[toyg]

Fukuyama basically argued that the end of the Cold War marked a point of no-return after which all countries would have slowly but inevitably converged towards globalised, market-based, open societies. All the stuff you mention pre-dates that.

The worst we got in the Clinton era, when Fukuyama was writing, were the crypto wars and the Clipper chip, which look incredibly tame today and were both resolved in the public's favour.

So yeah, in the '90s, a lot of people thought "the West" had turned a corner. Fukuyama went beyond that and posited that the world had turned a corner. And instead, we fell right back into fascist nightmares as soon as we were attacked by a bearded guy on dialysis that we ourselves had armed a few years before; the Russians and Chinese decided that not starving was preferable to being "democratic", whatever that might mean; and most of the Middle East, Israel included, doubled down on its eternal fervour for holy war.

That was my point - history never "ends" and nothing is inevitable, including a return to feudal rule. Many progressive movements tried to tell the elites that, by singing a triumphalist note for late-stage capitalism, we were planting seeds for a massive backlash. They were ignored, like they would be ignored in 2003 on the risks of war and again today on the risks of ignoring global warming and rejecting migrations. Sooner or later, chickens will come home to roost, and it won't be pretty.

[icebraining]

I only read the essay, not the book, but that doesn't seem quite what I got from him. He's not saying liberal democracies can't have times of turmoil, with such fascist nightmares, but that those are not an alternative ideology pushing for a different system. And I think that's true - people pushing for more surveillance or voting for Le Pen and Bolsonaro are not idealists trying to forge an alternative to capitalist western liberalism, they just want it tilted some way or another. Western democracies always had underclasses, and people are fighting to change which those are, not pushing to overturn the bedrock.

Regarding the Middle East and Isreal, he writes:

> In the contemporary world only Islam has offered a theocratic state as a political alternative to both liberalism and communism. But the doctrine has little appeal for non-Muslims, and it is hard to believe that the movement will take on any universal significance.

and

> There would still be a high and perhaps rising level of ethnic and nationalist violence, since those are impulses incompletely played out, even in parts of the post-historical world. (...) This implies that terrorism and wars of national liberation will continue to be an important item on the international agenda. But large-scale conflict must involve large states still caught in the grip of history, and they are what appear to be passing from the scene.

And both of these seem true to me; there's no great spread of Islam ideology, nor of Zionism, they are isolated ideologies that can affect others, but not actually compete ideologically with Western liberalism.

history never "ends" and nothing is inevitable, including a return to feudal rule.

Maybe not - and in fact, like Fukuyama, I hope not; as he writes, "[t]he end of history will be a very sad time" - but I'm also not convinced that we've actually seen evidence of that. As of now, it seems possible.