00:03:39.220the book comes a couple years later in 1992 and it's called the end of history and the last man
00:03:47.000so no more question mark we're making statements now yeah he's he's getting cocky i have been
00:03:52.660looking forward to this episode because i always thought of him as someone who i don't agree with
00:03:58.460like i think that the central thesis of his book is wrong but i also think that it contains some
00:04:04.640like genuine insights. And a lot of the discussion and criticism of his book did, in fact, seem like
00:04:11.520it was coming from people who thought that he was saying that like stuff wasn't going to happen
00:04:16.400anymore. See, Francis, something happened. Your book is wrong. It's like, that's not really what
00:04:25.020he was saying. Yeah, no, I think that's right. A lot of the criticism I saw was a little bit
00:04:30.780off base and mischaracterized his work the ways in which he was wrong were much more subtle put it
00:04:36.780that way right he takes care to say i'm not talking about the end of things happening humanity has
00:04:43.520sort of decided upon a structure of governance for itself what's behind this thesis is the idea
00:04:51.680that originated at least in western philosophy with hegel who articulated this idea of the
00:04:58.340dialectical view of history, which just means that history has a narrative arc. There's a
00:05:03.880beginning, there's a middle, there's an end. And it ends when society meets mankind's most
00:05:09.620fundamental needs and wants. So like Marx was a proponent of this dialectical view, right? His
00:05:15.440belief was that the course of history is defined by class struggle. And the end point is a stateless
00:05:21.640communist society. Fukuyama is proposing something conceptually similar with a different endpoint,
00:05:25.760Right. Two world wars have been fought, the result of which he believes the defeat of fascism.
00:05:31.340And now he's seeing the Soviet Union fall. So he is witnessing in his mind a point in history where Western liberal democracy is not only ascendant, but is the final stage of human governance.
00:05:44.860Right. Alternatives have been vanquished in the battlefield of ideas. And I don't want to get too deep into his discussion of like human nature, but he believes that liberal democracy satisfies mankind's innate desire for recognition. And that's why it's fundamentally appealing to people. And that's why it has prevailed and why there is no next step.
00:06:07.680I have a huge fetish for like theory of everything books. These books like the end of history because they're always wrong, always wrong in like such fundamental ways, just like as a methodology. Here's the one true narrative. They never hold up to specifics.
00:06:25.520Yeah, I enjoy a narrative. I think it can be useful, but there's only so far you can zoom out. Right. And Fukuyama has zoomed out impossibly far. Yeah. That's like the problem with the type of abstraction he uses where you get this essay. It's a short essay makes this quick point. And then I look at I glance at the book and it's 400 something pages. And I was like, oh, he's going to like use data to support his essay.
00:06:54.200no naive Peter that was deeply naive that was Peter three weeks ago a young boy with his whole
00:07:04.320life in front of him no it was actually 400 pages of extrapolation on the essay yeah each of those
00:07:12.60015 pages in the original essay yanked into like 50 yeah it just goes on and on and on the same idea
00:07:21.040rephrased over and over again i remember this from his future books too that both of them i mean
00:07:27.960they're big they're like bricks and both of them easily could have been a new yorker article right
00:07:33.300he does a lot of like in this essay i will like setting the table stuff does he do that in end
00:07:38.180of history too where like the first four pages of every chapter are him like describing what he's
00:07:43.020about to do yes and then he describes the exact same thing again in like 20 pages and then he
00:07:48.000does like, what I've just described is, and then you like describe the same thing in like another
00:07:53.200four pages. When you're bullshitting this much, you have to remind people what you're talking
00:07:57.300about. It's incredible. And then you look back on the chapter and you're like, wait, he only gave
00:08:00.600me like one example of what he was actually talking about. Like there's no actual information
00:08:05.200in these chapters. It's just like prose. Oh, so much prose, man. He's trying to write a book
00:08:11.640about the entire structure of human society and why he believes liberal democracy both has
00:08:17.500prevailed and will continue to prevail. When the thesis is that broad, it's hard to know where and
00:08:24.500how to start critiquing it. But I think when you glance at the thesis, a couple of major threshold
00:08:31.300questions pop up. Namely, you're saying liberal democracy is the final form of human government.
00:08:37.000But how are you defining liberal democracy? How does he answer that? He defines it. He says,
00:08:42.620the state that emerges at the end of history is liberal insofar as it recognizes and protects
00:08:47.580through a system of laws man's universal right to freedom and democratic insofar as it exists
00:08:52.540only with the consent of the governed so right off the bat we're working with a definition that
00:08:57.560is simultaneously vague and like clearly untrue at least around the margins right because he's
00:09:03.480describing it in these like super idealized terms that like it recognizes our deepest desires and
00:09:09.300everybody gets to participate or whatever. But then you look around at actual liberal democracies
00:09:15.380and all of them are doing that to varying degrees, right? Like none of them are actually
00:09:20.020reaching this like high-minded definition that he's set, even though he's trying to describe
00:09:25.240the real world with this. He is incredibly credulous about like the extent to which
00:09:30.580countries that claim they are liberal democracies are actually either liberal or democratic.
00:09:35.820Right. I mean, and a good example is he will describe aspects of the United States as like inherent to the United States while writing off other very real aspects of the United States as like not inherent. He says the U.S. is fundamentally egalitarian.
00:09:53.180sure in making that argument he acknowledges like disproportionate black poverty for example
00:09:58.660but he says that that's not fundamental to the u.s it's just the legacy of slavery and racism
00:10:04.720right but like why is egalitarianism fundamental to america while racism is not yeah the three0.90
00:10:11.320fifths compromise was in the fucking constitution but it's basically this thing that we saw when all0.87
00:10:15.780the abu grabe stuff came out where george w bush was like we do not torture right like yeah we0.97
00:10:21.280tortured a bunch of people and like yeah it was u.s government policy and everything but we're not
00:10:25.400the kind of people who do that give me a break right it's the international policy equivalent
00:10:31.580of your dog bites someone and you're like he's he never does that yes in the book he makes an
00:10:39.360argument that there are more liberal democracies now than in 1790 he says that there were three
00:10:45.780in 1790. France, Switzerland, and the United States. I get what he's going for here. But is
00:10:52.280that right? Was the United States a liberal democracy in 1790? Does it make sense to call
00:10:58.120a country where only white male landowners could vote? Yeah. And one out of every what,0.67
00:11:03.560seven or eight people was a slave? Is that a liberal democracy? I don't know. I don't really
00:11:08.960think so. Well, okay. I remember very vividly this part of the book. And I actually, at least from my
00:11:14.920now 15-year-old memories of the book. I actually thought that this was one of the better parts of
00:11:19.680it and one of the more convincing cases. I think it's a much more deep insight when you look at
00:11:24.480the post-World War II world. If you look at the 1960s and 1970s, most of Latin America was under
00:11:31.460some form of dictatorship. Spain, Portugal, the entire USSR, a huge number of people who used to
00:11:40.760be living under totalitarian regimes are at least nominally living under democratically
00:12:07.600Not necessarily that all these countries are embracing them in full.
00:12:10.440Right. But there's this problem that he starts to run into where if you make that argument about the early US, right, it is espousing democratic values. And while it's not really embracing them in full, it's taking steps towards that. Right. I get that.
00:12:27.800But what he ends up doing is then sort of failing to ask the important questions about like the later stage democracies, right, about whether they are in fact furthering democratic and liberal values.
00:12:41.880So to give an example, there are a couple of chapters where he describes what he calls the weakness of strong states, meaning like the decline of authoritarian governments across the globe, especially in the post-World War II era.
00:12:56.600His basic claim is like authoritarian governments are losing their grip on power because the people yearn for liberal democracy.
00:13:04.160He mentions the example of Latin America, which had a surge of democratic governance starting in the 1980s.
00:13:11.840This is why debunking this book is so fucking annoying because, yes, that is true in a sense.
00:13:17.740But he's also hiding the ball when he has this discussion because he starts in the 1980s.0.85
00:13:22.660And if you're asking yourself why the 1980s, probably because if you go back before that, a lot of the history of Latin American politics involves the United States orchestrating violent coups that like placed authoritarian regimes into power.
00:13:40.780I'm going to send you a little excerpt.
00:18:25.800fuck this guy i have like adrenaline um okay i got i really lost my ability to articulate stuff0.99
00:18:33.180and i was just like fuck we need to do one of those health help books after this one of those0.99
00:18:36.540like mindfulness books that'll help you calm down using science i would like to sort of shift my0.98
00:18:41.940vibes from angry snarky lawyer to like gwyneth paltrow yeah get get a smoothie peter so fascism
00:18:48.780and communism those are the biggies uh the the other two and uh obviously a major thesis of his
00:18:56.200is that both of them are more or less at this point done for good not that they would never
00:19:01.380appear again but that they are not in serious competition for global ideological domination
00:19:07.880right fukiyama really seems to think that the military defeat of fascist states in world war
00:19:13.160two is enough to signal that fascism is dead oh interesting he says fascism was destroyed as a
00:19:20.520living ideology by world war ii this was a defeat of course on a very material level but it amounted
00:19:26.760to a defeat of the idea as well what destroyed fascism as an idea was not a universal moral
00:19:33.040revulsion against it since plenty of people were willing to endorse the idea as long as it seemed
00:19:38.000the wave of the future, but its lack of success. So he points out that no significant fascist
00:19:45.240nations arose after World War II. Right. Nobody looked at fascism and was like,
00:19:49.540let's do that. Right. And look, I think that's a little too clean cut of an argument. You know,
00:19:57.160you can say that there are degrees to which like the regimes of Pinochet, for example,
00:20:01.640to use that example again, or like Perón were fascist. They certainly had significant
00:20:06.900elements of fascism. But more importantly, the fact that many of the governments popping up
00:20:12.940across the world in the Cold War era were either communist or hard right capitalist
00:20:18.180is a direct result of the fact that, again, they were being propped up by the Soviet Union and the
00:20:24.660U.S. He describes all of these Cold War power struggles, again, as if they were just taking
00:20:29.240place on the battlefield of ideas and not like the result of these powerful interests trying to
00:20:34.320like very purposefully shape the world. It's also hopelessly naive about the nature of fascism.
00:20:40.420Yes. Fascism isn't the kind of quote unquote idea that gets defeated in the marketplace of ideas.
00:20:45.260Like my arguments were so good that no one did fascism anymore. Like fascism draws upon
00:20:51.060deeply human impulses to like blame societal others for your problems and to allow a strong
00:20:57.820man to manipulate your emotions. You know, if he's writing this in 1992, this is as the rise
00:21:03.000of Slobodan Milosevic is happening right it's frustrating that Fukuyama's looking at this he's
00:21:08.940like oh we defeated fascism like we don't need to worry about fascism coming back it's like oh it
00:21:13.520doesn't work and it's like well it works in the short term it works really well in the short term
00:21:18.620and it works really well if you're a fascist leader it's not really an idea in the same way
00:21:24.260that like liberal democracy is right fascism is predicated on this in-group declaring themselves
00:21:31.880the inheritors of the nation's power right how do you convince someone out of that you're not like
00:21:37.120well what if other people had power right and you had less like that's i think you're
00:21:42.240misunderstanding what the what they're trying to do they're trying to take the power because0.87
00:21:45.900they don't fucking care there's something kind of bleak about the fact that there's this huge0.94
00:21:50.700tranche of i think intellectual elites like the foreign policy establishment whatever you want0.98
00:21:55.600to call it, who seem to still think that politics is a battle of ideas.
00:22:00.680I do wonder if End of History was just like his justification for the way we got here.
00:22:08.320Because anyone in his position, a Rand Corporation State Department employee, knows that the
00:22:16.340ascendance of these ostensibly liberal countries in the Cold War era was a brutal undertaking.
00:22:21.940and if you had a hand in that brutality it might be comforting to tell yourself a little story
00:22:27.880about how what actually happened was that the best most appealing ideas triumphed over their
00:22:33.480competitors yeah that's my pet theory about what brought francis fukuyama to this point where he
00:22:39.680writes this book he had to write it because he could not face god that's why 30 years later i
00:22:46.080had to read it for a podcast so you know i almost didn't want to talk about his like analysis of
00:22:53.900economics because he's out of his depth in like large portions of this book but maybe none more
00:23:00.320than his economic stuff he talks as if there's no question that capitalism reflects like economic
00:23:06.620liberation sure obviously that's just like hand waving and assuming away every critique of
00:23:12.180capitalism that has ever been. And it just completely adopts this right-wing framework
00:23:16.940where like free markets mean free people. There's a line worth pointing out from the original essay.
00:23:23.320He says, Marx asserted that liberal society contained a fundamental contradiction that
00:23:29.280could not be resolved within its context, that between capital and labor. And this contradiction
00:23:34.240has constituted the chief accusation against liberalism ever since. But surely the class0.94
00:23:40.260issue has actually been successfully resolved in the west what uh wait that's the whole quote i
00:23:45.660wish i could tell you that there's like another couple of lines that like really explains what
00:23:49.180he's trying to say here but there's really not he gives a little more explanation it's that he says
00:23:54.160quote the root causes of economic equality do not have to do with the underlying legal and social
00:23:59.820structure of our society which remains fundamentally egalitarian whatever what he's saying is that like
00:24:06.660Yeah, there are problems, but they're not fundamental. They're not inherent to our system. Yeah. So anyway, that's a little snippet you can keep in your pocket the next time. See like an unhoused person who needs money for food. You can just say, hey, don't worry, bro. The class issue has been successfully resolved in the West.
00:24:26.080But then what's so interesting about that, though, is that the extent to which the class
00:24:29.620issue has been resolved is almost entirely a function of socialist structures that we
00:24:34.980have placed for the redistribution of wealth.
00:24:37.480I guess you could call it a triumph of capitalism if you want to, but it's a triumph of capitalism
00:24:42.100plus redistribution and high taxes on wealthy people.
00:24:45.660It's not like, oh, capitalism just like happened to solve this thing.
00:24:49.560There's no scenario under which capitalism itself would provide money for unemployment,
00:24:55.540I think that what he's actually saying is that like society has agreed that Western capitalists, liberal democracy is the winner. And yes, inequality and poverty persist. But those people who have come out on the bottom of our system, they're just the natural and organic losers. And I don't give a shit. Right.
00:25:15.420They don't factor into this like global consensus that he's describing.1.00
00:25:21.520And like he's basically making this like very common conservative argument that like the fact that someone is impoverished or suffering is not something that you actually have to care about unless the conditions were unfair to begin with.0.97
00:31:52.780Anyway, I just wanted you to suffer with me.
00:31:55.360I didn't really have more to say about this.
00:31:57.000Thank you for bringing me into the dark tunnel that you've been in for the last couple of weeks.
00:32:03.900That's why, by the way, I have nothing to say about the last half of this book because I was just like ripping through the pages being like, again, we're still doing this?
00:32:21.780I mean, although he's sort of constantly making it and never making it, he's always sort of touching on the ways in which he believes that liberal democracies are superior.
00:32:34.820But he always falls back on that same basic argument that it is appealing to these base human desires, the desire for recognition.
00:32:45.840And that is why liberalism and democracy succeed because they feed those desires and people need those things.
00:32:53.480And all of his arguments sort of circle back to that point.
00:32:56.400I don't want to get into like the human nature stuff, but I don't hate the argument that that's a big part of the appeal of democracy.
00:33:31.300And that's why the book is so, like, just so arrogant.
00:33:35.620This, like, whole idea to, like, evolve as a species for millions of years, try one form of political organization for, like, 200, only a few decades of which are even, like, a good faith effort.
00:33:50.300And then declare that you have solved the problem of ordering society as if, like, all of history is a Disney movie and we're now just in this happily ever after phase.
00:35:04.100I don't know if he's ever reckoned with this, but I feel like he's right in that the world has become more liberal democratic, but he hasn't reckoned with how much he helped bring about the world that we have now, where a lot of countries have quietly backslid into authoritarianism.
00:35:22.260because they still look like liberal democracies on the surface.
00:37:02.280It's also, it was very smart of him to write an unreadable book because nobody's going to go back
00:37:06.940and find like specific passages that debunk him. Like this is the Paul Ehrlich move where like,
00:37:12.400even when you make specific predictions about the future, like there will be large scale famines
00:37:17.320and then those famines don't happen. All anybody remembers is like, this guy seems like a smart
00:37:22.740dude. Like he really has the finger on the pulse. And like you, you never fall out of polite
00:37:27.360discourse because nobody goes back and actually reads your specific words. And in Fukuyama's case,
00:37:32.780no one understands what the fuck he was trying to say. Right. I mean, and you can, you can even0.96
00:37:36.740see like how the discourse plays out where someone's like, Hey, you had a book that said
00:37:41.280liberal democracy was going to be the basic form of human government forever based you know more
00:37:48.420or less and then he he gets to be like aha no you didn't understand uh what i said was that
00:37:55.260right the thematic response to liberal democracy is such that and then like you're just like what0.97
00:38:02.260what what the fuck like he gets to take you into a place where you're totally uncomfortable because0.81
00:38:08.000he's literally created his own vocabulary. Peter, are you saying that thymos isn't the0.99
00:38:12.880psychological seat of justice and selfishness while at the same time being closely related
00:38:16.840to selflessness? What I'm saying is that the thymotic self demands recognition for its own
00:38:21.880sense of the worthiness of things. We both have this fucking text in the window in front of us,0.98
00:38:27.060just staring at it like my head tilted like a golden retriever the whole episode.0.99
00:38:33.360what the fuck is he talking about it's so unfair that we're not allowed to call someone like this1.00
00:38:41.600stupid it's less offensive to me to just be bad at math yeah yeah than it is to write something1.00
00:38:47.900like this i feel like fukuyama is is less of an interesting beast than the kind of person he is0.97
00:38:54.940and the times that birthed him right like this is like the formation of sort of the ideas industry
00:39:00.740and this this kind of fetishization of ideas ideas are going to save us right right and i think one
00:39:06.760of the ways you remain popular in like places like davos you can't really get down in the muck
00:39:13.500of actually wanting anything yeah and you don't want to actually do any fighting for these ideas
00:39:18.380because all of a sudden people are going to pull back and be like oh it seems like you're doing
00:39:21.700politics whereas like this is ideas but then what's the point of an ideas industry if it doesn't
00:39:26.740actually become policy somewhere. Right. Like these people want the seriousness and the
00:39:31.540credibility of people who are meaningfully linked to politics, but they don't want to actually like
00:39:36.340do the boring stuff of supporting one political outcome or another. Right. He's Dr. Manhattan on
00:39:43.780Mars. Like I'm tired of being caught in the tangle of these people's lives. I mean, that's actually
00:39:48.220really good for it. Yes. He just sort of like watching everything like the fucking magi.
00:39:51.840And, you know, in general, it's hard not to look at, like, the post-2016 era of international politics and not think, like, it seems like maybe the whole communism, fascism, capitalism thing hasn't been quite hashed out, right?0.98
00:41:36.100It is. And a very prescient description of the neoliberal malaise of like the 90s and the 2000s.
00:41:42.860Right. And if he had framed this essay as a prediction of like what the next couple of decades would look like rather than the next couple of centuries, I think you could argue that he was on point or that he was like getting something very real.
00:41:56.000Right. Right. I mean, people are coming and saying my life sucks. And Fukuyama is just like tapping the sign like, well, we are a fundamentally egalitarian country. So the problem's been solved. Right. There's only so long you can tap that sign before people are like, fuck that sign. Right. Right. Shit sucks for me.
00:42:15.780I've listened to a bunch of interviews with Fukuyama and read some pieces by him where1.00
00:42:22.420it feels like he should be answering the question, was your thesis wrong?
00:43:28.920I'm sending you an excerpt from the new essay where he sort of lays out again his thesis.
00:43:36.380Okay. No authoritarian government presents a society that is in the long term more attractive
00:43:41.460than liberal democracy and could therefore be considered the goal or end point of historical
00:43:45.740progress. The millions of people voting with their feet, leaving poor, corrupt, or violent
00:43:50.420countries for life not in Russia, China, or Iran, but in the liberal democratic West,
00:43:54.520amply demonstrate this. So this is Fukuyama trying to like reset the discussion a little bit.
00:44:03.420Right. He's doing his Fukuyama thing where he's like saying a bunch of true facts,
00:44:08.140but he's using them to reach a conclusion that is not justified by them at all. He's basically
00:44:13.200saying that like people don't like living under dictatorships, which sort of depends on the
00:44:18.240dictatorship. Like some in-groups are actually quite happy to live in authoritarian states.
00:44:22.400And then he's like, oh, well, everybody's leaving so you can tell they don't like living under dictatorships. But like people leave countries for like a really wide range of reasons. Like one of the highest out migration rates in the world is Lithuania because it's in the EU and people can just like really easily move to other countries and make more money. It's not a dictatorship. And like he has to know this, right? World immigration trends are not driven by one factor.
00:44:49.560You know, he's like, people are leaving Iran. And it's like, well, we have used sanctions to completely cut them off from the rest of the world. So I guess I get I mean, that's true in some regards. But is that really a good example? Right. I don't know. I'm half Orion. And so this sort of makes me lose my mind a little more than it usually would.0.99
00:45:08.220it's just sort of like come come on like you can't discuss the economic situation in iran
00:45:16.420as like the manifestation of ideology yeah he has to write this piece because it's been 30 years
00:45:24.000since he published the book and he sort of seems to be wrong right liberal democracy appears to
00:45:30.020be on the decline globally not permanently ascendant and he's subtly changing the discussion
00:45:37.260by saying no authoritarian government presents a society that is in the long term more attractive
00:45:43.800than liberal democracy, constantly pushing it further into the future. His thesis did not
00:45:50.120predict what is happening globally right now. If he were honest, he would be like,
00:45:55.780I missed something here, right? I was a little too conclusive or whatever.
00:46:00.560But instead, he's like, one day it'll be liberal democracy forever.
00:46:04.340God, it's the political philosophy equivalent of self-driving cars where they're just always five years away for like a good Sonic the Hedgehog 3D game.
00:46:15.220He makes this case in the early 90s that breeds a complacency that I think you can credibly argue leads to liberal backslide just a couple decades later.
00:46:27.780And then he like writes about liberal backslide like, oh, this is bad.