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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. |