I don't know about you, but I think this is a big deal.
Francis Fukuyama was an important contributor to the political philosophy that led to the rise of Neoconservatism. That intellectual contribution aside, he was part of the development of the Reagan Doctrine, and later became active in the Project for the New American Century. He famously predicted "the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."
After the fold, I'll explain his journey to this new conclusion, summarize his arguments against his former positions, and share his argument in support of Obama. To do that, I review three articles he published, the last one of which will come out in print next week.
Fukuyama, the Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy and Director of the International Development Program at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University, has been undergoing a change of heart for the last few years. He published what amounts to a "post-mortem" of neoconservatism in The New York Times in February 2006, titled: After Neoconservatism. In that article, he states:
I have numerous affiliations with the different strands of the neoconservative movement. I was a student of Strauss's protégé Allan Bloom, who wrote the bestseller "The Closing of the American Mind"; worked at Rand and with Wohlstetter on Persian Gulf issues; and worked also on two occasions for Wolfowitz. Many people have also interpreted my book "The End of History and the Last Man" (1992) as a neoconservative tract, one that argued in favor of the view that there is a universal hunger for liberty in all people that will inevitably lead them to liberal democracy, and that we are living in the midst of an accelerating, transnational movement in favor of that liberal democracy. This is a misreading of the argument. "The End of History" is in the end an argument about modernization. What is initially universal is not the desire for liberal democracy but rather the desire to live in a modern — that is, technologically advanced and prosperous — society, which, if satisfied, tends to drive demands for political participation. Liberal democracy is one of the byproducts of this modernization process, something that becomes a universal aspiration only in the course of historical time.
(emphasis added)
He then says the unsayable in conservative circles: That there is something that this philosophy (modernization that leads to a spread of liberal democracy) shares with Marxism! Not only that, but he also likened neocnservatism to... wait for it... Leninism!
"The End of History," in other words, presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism. In the formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt, the neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.
(emphasis and links added)
So to separate himself from neoconservatism, he basically rejects the "interventionist" position that neoconservatism takes. He then ends that article with the following indictment:
Neoconservatism, whatever its complex roots, has become indelibly associated with concepts like coercive regime change, unilateralism and American hegemony. What is needed now are new ideas, neither neoconservative nor realist, for how America is to relate to the rest of the world — ideas that retain the neoconservative belief in the universality of human rights, but without its illusions about the efficacy of American power and hegemony to bring these ends about.
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Back on October 4th, 2008, Fukuyama published an article in Newsweek titled: The Fall of America, Inc. In this substantive and highly recommended article, Fukuyama pays a lot of attention, not just to neoconservatism, but also to the American brand of fiscal conservatism. After a bit of nostalgic remembrance of the "Reagan Revolution", he states:
Like all transformative movements, the Reagan revolution lost its way because for many followers it became an unimpeachable ideology, not a pragmatic response to the excesses of the welfare state. Two concepts were sacrosanct: first, that tax cuts would be self-financing, and second, that financial markets could be self-regulating.
(emphasis added)
He follows this by an interesting observation: Prior to the establishment of Reaganomics in the 1980s, conservatives were fiscally conservative. The notion that tax cuts would stimulate the economy enough to produce greater tax revenue was an instant failure: Reagan's tax cuts produced deficits, Clinton's tax hikes produced surpluses, and GWB's tax cuts produced record deficits. Further, the economy grew just as fast during the Clinton years as it did during the Reagan years, but this did not shake the faith conservatives had in their economic philosophy.
And guess what globalization did:
More important, globalization masked the flaws in this reasoning for several decades. Foreigners seemed endlessly willing to hold American dollars, which allowed the U.S. government to run deficits while still enjoying high growth, something that no developing country could get away with. That's why Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly told President Bush early on that the lesson of the 1980s was that "deficits don't matter."
He then tackles financial deregulation, or what he called "the second Reagan-era article of faith". While he agreed that the long-standing regulations stifled innovation and US competitiveness, he nevertheless asserts that deregulation has produced the pre-requisites for the current financial crisis.
Fukuyama reminds us that there were early signs that this aspect of Reaganomics was leading us to ruin:
* The Asian financial crisis of 1997-98.
* America's accumulating structural deficits, and the impact of this on the behavior of other players around the world:
China and a number of other countries began buying U.S. dollars after 1997 as part of a deliberate strategy to undervalue their currencies, keep their factories humming and protect themselves from financial shocks. This suited a post-9/11 America just fine; it meant that we could cut taxes, finance a consumption binge, pay for two expensive wars and run a fiscal deficit at the same time. The staggering and mounting trade deficits this produced—$700 billion a year by 2007—were clearly unsustainable; sooner or later the foreigners would decide that America wasn't such a great place to bank their money. The falling U.S. dollar indicates that we have arrived at that point. Clearly, and contrary to Cheney, deficits do matter.
(emphasis added)
He wondered why we didn't catch on to what was happening when California's electricity prices spiraled out of control in 2000-2001 as a result of deregulation in the state energy market, and when Enron and other firms collapsed in 2004.
Then he makes this insightful observation about the American electorate in explaining our blindness to the failure of Reaganomics:
All this suggests that the Reagan era should have ended some time ago. It didn't partly because the Democratic Party failed to come up with convincing candidates and arguments, but also because of a particular aspect of America that makes our country very different from Europe. There, less-educated, working-class citizens vote reliably for socialist, communist and other left-leaning parties, based on their economic interests. In the United States, they can swing either left or right. They were part of Roosevelt's grand Democratic coalition during the New Deal, a coalition that held through Lyndon Johnson's Great Society in the 1960s. But they started voting Republican during the Nixon and Reagan years, swung to Clinton in the 1990s, and returned to the Republican fold under George W. Bush. When they vote Republican, it's because cultural issues like religion, patriotism, family values and gun ownership trump economic ones.
(emphasis added)
Does that last sentence remind anyone of the faux tempest-in-a-teacup over Obama's "bitter" comments? Thomas Frank's 2004 best-selling book "What's The Matter With Kansas" explained what Frank called "The Great Backlash" in very similar terms. But I digress.
Fukuyama then goes back to the American idea of spreading democracy and freedom, an "idealistic streak in U.S. foreign policy" that is central to neoconservatism, and has origins that go back to Woodrow Wilson's idealistic internationalism that led to the establishment of the League of Nations. He clarifies that the promotion of democracy through diplomacy and aid to civil society groups is not what is controversial. Rather, it is the use of that ideal to justify war and/or regime change through US intervention. He reminds the readers that the US has no credibility when it champions a "freedom agenda" in the Middle East, when it supports dictatorships and opposes entities (like Hamas) that came into power through elections.
He also places some of the blame for this loss of credibility on the use of torture by the Bush administration, and the readiness with which it did away with constitutional protections.
Guantánamo Bay and the hooded prisoner at Abu Ghraib have since replaced the Statue of Liberty as symbols of America in the eyes of many non-Americans.
So what is his prescription to cure these ills?
He starts with the assumptions that the US economy will recover from its current crisis as it has in previous ones, and that other competing economies (e.g., the Chinese and Russian economies) will not fare much better than our own. He then makes this startlingly liberal statement:
Still, another comeback rests on our ability to make some fundamental changes. First, we must break out of the Reagan-era straitjacket concerning taxes and regulation. Tax cuts feel good but do not necessarily stimulate growth or pay for themselves; given our long-term fiscal situation Americans are going to have to be told honestly that they will have to pay their own way in the future. Deregulation, or the failure of regulators to keep up with fast-moving markets, can become unbelievably costly, as we have seen. The entire American public sector—underfunded, deprofessionalized and demoralized—needs to be rebuilt and be given a new sense of pride. There are certain jobs that only the government can fulfill.
(emphasis added)
I swear that when I read that paragraph, especially that last sentence, I double-checked to see that I was still reading Fukuyama's article, and didn't by mistake skip a few pages to somebody else's!
Alas, he followed this by cautioning us from an overcorrection. He advocated care in re-instituting regulations and in bailing out what might better be left to fail. He did not want to completely abandon the Reagan model, and said that many non-Americans should try to emulate some aspects of it, such as the emphasis on efficiency and productivity that is often lost in Europe due to their "long vacations, short working weeks, job guarantees and a host of other benefits."
The penultimate best paragraph in this article was the last one. It came across to me as a Valedictory address:
The unedifying response to the Wall Street crisis shows that the biggest change we need to make is in our politics. The Reagan revolution broke the 50-year dominance of liberals and Democrats in American politics and opened up room for different approaches to the problems of the time. But as the years have passed, what were once fresh ideas have hardened into hoary dogmas. The quality of political debate has been coarsened by partisans who question not just the ideas but the motives of their opponents. All this makes it harder to adjust to the new and difficult reality we face. So the ultimate test for the American model will be its capacity to reinvent itself once again. Good branding is not, to quote a presidential candidate, a matter of putting lipstick on a pig. It's about having the right product to sell in the first place. American democracy has its work cut out for it.
(emphasis added)
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Now, Fukuyama has thrown his support behind Obama, and published it in the November 3rd issue of The American Conservative!
He laid out his argument in a succinct and a rather concise manner as follows... He starts with the conclusion:
I’m voting for Barack Obama this November for a very simple reason. It is hard to imagine a more disastrous presidency than that of George W. Bush.
He then explains that Bush has launched an unnecessary war, undermined the international standing of the USA, and allowed the economy to collapse. Then, a devastating truth:
As a general rule, democracies don’t work well if voters do not hold political parties accountable for failure.
He said that even though McCain has tried to distance himself from all that, the Republican Party should not be rewarded for those failures.
This is followed by an indictment of McCain:
* He was supposed to be a person that thinks for himself...
* Instead, he was "erratic and hotheaded"....
* His choice of Sarah Palin was "highly irresponsible"...
* As evidence for how irresponsible the choice was he reminds us that the current president didn't have much knowledge and was under the mercy of the "wrong advisers"...
* His switch from a champion of the free market to a populist raises the question: Does McCain have "any underlying principles at all"?
His closing paragraph is a thing of beauty. Here it is in full:
America has been living in a dream world for the past few years, losing its basic values of thrift and prudence and living far beyond its means, even as it has lectured the rest of the world to follow its model. At a time when the U.S. government has just nationalized a good part of the banking sector, we need to rethink a lot of the Reaganite verities of the past generation regarding taxes and regulation. Important as they were back in the 1980s and ’90s, they just won’t cut it for the period we are now entering. Obama is much better positioned to reinvent the American model and will certainly present a very different and more positive face of America to the rest of the world.
(emphasis added)
This, to me, is such a clear indication of the change in the political environment we live in coming from an intellectual with gravitas... I can now confidently say:
Neoconservatism: R.I.P.
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For a short Bio on Fukuyama see his web page at SAIS.
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[Update] h/t to batgirl71: The same issue of The American Conservative had 18 Conservative writers (including Fukuyama) declare their choices for the 2008 Elections. Reading what they had to say was a lot of fun, actually. Here's the list:
* Peter Brimelow: Chuck Baldwin (Constitution Party)
* Reid Buckley: John McCain (Republican Party)
* John Patrick Diggins: possibly Barack Obama (Democratic Party)
* Rod Dreher: Will withhold vote
* Francis Fukuyama: Barack Obama (Democratic Party)
* Kara Hopkins: John McCain (Republican Party)
* Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn: Barack Obama (Democratic Party)
* Leonard Liggio: Bob Barr (Libertarian Party)
* Daniel McCarthy: Ron Paul (as a write-in)
* Scott McConnell: Barack Obama (Democratic Party)
* Declan McCullagh: Will withhold vote
* Robert A. Pape: Barack Obama (Democratic Party)
* Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.: Will withhold vote
* Gerald J. Russello: Will withhold vote
* Steve Sailer: Ward Connerly (as a write-in)
* John Schwenkler: Bob Barr (Libertarian Party)
* Joseph Sobran: Chuck Baldwin (Constitution Party)
* Peter Wood: John McCain (Republican Party)
Tally:
Barack Obama | (Democratic Party) | 5 |
John McCain | (Republican Party) | 3 |
Chuck Baldwin | (Constitution Party) | 2 |
Bob Barr | (Libertarian Party) | 2 |
Ron Paul | (as a write-in) | 1 |
Ward Connerly | (as a write-in) | 1 |
Will withhold vote | | 4 |
I almost feel sorry for the Republicans. This is just incredible!