Francis Fukuyama, the neoconservative apostate of “end of history” fame, has a new book out about the global crisis of liberalism. While Fukuyama has gotten a lot of flak for thirty years for being wrong about the end of history, he has increasingly acknowledged that the triumph of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism on the world stage is far from certain.
(There’s a review of Liberalism and Its Discontents on the Liberal Patriot, a moderate Democrat Substack blog, here, Charlie Sykes, a prominent Never-Trump conservative, had a great interview for The Bulwark with Fukuyama here, and Fukuyama wrote a summary of his book here.)
More than that, Fukuyama is aware that the old neocon-neoliberal consensus was deeply flawed in a number of ways, particularly where the former underestimated the difficulty of regime-change and nation-building, and where both downplayed the importance of democracy and active government in producing shared prosperity.
Putin’s war on Ukraine is an example of what Fukuyama was missing when he was writing his end of history thesis in the early 1990s. Remember the timeline: the Berlin Wall fell; the Soviet Union collapsed; Fukuyama published first a 1989 essay in the National Interest, and then a book in 1992 called The End of History and the Last Man. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West pushed free markets on Russians but neglected to help them build a strong government and a correspondingly robust culture of civic democracy. As we are learning every day, democracy is very difficult; the Russians failed at it right from the start. Now they are at war.
In the early 1990s neoliberalism and neoconservatism were at their historical peak. It involved an overemphasis on free markets, privatization of nearly everything, neglect of the importance and difficulty of democracy, and an underestimation of the role government plays in fostering a robust economy—the “entrepreneurial state” as economist Mariana Mazzucato calls it.
Thanks to the rise of populism today, particularly in its authoritarian right-wing versions, wealth inequality and the problems of democracy are now of pressing concern to political centrists. Progressives might feel vindicated, and, yet, while Fukuyama may have exaggerated his end of history thesis, we desperately need him to be right. Liberal democracy is in peril and it’s painfully obvious that centrists don’t know what to do about it.
A new-and-improved Wisconsin Idea is the answer. Progressives need to quit wokeism and commit themselves to reimagining centrist democracy. Fukuyama is right about the former but doesn’t know what to do about the latter. It’s less about trying to push citizens farther to the left and more about institutions.