The End of History

A somewhat exaggerated obituary

(Photo: Substack AI)

“History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.”

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

Joel Bowman, with today’s Note From the End of the World: Houston, Texas...

Remember when history ended, dear reader?

The year was 1992. Under the Bridge and Tears in Heaven were playing on the FM radio. The Cold War, which had promised such a “Bang!” had ended with barely a whimper. And American philosopher, Francis Fukuyama, had just published a daring book: The End of History and the Last Man.

In light of the great Soviet collapse, Mr. Fukuyama was of the opinion that The West had not simply triumphed over The Rest, but that the world had finally reached “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

In other words, whatever was to be done in the fickle and turbulent realm of politics had, by the grand old year 1992, already been done. Here is Mr. Fukuyama, joining a long line of intellectuals (including Marx) to have become ensnared in the labyrinth of Hegel’s dialectical materialism:

“Both Hegel and Marx believed that the evolution of human societies was not open-ended, but would end when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings. Both thinkers thus posited an "end of history": for Hegel this was the liberal state, while for Marx it was a communist society. This did not mean that the natural cycle of birth, life, and death would end, that important events would no longer happen, or that newspapers reporting them would cease to be published. It meant, rather, that there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled.”

~ Francis Fukuyama

But a curious thing happened on the way to the end of history; namely... history did not end. The political pendulum did not come to a full stop. Stubbornly, insolently, it kept right on a-swingin’...

Time and Again

Indeed, the ‘90s were a time of great political upheaval and experimentation, not all of it leading to the holy grail of western liberal democracy, as imagined by Mr. Fukuyama.

In the power vacuum created by the collapse of the Soviet Empire, Gorbachev’s perestroika (a program of political and economic “restructuring”) delivered the Russian people from the brutality of communism… into the unloving embrace of a corrupted oligarchy…and then to a kind of faux democracy that has seen the same man at the helm for a quarter of a century. (After this year’s “election,” Vladimir Putin became the longest-serving Russian leader since Joseph Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union from 1929 to 1953.)

As for the Americans, co-belligerents in the aforementioned ideological conflict, they continued their own long march…headlong toward a special brand of political circuses and economic madness. 

In a country where any boy, girl or two-spirit animal might grow up to be president, the nation that enthusiastically sent its soldiers abroad to “make the world safe for democracy” offered up a Bush, followed by a Clinton (twice), followed by another Bush (twice), then very nearly another Clinton. Two decades of political power, held in the hands of two dynastic families.

Meanwhile, beneath fierce power struggles at the executive level, America’s vast and menacing security state – about which General Eisenhower famously warned in his farewell address in ‘61, at the height of the Cold War – continued its inexorable mission creep into the lives and private affairs of the good citizens of The Republic.  

The Scourge of War

Neither the defeated Soviets nor the victorious Americans appeared willing to take the path Fukuyama had so carefully laid out for them. The End of History would have to wait...

Ah, but what about Europe, some venture to ask? 

Indeed, Mr. Fukuyama himself preferred the transnational euro-model to the comparatively unipolar American offering. Might not the “post-historic” world manifest itself over on the continent, where a common “Esperanto” currency – in the form of the euro – would facilitate free trade and citizens of all backgrounds, creeds and cultures would walk arm in arm from the Seine to the Danube, the Bay of Biscay to the shores of the Black Sea?

“I believe that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the contemporary United States,” declared Fukuyama at the time, in brave defense of his curious, end-of-days timeline. 

“The EU’s attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a ‘post-historical’ world than the Americans’ continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military.”

Alas, not unlike the Ruskies and the Yankees before them, the Europeans would go on to disappoint Mr. Fukuyama, too. 

After a relatively sanguine start to the new millennium, the Eurozone spent most of the ensuing two decades descending gradually into first economic, then political, and now widespread cultural disaster. Today, protests from one end of the continent to the other – Finland to Greece, the Netherlands to France, Poland to Ireland and plenty more between –  underscore real discord between neighbors in the great eurocrat utopia. Not to mention the scourge of war, which threatens to drag the entire continent, if not the whole western world, into yet another great conflagration.

Under the Bridge

And so, almost a quarter of a century after Mr. Fukuyama stopped the clock on History, it plods along regardless. Evidently, something about the political spirit of mankind just doesn’t want to sit still. 

In the year 2024, the world is faced with a plethora of political challenges, for which many of the seeds were sown in the dimming twilight of the last century. 

That is to say, the ideological struggle continues against the backdrop of protests, uprisings, springs, occupations, revolutions and, over the weekend, here in the United States of America, attempted assassinations. (How close the Republic was to having its own Franz Ferdinand moment, we may never know...) 

Of course, Mr. Fukuyama is not alone in wondering how all this ends. Only, if history has taught us anything, it doesn’t. The show, as always, goes on.

Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...

Cheers,

Joel Bowman

P.S. When Mr. Fukuyama stopped the clocks back in 1992, America’s debt clock was just ticking past $3 trillion. As we type these very words, that figure is fast approaching $35 trillion, a rather brassy 775 percent increase. According to the latest estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, it is set to top $56 trillion within the next decade. And the rate of increase is only accelerating…

In its report last month, the CBO revised its estimate of the budget deficit for 2024 from $1.6 trillion to $1.9 trillion—an increase of more than 20 percent.

As a proportion of annual GDP, the debt will rise from almost 100 percent this financial year to 122 percent in 2034, meaning that the debt is growing at a much faster rate than real economic output. Interest rate costs to service the debt, now approaching $1 trillion, will rise to $1.7 trillion by 2034, when it will become the single largest line item on the federal budget.

Which brings us back to the lessons of history…

Will the United States have to go “Full Argentina” before the pendulum swings back the other way, to sanity, fiscal responsibility and limited government? Or is the die cast? We wait to see…

P.P.S. Extra special thanks to our dear members who support this publication. If you appreciate the work we’re doing here and would like to join our growing community, please consider becoming a Notes member today. Cheers! JB