fukuyama was right or wrong.
Political thinkers have been wrong before. They will manage the feat again.
The more interesting question is why so many people wanted him to be right.
“The end of history” offered something irresistible to the victorious West.
Permission to relax.
There would still be problems, certainly.
But no fundamental reconsideration was necessary.
No great democratic reconstruction was required.
No urgent need existed to ask whether institutions built for one century were serving citizens in another.
We had arrived.
History’s great argument was over.
All that remained was administration.
Perhaps that explains some of the bewilderment produced by the present moment.
People who believed liberal democracy was the natural destination of modern societies now find themselves confronting citizens willing to abandon liberal principles, elected officials willing to subvert democratic constraints and political movements openly hostile to arrangements once assumed to be permanent.
Everybody keeps asking: How could this happen?
The builders of the postwar order might have asked a different question: Why wouldn’t it?
They understood that democracy is an achievement, not a condition.
It survives because people maintain it.
It earns allegiance because institutions work.
It retains legitimacy because citizens believe that government can respond when circumstances change.
And when those things cease happening, democracy cannot simply point to its résumé and demand continued loyalty.
That may be the lesson liberal democracy most needs to relearn.
It must keep earning its place.
Not because every populist complaint is legitimate.
Not because every angry voter is correct.
And certainly not because authoritarian alternatives deserve accommodation.
But because no political system is entitled to permanent public confidence merely because philosophers once declared it the winner.
Francis Fukuyama may have been right that liberal democracy could eventually produce citizens bored with liberal democracy.
What he seems not to have anticipated was that liberal democracy might grow bored with itself first.
History never ended.
We merely stopped tending to it.
And perhaps what ended was something considerably more dangerous.
We stopped trying.
— Dunneagin
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