John Mac Ghlionn, in contesting Francis Fukuyama’s warning of a coming American plutocracy, is unaware of the extent to which he agrees with Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis. He may be spot on in pointing out that Musk and Ellison aren’t the unprecedented threats to American democracy that Fukuyama makes them out to be. But his argument, based on the adaptability of democracy, is positively Fukuyama-esque. Far from someone who has consistently disagreed with Fukuyama’s predictions, Mac Ghlionn appears more like a disgruntled fan who misses the old Fukuyama like rap fans miss the old Kanye.
Admonishing Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis because events continued to occur post-1989, as Mac Ghlionn does in the introduction to his article, is only valid if we understand history to be a series of newsworthy happenings, which we don’t. This is not what Fukuyama meant by “history,” nor is it, to my knowledge, how philosophers of history generally understand the term. The “end of history” referred to the end of humanity’s ideological evolution, rather than the end of all occurrences or the immediate termination of all conflict.
How Mac Ghlionn describes the triumph of liberal democracy as not permanent, only provisional, and states that democracy is adaptive, built to absorb shocks, capable of disciplining power “through markets as well as ballots,” I’m unsure. A political system that disciplines power through markets and ballots is a textbook “liberal democracy,” and a resilient one at that. The phenomenon that Mac Ghlionn describes to alleviate our worries about billionaires undermining American democracy is the same one that Fukuyama wrote about in the 1980s and 90s.
In Fukuyama’s 1992 book, he stated that a lack of consensus in modern thought wasn’t evidence against a historical process that explained modern society’s move towards democracy. “This confusion of thought,” he wrote, “can occur despite the fact that history is being driven in a coherent direction by rational desire and rational recognition, and despite the fact that liberal democracy in reality constitutes the best possible solution to the human problem.” If the Fukuyama of 1992 is to be believed, no amount of Trumps, or Brexits, or articles by John Mac Ghlionn can change the reality that is the coming global triumph of political and economic liberalism. I suggest John dust off his copy of The End of History and the Last Man.