More interesting than Fukuyama’s predictable criticisms is his willingness to confront liberalism’s “discontents” head-on. In particular, and unlike in “The End of History?,” he recognizes that actually existing liberalism has produced an enormous amount of inequality. Yet Fukuyama doesn’t blame liberalism itself for this reality but instead the radical neoliberals who rejected “state intervention…as a matter of principle.” The solution to inequality is therefore obvious: deradicalize contemporary liberalism and return it to its reformist and centrist roots. Specifically, Fukuyama urges neoliberals to accept that markets “function only when they are strictly regulated by states”; that social welfare is necessary; and that “economic efficiency” is not the be-all and end-all of human life. If minds change, he avows, society will too.
As this suggests, Fukuyama rejects the left-wing argument “that liberalism inevitably leads to neoliberalism and an exploitative form of capitalism.” He points out that for much of the late 19th and 20th centuries, incomes in liberal societies rose, which allowed liberals to “put into place extensive social protections and labor rights.” In Fukuyama’s view, liberalism and social progress historically go together. But is this true? On the one hand, the benefits that the working classes in the liberal West achieved were gained at the expense of the Global South, which was cannibalized for the metropole’s enjoyment. On the other hand, as Fukuyama is aware, the era to which he refers was also a time when liberalism had to do battle with other grand ideologies and thus was forced to temper some of its worst tendencies. Strangely, Fukuyama doesn’t consider that liberalism at the end of history might be disposed to its cruelest extremes. If the past 30 years demonstrate anything, it’s that absent any genuine ideological threat, liberals will enact maximalist policies, from the broad deregulation of industry to the dismantling of the welfare state. Put another way, reforming liberalism might be an impossible project to realize at history’s end.
For many people, Fukuyama’s earlier prediction that the end of history would be “a very sad time” has turned out to be true. In fact, in Liberalism and Its Discontents, Fukuyama sometimes acknowledges as much. For example, he notes that manifold liberal subjects feel “lonely and alienated in their individualism.” Yet at the same time, he affirms that “modern liberal states have dense networks of voluntary civil society organizations that provide community, social services, and advocacy to their members and to the political community more broadly.” What gives? Is the end of history sad or not?
Clearly, when it comes to exploring what it feels like to live at history’s end, Fukuyama the analyst stands in tension with Fukuyama the liberal booster. The former appreciates that life under liberalism is often grim, defined by anomie, precarity, and despair; the latter can’t believe that, and so he doesn’t. Though Fukuyama can’t ignore liberalism’s numerous problems, he also can’t bring himself to imagine that there might be an alternative. To him, accepting the inevitability of liberalism is identical with mature thinking. Liberalism, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, is the worst ideology, except for all the others. It’s what we’ve got, so let’s defend it and make it better.
