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May 11, 2021 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
01:03:21
Francis Fukuyama’s Last Man
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All right, hello everyone.
This is Left, Right, and White.
I am Chris Roberts, and I'm here, of course, with Gregory Hood, and this week we're going to talk about Francis Fukuyama, in particular his idea of the end of history and the last man.
So there's actually quite a bit of background worth getting into here.
Right when the Cold War started to end, Francis Fukuyama wrote an essay called The End of History?
The question mark is important, just make a note of that.
where he noted that the concept of history, like in the more philosophical sense of
capital H.
Yeah, capital H history. This draws a lot from GWF Hegel, of the idea of history being
like linear and telecratic, like headed towards an end state that history represents, like
the evolution and the progress of man's kind of like philosophical destiny, was perhaps
Fukuyama was saying that with the end of communism Democracy writ large, especially capitalist-centered democracy, was maybe in fact what humanity had been building towards this whole time.
And this is a really provocative argument because up until then, the biggest argument for where human history with a capital H was headed was made by communists.
This was Karl Marx's adaptation of Hegel saying the natural endpoint of human destiny of philosophy of all of this stuff is communism is you know the proletariat seizes the means of production and we end up with this sort of classless stateless society etc.
Fukuyama basically inverted that and said no it's actually like the the opposite with the fall of the Soviet Union this means that Um, communism, which is like the last ideological opponent to capitalist democracy, has been felled.
It's over and there's no new big competitor to capitalist democracy.
So maybe we've really reached an end point here.
Now it's interesting that in this essay, which again had a question mark, Fukuyama made it kind of clear that he himself was not necessarily convinced that this was absolutely, definitely the case, but the essay made such a big splash that he got a book deal out of it, and a few years later he wrote a book version of the essay.
of the essay called The End of History and the Last Man, and in the book there is no question mark.
Now, Fukuyama does still express reservations, considerable reservations, which we're going to
get into in the book version, but he's a lot more confident in the book than in the essay, and I
think it's really worth noting that because now Fukuyama's entire career is this book and this idea.
Which is kind of unfair, considering how much he's written about it.
Yeah, he's openly expressed annoyance about this, because he has written a number of other books, and he knows a lot about a lot of different topics, and he's kind of like a policy wonk guy.
This was one of his only forays, really, into political philosophy.
Although it's kind of unfair to complain when you say, I have discovered the end of human history and then people keep reminding you about it.
It's just clear that he was ready to move on at some point in the mid-90s, at the very least at the end of the 90s.
And before we go into his arguments and his own counter-arguments, It should be said that everybody and their sister wrote a book replying to The End of History and The Last Man from every possible ideological perspective.
And from every little event.
Some podunk hotel in a third world country gets blown up and they're like, this shows that history has begun once again.
That's right, that's right.
The first big one was the first Gulf War.
People were saying, well this disproves the thesis.
When people grab stuff from the headlines to say, oh, look, something interesting has happened or something awful has happened, ergo Fukuyama was wrong, that it really betrays this enormous misunderstanding of what Fukuyama was arguing.
He was not saying that from here on out, It's going to be boring from here on out.
We're going to, you know, be living in like a 1950s sitcom and everything's going to be peaceful and perfect.
He makes it very repeatedly clear over and over again that that is not what he is saying.
That there will still be, you know, crime, there will still be poverty, etc, etc.
There will still be war.
Right.
His point was that The era of, like, warring ideologies was over, and it was very unlikely to start again, that, like, the human sort of collective consciousness had basically settled on democratic capitalism.
I'll go over, like, a few of the counter-arguments briefly here.
So a lot of leftists, like Jaco DeRida and Perry Anderson, their rebuttals were definitely the weakest, because basically all they said was, like, Oh, well, there's still poverty.
Fukuyama just doesn't know that there's poverty because he's, like, this privileged, like, Reaganite Republican, and since there are still poor people, history is not over.
We haven't hit perfect equality, so therefore we're going to just keep going.
And again, this is very silly because in both the essay and the book, Fukuyama talks about, you know, there are still very serious social problems.
His point is that the manner in which we will address and solve those social problems will always come from the axiomatic perspective of, like, democracy and capitalism, and especially the hybrid of the two.
We're going to stop trying to solve social problems through these competitive ideologies that have basically fallen by the wayside, namely communism, but also fascism, and simply, you know, theocracy, or monarchism, etc.
So the left-wing arguments for I mean, you are listening to a podcast hosted by American Renaissance, so we're perhaps a little biased here, but these left-wing arguments were extremely weak.
Well, he thought they were weak, too.
He seemed to anticipate that the weaker arguments were actually coming from the left, and he saw a bit more of a challenge coming from the right.
Yeah, absolutely.
Why don't you talk about that, because I know that you find this argument really interesting.
And this is something that Fukuyama really fleshes out in the final chapters of the book.
He's pretty clearly convinced that If he's wrong, it's basically because Friedrich Nietzsche was right about a lot of things.
You know a lot more about Nietzsche than me, so why don't you delve into this one?
Well, it's worth noting that in his title he refers to the last men.
And the last men, you know, any edgelord who's read Zarathustra at age 15 or something like that knows what that refers to.
It's the men without chess, it's the men without spirit.
You know, he uses the Greek term for it.
And this is the idea of wanting distinction.
This is the idea of an inherent need to prove your power, your superiority over other people, to have pride, to have self-mastery.
Basically, these are irrational forces, but these are forces that are within us.
And what Fukuyama is basically saying is that Equality is not enough.
If you had a, even if you could create a perfect society, quote-unquote perfect society, where everybody was perfectly equal, everybody had perfect wealth, everybody had perfect rights, people would be fundamentally unhappy.
Because that's not what people actually want.
What people actually want is a way to show their superiority and their strength and their greatness.
I think Napoleon even said something like this after the French Revolution where he said the French don't want equality, the French want honor.
And Fukuyama goes into pretty significant detail about how this could throw the whole end of history project into Destruction.
And one of the things he says is he questions whether capitalism and the idea of corporate warfare or excelling in the business world and crushing your opponents that way, if that's the way you can get these men of power to satisfy these primal urges.
So instead of an Alexander the Great gathering his bros together and conquering the known world and slaughtering everyone in his path, You start a blank check company and take something public and become a billionaire and post stuff on Instagram about your life.
He didn't know about Instagram, but it was essentially the same thing.
Right.
Well, what he cites specifically is the characters in Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe.
Exactly.
The Masters of the Universe.
Right.
And he also talks about, well, there's still going to be these kind of weird third world, you know, areas off where guys who want to be mercenaries or something like that can go off and have Adventures, you know, Bronze Age pervert style type adventures where you conquer, you fight for the sake of fighting and do crazy things, but they're not really part of history as such.
It's just a sideshow.
Because Hegel said more or less the same thing about Africa.
He said the continent of Africa was kind of outside of the purview of history and like sort of human consciousness that it was this kind of no man's land.
It's always something that's going to be acted upon.
You know, and to just digress for a second, I mean that seems to be essentially still true.
Even if Africa, the African population becomes the dominant population in this world, it's always going to be colonized.
It's just now it's being colonized by China, so therefore the media doesn't care about it.
But, Fugiyama even goes into, it's pretty funny actually, he even brings up some sort of Futuristic ideas of right-wing social structures.
So, movie that's coming out pretty soon in a book I'm sure you're all familiar with, Dune.
He even thinks of the idea, he cites Dune and wonders whether we'll have some sort of weird space monarchy that will re-emerge and these aristocratic values will re-emerge.
As technology grows and as we start going to other planets and things like that, a note in passing that Elon Musk has coined himself Techno King and that is officially his title.
That's actually his title at Tesla.
But he's skeptical of all this and he basically says okay these are all interesting thought experiments and there'll be these weird little things but ultimately This is where it's coming down to.
This is where capital H history ends.
And he says that there's the potential for this challenge from the right.
But he doesn't sound too convinced of it.
He simply lays it out as a possibility.
And one of the things that we've seen, you know, you briefly saw a stirring of it with the European New Right, some of the alt-right and dissident right perspectives here, where you had this sort of emerging right-wing intellectual challenge to the meaning of history.
But that does seem to have been suppressed somewhat by the liberal democratic power structure and you're also now seeing a return of some of those more egalitarian movements communism socialism where people are actually you've got Teen Vogue publishing articles like why Marx was right and things like that and so the question is does this battle begin anew?
Of course one of the things he also said in passing was the idea of sort of authoritarian capitalism.
He kind of refers to this in the book but he doesn't take it seriously as an ideological challenger because he says even these systems appeal to some sort of democratic Moral legitimacy.
So for example, Vladimir Putin, you know, he's not the czar.
He wins elections.
Now you can say the elections are unfair or whatever else, but he does feel the need to have an election to ratify his power.
Even China, they feel the need to have some sort of democratic trappings over all of this stuff.
But now the question becomes, is there an actually new ideological structure emerging?
Well, and something else he would have pointed out is even if you have a single autocratic state
such as China or Russia, it's so isolated and so nationalistic that it doesn't create an entire
ideology or worldview that can spread elsewhere.
It's just an island onto itself by definition.
This is a big point about Islam as well, because another counter-argument against Fukuyama, especially after The 9-11 terrorist attacks was that, no, the new big competitor against democratic capitalism is Islam, or Islamofascism, or Islamism, or Jihad, or whatever.
There were a number of books that came out about this, like there's The Fourth World War, or something stupid like that.
like jihad versus mcworld or right or something like that and even thomas friedman's like lexus
and the olive tree kind of anticipates this yeah absolutely uh and fukuyama's point for that
was i mean he made this really strong comparison between communism and islam where he was like
look communism can at least theoretically appeal to anybody anywhere across the world regardless
of like language race culture etc and And moreover, it's not just a theoretical question.
We saw that that was in fact the case.
Same is not true of Islam.
Islam is really popular in Islamic parts of the world, and where there are then Islamic immigrants, but you're not going to have some organic mass conversion to Islam in Peru, the way you could see it happening with communism, you know, I mean, again, the way that that did happen with communism, countries would suddenly go communist.
Yeah.
Almost overnight.
And there were people who argued.
And Jihad just doesn't have that power.
Some people argued it did.
I mean, because in theory, Islam does have the, there is this idea of a universal caliphate, right?
And it does have a vision where it ends in world domination.
There's the House of Peace and the House of War, the Dar al-Islam, the Dar al-Aswad, or however they pronounce it.
But the Islamic world is also divided against itself.
I mean, Sunnis and Shiites in the Middle East, I mean, they hate each other much more than they hate the Christian West.
If you look at the Middle East now, Iran and Saudi Arabia are countries that hate each other far more than either of them have to do with, say, Israel.
Right.
Well, and communist countries never fought each other.
They never fought wars against one another.
You had the border skirmishes in the 70s between China and the Soviet Union, but that was basically at the point where I would argue that those quote-unquote communist countries were really just becoming sort of a A decade worker state, you know, they were just basically autocratic nationalist states.
And it's still just a skirmish, it's not a full blown war the way the Iran-Iraq war in the 80s was this absolutely total war, or the way Iraq conquered Kuwait.
You did have China fighting Vietnam, though.
I mean, you did have some conflicts, although even that, you know, again, I think that's Now we get into the real question.
Is that real communism?
I mean, I think what's interesting about communism, and maybe this shows that this theory should still be taken much more seriously because I still wonder quite often whether Fukuyama was right, whether they can pull this off, whether the last men really are here.
And one of the things about communism and its failure as a universal ideology is that even after you have a communist takeover, The old patterns of a nation and a culture reestablish themselves very quickly.
I mean, in this case, you had Vietnam, which was basically backed by the communist Vietnamese, which was basically backed by the Soviets, then fighting the Chinese, which were at that point having their own separate geopolitical strategy from the Soviets.
You didn't have that idea of a monolithic world conspiracy that American conservatives used to rave about in the 1950s.
You know, we can definitely find these little instances of communist countries being at odds with one another, and I don't want to get into this whole question of, well, which country was really communist when and otherwise, but I still don't think that you can find, like, a level of...
Conflict between communist countries during the Cold War that's comparable to the level of conflict we've seen, I mean, for decades and decades between a number of different Islamic countries.
Right.
And you also, you're never going to see a war to the knife the way you saw between National Socialism and Communism or the way you saw between Liberal Democracy and Fascism or what could have happened between Liberal Democracy and Communism.
I mean, if you had had a World War III between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, it would have been a total war, and it would have been a total war not just in the way it was waged, but also in the ideologies that would have been fighting.
It would have been seen as a test on the battlefield of these ideologies.
That's right.
The same way that, you know, fascism was defeated, not in the realm of ideas, but on the battlefield.
Right, and it's very difficult, you're right, what you're getting at is it's very difficult to imagine some kind of total war in which All of the Islamic world is at war with all of the non-Islamic world or something.
That's actually an amusing fantasy in one of Orson Scott Card's sci-fi novels where the entirety of the Islamic world unifies as one big super state to try and counteract the power of the Russians.
Right, and that was the nightmare after 9-11 that supposedly serious people, the neoconservatives, would talk about.
You would hear these references to the Arab Street and the Islamic Challenge and everything else, and now this whole thing seems pretty pathetic because the threat was so exaggerated because they wanted this existential enemy.
And to his credit, I think Fukuyama We anticipated and disproved this even before 9-11, that the idea of an existentialist Islamic challenge to liberal democracy, it just doesn't hold up.
I mean, we've seen the caliphate be re-established in our own lifetimes through the Islamic State, and it didn't unite all Muslims, it was just a bunch of guys in one area of one country, and it was mostly brought down by other Muslims.
Yeah, that's right.
Another challenger to Fukuyama is Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who we've talked about before on the podcast.
That is actually why I read Democracy, the God that Failed.
In his introduction to that book, he challenges Fukuyama very directly.
A lot of listeners are pretty sympathetic to Professor Hoppe, but his critique is similar to the leftist critique of, well, there are currently things in the world which I dislike and which are bad.
Yes, therefore your entire theory is wrong.
Yeah, which I do think is a little weak.
No disrespect to Professor Hoppe.
He'd be worthy of an episode in the future.
Maybe so.
Be that as it may, You know, even if you are a doctrinaire libertarian, so much of that can still fit under the auspices of Fukuyama's end of history.
I mean, you can have libertarian states worldwide and still be within the kind of paradigm that Fukuyama outlines.
You know, you can still have elections, obviously you're still very pro-capitalism, and most libertarians are At least comfortable with at least some level of democracy.
Hapa is not.
I mean, for him, Fugiyama's The End of History is wrong because anarcho-capitalism You've got to understand this whole theory of argumentative ethics about why this is so and everything else.
Well, this is about as far-fetched as Jekyll and Hyde's argument of, no, Fukuyama is wrong because communism is eventually going to make a comeback because there are still poor people.
It's very hard to envision.
You might personally feel that way.
That might be your preference.
But it's very difficult to objectively and convincingly argue that there's going to be this huge And the universal ideology, which is key to this.
Even China, just a few days ago, they had one of their big meetings and the president said, even if China becomes the world superpower, it will never see hegemony.
Well, it'll never seek ideological hegemony.
It'll seek military hegemony.
economic hegemony. Right, but it will never be tried to become the universal power.
And that's because the Chinese have a conception of themselves as a
civilization state, the Middle Kingdom. There are things inside and outside
that civilization and the outside world may have to pay tribute to it in some
way, but they're not going to seek to try to directly rule it because in some way
that would degrade them.
That's the historical Chinese viewpoint.
So you can't even point to China and say, oh well this is the new ideological threat.
What you have to ask yourself is does that model of the kind of state that they're building Does that represent a universal challenger?
And even that, I'd find it pretty hard to say, yeah, it does.
I mean, what would you even call it?
Authoritarian capitalism?
That's what people often call it, yeah.
Well, this can be difficult to talk about because we sort of have two...
Two parallel concepts that we have to address here.
When we're talking about Fukuyama's concept of history, China does not represent a philosophical challenge for the reasons that you just outlined.
But then if you sort of get out of the philosophical clouds and come back to Earth, we've got Aristotle pointing down here.
Yeah, China is very much a material and military threat to the here and now of democratic power.
You know, Western hegemony, essentially.
I would dispute only that we call it Western.
The system that is.
You know, say NATO.
The post-West, yes.
And when you're talking about all of that, all of this philosophical stuff Doesn't really matter that much all of a sudden.
And you brought this up to me when we were preparing for this, that one of Fukuyama's mentors was Samuel Huntington.
And Samuel Huntington, of course, And Samuel Huntington is probably the, you know, I remember when I got my master's and everything else, Samuel Huntington pops up in class after class after class you're taking because he was the lead guy on civil-military relations, on democratization, which of course is very relevant to what Fukuyama was talking about.
But when he, toward the end of his career, what he really was saying was almost that universal history can't have an end because what we have is the clash of civilizations.
And so what we have is not necessarily a universal model that can be opposed across the entire world or one sentiment that will move all of humanity, but instead we will have this never-ending ebb and flow of these civilizations that are more or less permanent, barring catastrophe.
That's right.
Yeah.
And you said Fukuyama broke with him, essentially, over that.
Yeah, Huntington was Fukuyama's elder, and I know they worked together in the Academy at some point, and when Fukuyama wrote his first essay, End of History?, Huntington wrote one of the first replies outlining His Clash of Civilizations concept, which again is essentially Machiavellian.
It's like, well, these sort of philosophical questions just don't matter that much because you have profoundly different societies that are just inherently antagonistic.
And we should say, you know, Huntington was not making a racial argument.
He was making, you know, very cultural and to some extent religious arguments.
Yeah.
And civilization is more than just even a culture or a religion or even a race.
I mean, it's something More all-encompassing.
Yeah, he was making, you could say, sort of like a macro-civilizational argument.
And his point was that ideology just doesn't matter that much.
China's still China, whether it's communist or under the emperor.
Exactly, exactly.
And he would say the same about a lot of these Islamic states, where it doesn't really matter if they have elections or not.
They're still defined by their Islamic culture, which we really saw in You know, in Egypt, when they went democratic and then started democratically electing, you know, all of these really hardcore Muslim guys.
And now a general's in charge, yeah.
Yeah, it just doesn't... Like, we got rid of the general, and now, like, some new general's in charge.
Well, and it's the same thing with Palestine.
I mean, Palestine is in many ways democratic.
They have elections, but then they elect Hamas.
Right.
Which, so it's like, well, what's the point of, you know, democracy then?
That doesn't... That's something that really does not fit neatly Into Fukuyama's thesis, I think this is one of the things that he does miss on some level, and that Huntington is correct about, of like, well, what if you have a culture that decides to adopt democracy, but then its cultural trappings are such that it democratically, and again, not through, you know, ballot manipulation or whatever, like the way Saddam Hussein would, but they have free and fair elections in which they free and fairly
elect somewhat anti-democratic leaders, you know?
Yeah.
And I think Fukuyama is sufficiently philosophical and sufficiently Hegelian
that he would simply say, well, that probably won't happen.
Or it's a bump on the road.
It's a temporary thing.
It'll just be an outlier.
Sorry, we're going on a tangent here.
After Sam Huntington wrote this reply to Fukuyama saying this philosophical stuff is kind of for the birds, we have these very real terrestrial Powers and we have these great states that are inherently
antagonistic because they seek to dominate one another For economic gain and for pride and all of these things
Huntington also got a book deal out of that and then turned that essay into the book the clash of civilizations
I never get a book deal for any of my like Not yet, not yet.
Give it time, give it time.
And what's interesting is I was in the end of high school, beginning of college when the so-called Arab Spring started happening.
God, I'm so old.
Well, and I remember a lot of people started talking about Fukuyama again in 2011 because of this.
Matt Iglesias, when he was still with ThinkProgress, I remember he was talking, he had a blog post called The End of History in Tunisia, because this The Islamic world had been the biggest holdout against democracy for the longest time, and there was a real unity in that almost no Islamic nations, especially in the Middle East and North Africa, had gone democratic the way you'd seen democratic inroads in Latin America and in Asia and in the former Soviet bloc and all of these places.
So for a lot of people, that was like, wow, Fukuyama was right, or at the very least, Huntington was just totally wrong.
Right.
And I remember people in college, you know, really dunking on Huntington of him being like, oh, he was just this this fuddy-duddy, you know, he was dead at that point.
He died in like the mid 2000s, maybe late 2000s.
Somewhere around there.
You know, who just didn't get it and he was so bigoted and Islamophobic and he just couldn't see that this obviously great thing would go everywhere.
They're all like us.
Here's a Lebanese girl posting on Twitter or something, ergo, they're just like Americans.
And this is also what would underlay the whole George W. Bush, we'll drain the swamp over there and then we'll have McWorld and Mecca.
Yeah, well, this was also when the Syrian Civil War was just starting.
I believe it's been ten years.
And, gosh, listeners, some of you should write in and tell me.
I'm not losing my mind here.
I remember when that civil war started, people were very optimistic about it in the West.
People I went to college with and stuff were saying, like, this is good because Bashar al-Assad will fall and Syria will become a modern democracy the way Lebanon had once been.
Or, at the very least, become a much more pacific Islamic state that nobody really cares about the way Jordan is.
Where it's like, oh, Jordan seems fine.
There's a monarchy, but nobody's afraid that it's going to nuke the world or something like that.
Exactly.
And people thought that this was great, and I knew people who were all for American intervention to help liberate it.
That worked out great.
We've got a migrant crisis, and the Lion of Damascus still stands, regardless of what DC has to say about it.
And yeah, here we are ten years later, and Fukuyama, to his immense credit, at the time that the Arab Spring was starting, a lot of people contacted Fukuyama, and there are even a few interviews with him that you can find, and they're asking him, like, oh man, do you think this finally proves that you were right?
And Fukuyama was like, I'm right, but don't get your hopes up about just this, you know, democracy just hitting the Middle East overnight.
Right.
And he brought up that, like, the most powerful institutions in most of these states where we were seeing these revolutions was the military and then organized Islamic groups like the Muslim Brotherhood.
Right.
And he, it's interesting because he's so philosophical, but he was willing to look at the material reality of a lot of these Islamic nations and say, they just don't really have Like the sociological infrastructure necessary to create a democracy out of thin air.
He brought up that, you know, to have a democracy, and Huntington wrote, Huntington, his mentor, wrote about this in the 70s, of you need unions, you need women's groups, you need civic-minded business leaders.
You need the waves of democratization to happen.
You need all of these structures in place to really have a successful democracy.
You can't just overnight decide like, oh, well, next month We are going to have elections.
We'll find some way of organizing that.
We'll set up these little centers and everybody will go in and vote and it'll go great.
You need to have all of these societal things in place and that's something that a lot of Fukuyama's more academic writing and Huntington's academic writings from the 1970s and 80s really focused on.
Yeah, because Huntington wrote, and obviously Fukuyama would have been very familiar with this, a lot of these same arguments that people made against The Arab world becoming democratic and what people still today make against Russia becoming democratic is they say, well, there's some cultural barrier to democratization.
But they used to say that about Spain and Hispanic countries, because you remember like 70s and 80s, you still had Franco, you still had the military dictatorships in South America.
And so people just said, well, because of Catholic heritage and reactionary institutions, these countries will never become democratic.
But then, of course, they did.
And so that led to a lot of people saying, well, maybe there actually is a universal model here.
But even if you believe there is a universal model, there's a lot of preconditions before you can get to that point.
And Fukuyama, I think, is underrated.
His thought is reduced almost to a cliché by people who think they're dunking on him.
That's right.
And it's not fair, because he does meet their objections head-on, it's just they don't bother to read it.
That's right.
You saw this again a lot with Occupy Wall Street, which, boy, really seems like ancient history now, but that was kind of the first wave of Bernie Sanders-dom, really, Bernie Sanders-ness.
I remember, I knew, again, I was I was a heady teenager when Occupy Wall Street was happening and I thought it was very interesting and I knew a lot of people who were very excited about it and you can go on to these left-wing websites and these anarchist websites being like, ah, finally, Fukuyama has been disproven, you know, Occupy Wall Street will disprove Fukuyama.
Another world is possible!
Yeah, that's right, that's right, this sort of endless mantra.
And again, Fukuyama's point would be, look, even if Bernie Sanders is elected president and we dramatically Expand the welfare state and all of these things.
This is still very much within the democratic model I mean Bernie Sanders himself, yeah, you know runs for elected office and plays by the rules of Democracy and in no way ever so much as like hints that the system should be otherwise It would be better if there was just a violent revolution and every time somebody tries to pin him on pin him down on like oh, you know, it's usually these conservatives who are getting their talking points from like a You know, 1950s or one of the Fallout games or something and it's like, oh, Bernie Sanders is going to implement a socialist dictatorship!
And he says, like, no, what I want is what's in Denmark and Norway and Sweden.
And that's part of liberal capitalism.
You know, whether you move the margins a little bit, it doesn't really matter.
To skip forward a little bit, when Fukuyama wrote about the origins of political order Yeah, the origins of political order, I mean, I think one of the takeaways from it was he called it getting to Denmark.
That's right.
Where Denmark becomes sort of the, this is as good as it gets, where you have a country that has a significantly expanded welfare state compared to the United States.
But you still have low corruption, you still have a productive economy, you still have innovation, you have public institutions that people trust.
Yeah, trust is a big thing.
Right, high trust societies, and that's a whole conversation in itself that we can talk about when it comes to race realism.
But you're holding up Denmark and you say, this is it.
This is ultimately where we're all trying to go, and if we all play our cards right, and if we can get over all these little, you know, problems, and bumps in the road, and retrograde tendencies, we can all get to Denmark.
But that fundamental challenge, which he himself describes, is still there, which is, if you look at modern-day Denmark, and you say, this fulfills my deepest, most fundamental needs as a human being, this form of political order, you can't help but think, like, really?
That's it?
We're going to get there so someday we have an efficient DMV?
Great.
And the thing with Denmark too, interestingly enough, of course.
This gets into race and gets into immigration and everything else, of course, is that Denmark now has a relatively restrictive immigration policy, but it's not being pushed through by the far right.
It's being pushed through by the moderate Social Democrats, who quite openly say, in terms that would not be allowed by the modern Republican Party, or certainly not even allowed by so-called white nationalists like Stephen Miller or Donald Trump or whoever else, they simply say, look, we can't have this level of mass immigration because that undermines social solidarity.
So your point about getting to Denmark is perfect, because you make two separate points, which are the two most important ways, I would say, of critiquing Fukuyama.
On the one hand, there is the, well, why do we want to get to Denmark?
Denmark is boring, right?
And that is the Nietzschean critique, and also, essentially, if you're an Evolian, as in Julius Evola, you would largely say the same thing.
Our colleague Henry Wolff I would say very much agrees with you that Fukuyama is essentially correct that history has ended and we do have all of these last men and that this is a bad thing.
Yeah, it's terrifying.
Yeah.
That they can pull it off.
Right.
And like, I do want to get to Denmark just, you know, Denmark 1300 years ago.
So that's the Nietzschean critique, and it's something Fukuyama, when he talks about that in his book, he brings up the historical example of Japan where he says, in a lot of ways, for hundreds of years, history had ended in Japan, and they essentially, in a kind of a Nietzschean outburst, decided to ditch the end of history and try and be an empire, try and be a much more robust, warrior-like, intense society.
Yeah, because they froze history in place straight up, controlling gunpowder and keeping it all in one place and keeping the social order totally stratified, and basically it took an American warship showing up with all these fancy new toys to make them change.
Yeah, that's Admiral Perry.
Yeah, right.
But then simultaneously, aside from whether or not it's boring, you say, well, Denmark has all of this high social trust and very little crime and very little corruption, and that's because it's really homogenous, right?
It's a white country and it's trying to keep itself a white country, bringing up that the moderate social democrats are the ones restricting immigration.
Not some right-wing fringe nationalist party.
They're farther to the right than Donald Trump.
It's not even close.
That is my critique of Fukuyama.
I'm very comfortable with the idea of getting to Denmark not 1,300 years ago, but roughly now.
Maybe I'm the last man.
But I think Fukuyama is really unwilling to grapple with the reality of can you have these specific placid democratic capitalist high-functioning high-trust societies with Multiracialism and with mass immigration and all of these things and I would say no I think the verdict is is kind of in on that I mean can history end if IQ is going down can history be over if Crime and terrorism is going up all of these things like and Fugiyama just is so unwilling to touch this and Huntington even
didn't fully ever go there.
I mean, he was willing to say, like, there's these, you know, civilizational antagonisms on a global scale, but he was less willing to talk about, you know, race.
And Fukuyama, interestingly enough, really does not like to talk about race.
In one of Steve Saylor's funniest blogs, he talks about Fukuyama's book, The Great Disruption, about the 1960s, and Saylor points out that this massive book on the 1960s He doesn't talk about race, like, at all.
There's almost no mention of it in just hundreds and hundreds of pages.
There's just something, like, Fugiyama is just seemingly allergic to it.
Right.
Whereas, like, Chinese historians will point to the 1965 Immigration Act as, like, the most important thing that happened.
Even more important than Vietnam and everything else, in terms of, like, fundamentally changing what the country is.
Yeah.
And the thing is, too, I think there is, in his defense, though, in Fugiyama's defense, I think there is kind of a fallback explanation which you hear from a lot of people when you say like, oh, differences in IQ or these social problems, which is essentially the technology will solve all our problems.
Opt out.
You know, race won't be a problem when we can use, I don't know, neural enhancements and everybody will be super smart.
Crime won't be a problem when we have technology that will do all these things.
We're going through a rough patch now, but, you know, I effin love science and somehow it's going to lead us to the future.
Now, I think even that's falling apart now.
If you look at, like, the guys who were the big scientific rationalists five, six years ago, I mean, they're proto All right.
Now, I mean, look at what's happened to Richard Dawkins, Sam Hyde, people like Sam Hyde, Sam Harris.
You know, they've basically been driven out of the left.
And so that's sort of another left-wing challenge to Fukuyama's triumphalism, which is even technology You can't claim anymore because critical race theory even defines that as problematic.
And technology is beholden to ideology.
I hate this Pollyanna-ish idea of, oh, well, technology is progressing, so things are ipso facto going to get better.
It's like, well, bad people can do bad things with good technology.
And it opens up new problems.
Yeah.
I mean, even just something as simple as diet.
Have lifespans dramatically expanded?
Yes.
But a lot of that comes from decreases in childhood mortality.
But, you know, we have chronic disease problems that exist now because of, you know, modern ways that we produce food or modern ways we shape our environment that people didn't have to deal with long ago.
And so it is about technology does solve problems, but it creates new ones.
And you have to have somebody looking at the outcome and have some idea of the good in order to be able to use technology.
And instead, we've made technology itself the good.
And that doesn't lead us anywhere productive.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, I mean, if you look at like the opioid crisis now, you're talking about, you know, increased life expectancies.
It's like, well, some people have been have been left behind on that.
Yeah.
You know, are we going to use technology to try and solve that problem?
It's like, well, no, nobody talks about this problem.
I mean, it's like down to Andrew Sullivan on his substack.
He's like the only one.
The only person who's even nominally mainstream willing to talk about this issue.
We get a bi-weekly denunciation of him on Twitter trending.
Yeah, yeah, that's right. How dare I notice white people are dying. Yeah, exactly exactly the same thing
I mean, it's you know, it's a cliche, but you look at all of these horrors that happened in the 20th century
And it's like well technology made it a lot easier to just do all of these mass killings
Yeah, that gets into, I think, what a lot of the traditionalists with a small t—not the Evolian, but the Russell Kirk-type traditionalist conservatives would say—that by unleashing modernity, by unleashing technology, it inevitably leads to all these moral horrors because human nature Hasn't changed.
Human nature doesn't grow up along with technology.
Right.
That's a whole separate thing.
But I think that there is something to that that we have to grapple with and certainly the school of Fukuyama I just don't think grapples with it.
I think it just sort of shuffles aside the problem or just doesn't talk about it or just again assumes this is just a bump in the road.
Yeah, you get that same thing with now, like the massive increase in crime, especially violent crime in the United States.
Well, as we learned last night, the number one threat to America is white supremacist terrorism.
All these murderers in cities and everything else, again, I can't help but interject here.
Incredible.
It's incredible in the literal sense.
You actually have to stand back and marvel at it the way you would like an alien landing on Earth.
That you have this butchery in all these cities and the very people who claim to speak for these communities do not care.
It could happen right in front of them.
It would not trouble their day in the slightest.
And you have these Rich white progressives who fall into shrieking hysteria because they saw a tweet they don't like, and they're completely indifferent to all this suffering.
Yeah.
Well, so you're coming up on a question I was thinking about as I was looking over a lot of Fukuyama's writings in preparation for this.
Which is, you hear people talk a lot now about how wokeism is different than liberalism as it's been classically understood.
Right.
And does that, does wokeism, for lack of a better term, sorry everybody, but you know, the belief in like equity as opposed to equality, or you know, Black Lives Matter-ism, You know, all of that is meaningfully different from what liberals were about, you know, 20, 30, 40 years ago.
Even 10 years ago.
Even 10 years ago.
Does that represent, like, a new competitive ideology against the kind of democratic capitalism that Fukuyama was writing about, was talking about?
I think it could.
It's just a question of whether it's so self-destructive and so self-contradictory that it will consume itself.
I mean, wokeism is important because it is messianic.
It does offer you an absolute moral vision.
It's a moral vision that can never be attained, but that's part of its strength.
And that's something that lets people give themselves entirely over to it.
I mean, again, When I say that this is a religion, I don't mean that, oh, it's like a religion.
It's a religion.
Full stop.
Period.
That's it.
And this dream of universal human equality, we saw in the last century how communists were able to butcher millions with no, you know, Just quiet in their souls about what was happening.
And this is even more compelling morally.
Because you're not just talking about, oh, we're replacing an economic system, or we're replacing a system that's inefficient.
We're talking about, like, eradicating evil from the souls of a certain population.
And I think anything could be justified if that's what you're going after.
So it could emerge as a competitor.
The problem with, of course, is that, as it stands, and this is something I've been writing about in regards to the United States, If the things that made the United States a superpower are the very things that wokeism are consuming, how is it going to defend itself against external competitors?
And, you know, the United States right now is still trying to be the global superpower, still trying to uphold the liberal order.
But at the same time, you're going through the military and having symposiums on why you got to use the correct pronouns and wave certain flags and everything else.
And it's like, well, what are these guys going to be actually able to stand up to anything?
And even Fukuyama talked about this a little bit.
He saw this problem even inherent in the earlier liberalism to which he talked about.
He said himself that with liberal democracies you do ultimately need a sense of civic nationalism, a sense of civic belonging that cannot be justified rationally.
In other words, the rational state is ultimately supported by irrational beliefs.
You have to be a patriot Because you just feel it, and you've got some romantic thing in you that makes you willing to fight and defend this thing.
But if you said, explain this rationally and defend it, you can't.
Right.
Because you can't really give an explanation why America is inherently superior to this or that country.
Ultimately, it comes down to, it's your country.
Yeah, there's just an innate... Yeah, like, why is my family better than your family?
Well, because it's mine, and that's all I need to say.
Yeah.
I mean, now you can try to do this, you can point to certain things, you can try to do it rationally in terms of like, oh, performance on certain social indicators, but that's pretty cold, and you could also... Yeah, that is some thin grill, and then, I mean, it falls apart almost immediately because you say like, oh, well, so then if we fell on all of those metrics, would you then stop being a patriot?
Right.
Canada's got better healthcare, therefore, like, overthrow the government.
Like, that doesn't make any sense, you know?
And the other thing is that if you say, well, Everything has to be defined as a proposition nation.
Everything has to be defined as adherence to a certain set of ideas.
Well, does that mean that people who don't share those ideas, because there's no agreement on what those ideas actually are, are they not part of the country anymore?
I mean, you saw this even last night where people were saying, oh, America's an idea.
You keep saying last night, but this is... I'm referring to President Biden's speech to Congress, or rather to a few people in Congress who were socially distanced, and it was a rather pathetic spectacle.
But you know, you had a lot of these calls of, oh America is an idea.
And nobody seems to think through to the logical conclusion about this, which is that if you don't share in the idea, then you're an enemy.
And I think wokeism is actually one of the things that does take that seriously.
If the idea is America is dedicated to equality and to equity, And you don't fully believe in that, you are a political enemy.
You're an internal enemy that can be destroyed.
And that's a story that is as old as the French Revolution.
Right.
So, the big question then, is that kind of woke-ism going to sweep across the West and create something sufficiently different from the political order of the 1990s to say that Fukuyama was wrong?
It could.
I mean, I hate to be vainglorious, but ultimately it comes down to what people like you and I do, and what our listeners do.
Because there really is no alternative at this point between a revitalized sense of white and western identity, which is going to come from, and it's not just, oh, we're going back to the 50s or whatever.
It's going to be something new, and it's going to be built on different principles.
It's either that or you consume yourself and you die and the idea of Western civilization itself just ceases to exist and you're just going to have this kind of nightmare consumer, I don't know, shopping mall, dysfunctional shopping mall society that will inhabit North America and Europe and at which point I don't think I think any serious civilization will just steamroll that because it can't defend itself.
And furthermore, we'll have people who aren't willing to defend it.
I mean, that's like the most tragic irony of all this is that the people who gain the most from the system in place now are also the people least willing to sacrifice for it.
Never before have so many people demanded so much and offered so little.
I think that's a very good summary of our contemporary elites, yeah.
You know, and again, this is ultimately, on American Renaissance, this is ultimately about race.
And the one fundamental question that we have to ask ourselves about these things is who benefits whom?
They need us.
We don't need them.
Well, but so which is it though?
I mean if we have this woke elite and we're sort of like woke-isming ourselves to death, does that mean that something more muscular will just like replace us?
I mean, the big example, right, would be Islam in Europe through mass migration.
Or does the West continue on?
Because you said like, you're talking about the idea of the West itself becoming meaningless.
It's like, what if The concept of the West becomes the concept of anti-racism, and that's what it means to be Western, etc.
I would argue that we're already there in some ways, and that a lot of modern, Western, white self-loathing comes from, and this is something that conservatives, American conservatives at least, have imposed on themselves, A lot of the self-loathing comes from this identification of Western identity with liberal capitalism and technocratic society.
So when you say, I'm struck, you know, some of you guys out there might listen to a podcast called Hardcore History and he was talking about the Celtic genocide that Julius Caesar did and how he basically wiped out them as a people.
And at the very beginning he said, you know, what would it mean to lose your entire culture, your entire civilization?
And he said, I don't even know what that would mean.
Like, we don't get to wear blue jeans or something like that?
Like, that was how he said it.
The fact that you actually, and he's like a fairly conservative guy, but the fact that even he has to speak in these terms shows that we've already lost it.
I mean, if you say, what is my civilization?
And your only answers are McDonald's and Coca-Cola and video games.
Well, you don't have a civilizational identity, and it's no wonder that you hate yourself, and frankly, you probably should hate yourself.
Brutal.
Yeah, it's true.
Most brutal things are true.
And I think that this kind of anti-West, it's not that It's going to be something new.
It's just sort of the inevitable conclusion of a process that's already been underway for some time.
And you do see some stirrings of people who do have some identification with older ways fighting back against it.
But of course, Fukuyama has no truck with them.
He wrote a book, Identity, The Demand for Dignity in the Politics of Resentment.
And quite early in the book he simply says, this book would not have been written if Donald Trump had not been elected president.
He saw this as a problem.
He saw this as quite a big problem.
And ultimately what he comes up with as a solution, and this I think calls into question his whole project and his whole thesis, is he essentially argues that what we need is a sort of, again it all comes back to the vague, oh we're going to educate people in this kind of creedal form of liberal democratic values and adherence to these norms and institutions will be our new sense of identity and our new sense of patriotism.
And also the left maybe could be a bit more Kind toward white working-class people who have been left behind and then maybe they won't be so angry at us.
But like, that's pretty thin gruel.
And you have to ask yourself, is that something, not only, I mean forget even the apocalyptic questions of like, would you fight and die for this?
But like, would you even take this seriously?
And the answer is no.
I mean, you can't, people aren't going to go to the mat for something that's purely rationalistic.
You have to give them something that speaks to their souls.
Ultimately, what Fukuyama's big idea is about is that liberal democracy satisfies the soul of man.
That is what his argument was, or at least raises the question, is liberal democracy the thing that soothes the soul of man?
He personally finds that it is fulfilling, like for him, just like as an individual, but he's not sure if everybody is really like him.
Exactly, exactly.
But he doesn't know necessarily, his question is almost like, how many people out there are like me and how many people out there are not like me?
And there is a class.
I mean like, you do, you know, we joke about like bug men or something like that, like there is a class of people who will say something like, you know, the European Union flag means more to them than their national flag.
Right.
There is a class, there was a Cato study that just came out not too long ago which talked about a fairly high percentage of Americans who identify as citizens of the world, not citizens of the United States.
That's right.
And so there is, now how much of that is tied up with woke-ism and this more absolutist moral vision, that's a separate question.
But Fukuyama is not one of these woke guys.
He's more old-fashioned liberal.
Yeah.
And again, I hate, this almost seems crude, and I hate to talk about it in this way, but, I mean, we, it's a podcast about, on American Renaissance, so we gotta say it.
I mean, he's an Asian living in the United States, and so, what is his identity?
I mean, it's, it's this kind of artificially created thing of like, okay, I'm part of these leading institutions in the United States, and I have a vague pride with this civic form of nationalism, but, I mean, frankly, what the hell does Jamestown or Gettysburg or any of these things have to do with him?
Yeah, it's a fair point.
Well, it betrays, you know, his sort of polite request, you know, liberals, you should be nicer to people in the heartland, does betray this real ignorance of like, oh man, you must not actually have to deal with these kinds of liberals on a day-to-day basis.
I mean, if you did, you would understand just how absolutely futile it is to be like, oh, Hey guys, can you tone it down a little bit?
Can you be a little nicer?
Even just trying to rationalize with them, like, hey, if you were nicer to all of these poor, uneducated white people, everything would just kind of work better.
They don't care.
What makes me afraid is that Fukuyama might be right.
Whites are a pretty Cheap date, so to speak.
I mean, if you had somebody come along and say like, hey, guess what?
We're going to get rid of affirmative action, which nobody in the, even in the conservative movement, even in conservatives, Inc, whatever.
I don't find anybody who actually agrees with affirmative action.
They just don't want to talk about it.
That's right.
But if you had some candidate come along and be like, hey, guess what?
We're going to get rid of this stuff.
I mean, the media and the wokes would shriek and scream and everything else, but a lot of whites would be like, yeah, this is pretty much all we want.
And even guys like us are not like, we need to kick Fukuyama out of the country!
And we're supposedly the most militant right-wing fanatics, and we're nothing compared to the other side.
And that's not really a strength.
I mean, that's actually kind of a source of weakness.
It's because if you have this all-encompassing moral vision and facts and logic just, like, burn away in the fires of your fanaticism, like, You can get a lot done.
You can get a lot done, yeah.
You can get a lot done with just sheer zealotry.
And Islam's Islamic conquest at the very beginning spread very far for a reason.
If you've got a creed and you've got people willing to go for it, you're going to get somewhere.
Well, and you could make the argument then, I mean, Fukuyama says that the rebellion against the last men would basically be from the right, would basically be something nationalistic, but you could make the case that wokeism is in this perverse way, yeah, this rebellion against last men-ism, it's finding this new And even if you think self-annihilation is this novel thing, it's like, well, martyrdom is a pretty consistent feature of religions throughout history.
And I think the idea of people martyring themselves for a certain creed is not that unusual.
Yeah, not at all.
I mean the real question, the Fukuyama vision, you know, he talks about the last man as a problem.
And this is something his critics, again, don't give him a lot of credit for, but he does discuss it.
He does at least admit the possibility that a lot of people find this unfulfilling.
Perhaps he himself finds it fulfilling, but a lot of others don't.
But I think there is this kind of technocratic approach where if we can just kind of manage this stuff, If we can just kind of keep these peasants down for a little bit longer and let their fanaticism burn themselves out and eventually those sources of tradition and culture and whatever else will kind of be sapped away from high living standards and stupid media programs and video games and whatever else, then we'll get to that final society of the liberal democracy where everything will be great.
But the problem we face now is, if wokeism is this new challenge, it's actually being fueled by those leading institutions.
I mean, wokeism is very much pushed by the top down.
It's liberal democracy destroying itself.
It's injecting the poison into its own veins.
And so, you know, how does he grapple with that?
And I think he can't.
One, because it would just be...
Lovecraftian, mind-melting horror if he realizes the truth of what he's talking about.
Like a lot of these old-school conservative liberals.
He wouldn't survive in the academic world.
I mean, he would just be driven out.
If he even said, like, do you know this is happening?
I mean, he'd have a mob of people screaming for his head and he'd be where we are.
I mean, again, look, President Donald Trump is no different than a typical contributor to American Renaissance in the eyes of Most Democrats.
And is it so crazy to think Fukuyama could end up in the same category?
Andrew Sullivan apparently is.
Yeah, I was actually going to make that comparison.
Fukuyama, like Sullivan, and a lot of these conservative liberals just don't seem to quite get how serious the threat of all of this woke and anti-white stuff is.
And it goes beyond white.
Yeah, they dislike it.
They talk about it.
They acknowledge that it's a problem, but because they were sort of like, almost like
a grandfathered out of it, you know, because they got to have these careers before, you
know, cancellation, you know, before cancel culture and all of this stuff, they just don't,
they're just unwilling to really take it on and seem to kind of in their heart of hearts
think like, ah, this is just sort of a phase, you know, this is.
This is what happened with the 60s, too, is that you had these kind of old-school New Deal Democrat types who were in charge of the universities, and you'd have these college radicals going nuts, and they would sort of be like, well, these kids' hearts are in the right place.
They're just going a bit too far.
And now those people are the ones being challenged, and they still have this normal, well, you know, they believe the right things.
It's just the wrong way to go about it, guys.
But God help us if a bunch of people show up in DC waving MAGA flags like this is a threat to the Republic and insurrection and we should start drone bombing them and everything else.
I mean they fundamentally, the friend-enemy distinction is still there for them.
They still see the enemy as people like us.
But for the woke it doesn't work that way and they're gonna get dragged down.
I mean again I always think of Felipe Galate, the younger brother of the King of France, who changed his name and went along with the French Revolution and everything else, but it didn't stop him from getting his own head chopped off.
That's right, that's right.
So, this has been perhaps our most sort of sprawling podcast we've done yet.
Well, there's a lot of material when it comes to Fukuyama, and I think one thing that I would say, and I mean this sincerely, the jury is still out.
Everybody loves dunking on him saying, well, his theory has been proven wrong, and I don't think that's true.
I think that there is a chance that what he talks about is fundamentally correct.
I don't like it, but that might be where we end up.
A lot of it depends on what people like you and I do.
I do think his thoughts should be taken seriously and his books are worth reading and I would ignore the people who just sort of dismiss it with a tweet or something like that because the fact is most of the objections he does take seriously and he addresses them in his own books.
It's just he does have at the end of the day that major blind spot that you talked about.
Yeah.
I still maintain that Fukuyama's argument about the end of history is really interesting and really compelling, but ultimately it just doesn't work.
You can't get to Denmark with multiracialism, with multiculturalism, and Fukuyama himself just won't go there.
You certainly can't defend it.
Yeah, and you also can't defend it.
Yeah.
I mean, if liberal democracy, the liberal democracy view of the world is correct, I mean, John Lennon's Imagine becomes the national anthem.
And at the end of the day, if there's nothing to kill or die for, then you don't really have anything defending that system.
And so whoever comes up with a creed that speaks to people and can move them is going to topple it pretty easily.
Yeah, and I'd much rather that be us than Islam.
I think that's a good place to end it, huh?
Yeah.
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