May 15, 2023

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been reading Francis Fukuyama’s two books on political order, The Origins of Political Order and Political Order and Political Decay. He wrote these books after his bombshell article on “The End of History?” in 1989 following the fall of the Soviet Union.

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The point of “The End of History?” is that “liberal democracy” is the end point, the final destination of politics. And the two books on political order show how liberal democracy with its state, its rule of law, and its bureaucratic government programs, is the best of all possible worlds. And Fukuyama cannot imagine any other possible political regime in the future. Of course, Political Order and Political Decay was published in 2014:  before Trump, before woke, before all the frantic regime efforts to neuter Trump and his middle-class deplorables.

But now all the end-of-regime warning lights are flashing red: running out of money; demonizing the opposition; going pedal-to-the-metal on programs like climate change and systemic racism that keep the enthusiasm of regime loyalists at fever pitch but do nothing for the ordinary middle class.

Reading Fukuyama has been helpful to me because it helps me understand the mind of an elite believer in “liberal democracy.” For him, a strong state, the rule of law, and the full range of government programs run by an efficient, educated bureaucracy is the best that humans can hope for: who could argue with that?

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Obviously, nobody in the West would dare to argue: nice little job you got there…

But my whole life is dedicated to the proposition that Houston we have a problem, despite the fact that experts agree that a liberal democracy of, by, and for the experts is a Good Thing.

First of all, the strong state. I get, per Fukuyama, that the strong state won in the 1,800-year war in China that ended up in 221 BC with the Qin dynasty and the terra-cotta soldiers. But I fail to see how the strong states of Europe in 1914 were a Good Thing if they sent millions of their young men to die in the trenches for nothing.

Second, the rule of law. I believe that the Common Law is the best thing since sliced bread, disentangling the complexities of inheritances and bills of exchange for the benefit of humanity. But I doubt if using the Supreme Court to impose the moral conceits of the educated class on the peasants is a Good Thing.

Third, the bureaucracy. Maybe back in 2014 Fukuyama could convince himself that an educated bureaucracy was a Good Thing. But I think that by 2023 we can say that bureaucracy is a nightmare. It turned the nation upside down with COVID — for what? — and would brook no dissent to its expert-agreed “science.” And now the Biden administration is weaponizing the bureaucracy to impose a climate and race agenda on an America that would rather not. This is the best we can imagine?

Perhaps the best way to look at things is not by proposing answers, but asking questions.