Francis Fukuyama never promised us we’d be happy.
To be fair to the many readers who thought otherwise, The End of History and the Last Man, his famous 1992 book, did give off a whiff of utopia, trumpeting a post–Cold War world in which liberal democracy had vanquished competing political systems and everyone could lie back on their affordable chaise longues and raise a glass to the expiration of all strife and struggle. “Several” people each week still ask the poor man whether he would like to unwrite that book, he says. Yet Fukuyama insists today that if you had read to the last page—in fact, the last five chapters—you would not have expected serenity. His more sober forecast is right there in the original essay that led to the book: “The end of history will be a very sad time.”
Fukuyama has published a new memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man, in which he hopes to shake off a reputation that he clearly can’t stand. He is not a naive Pollyanna, and he never was. By the “end of history,” he did mean that we had arrived at the best of all possible worlds—and he still does. But being the “Last Man,” inhabiting this ending, was always presented as an unstable condition. Fukuyama borrowed the concept from the dark mind of Friedrich Nietzsche, who used it to refer to a person bored out of their senses, someone who lives in a society where there is nothing left to risk their life for.
What appeared in his earlier book as an alarming afterthought is now front and center for Fukuyama. He wrote The End of History during a time of American triumphalism, as the Berlin Wall was turned into rubble, but the events of the past three decades—9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Donald Trump—have offered up a different story. Fukuyama knows this. His defensiveness keeps him from fully acknowledging how far he’s had to step back from his own previously boosterish views, but he speaks about liberal democracy, this supposedly happy end state, in much gloomier tones. It now sounds like a scary cul-de-sac at night, where the streetlight is busted, an eerie tension fills the air, and there seems to be no way forward.
Purely as a memoir, I should say, this one is disappointing. Fukuyama loses interest in telling his own life story around page 60. The fun and revealing anecdotes are front-loaded. For example, as a young foreign-policy analyst, he kept failing a CIA polygraph test because a question about whether he had ever had sex with a man got him completely flustered (he hadn’t, he hastens to tell us). He writes about his father, a sociologist and committed liberal, who never stopped giving Fukuyama a hard time for his once-conservative political opinions (he did work for Ronald Reagan and the RAND Corporation, after all), telling him he was “brainwashed” by other people. When these more intimate insights taper off, so does any causal connection between Fukuyama’s personal background and his evolving thinking. His grandparents were Japanese immigrants who spent World War II in an internment camp. But this is only briefly mentioned, which left me wondering whether the stories they told him made him more attuned to the vulnerabilities of a pluralistic society.
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We do get a few chapters about what an unapologetic gearhead he is, a lover of woodworking who can also assemble a computer from scratch. Yet Fukuyama spends most of his time and energy on summarizing the ideas that have animated his work, producing a greatest-hits album of insights. This succession of shifting concepts helps clarify how much the bravado that marked The End of History has seeped out of his work. The invasion of Iraq and the long chaos that followed were a turning point. Fukuyama broke with the neocon friends and mentors who had shaped his career until then. His first published piece of writing, in 1979, had been in Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary magazine, and he had once revered the Iraq War architect Paul Wolfowitz as “one of the smartest people I had ever met.” But after that war was launched, in 2003, he stopped speaking with them. He even found himself taking a particularly awkward silent elevator ride with the conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer.
By the late 2000s, Fukuyama was referring to himself as a “realistic Wilsonian.” He is still idealistic about democracy, but he sees that democracy alone is not some kind of fairy dust that can be sprinkled on randomly chosen countries; it is meaningless without institutions and a strong state to ensure the rule of law. His work from over the past two decades has supported this point—especially his two-book Political Order series. “Creating a modern, effective state was a much more difficult task than creating a democracy,” he writes in the memoir, looking back at America’s dead ends in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among the unsexy chapters are those in which he extols the value of an impersonal bureaucracy as crucial for a well-functioning polity, as opposed to one in which a leader hands out jobs to cronies and personally enriches himself.
Liberal democracy will not be dethroned, Fukuyama insists—mostly because no one has come up with a better idea. In response to the global rise of anti-liberal movements, many people across the political spectrum have blamed liberalism itself, casting it as a dilapidated system that should be torn down to the studs. But as far as Fukuyama is concerned, every alternative vision has either already been discredited or would lead to a worse world. The ultimate value of liberalism, he argues, is that it delivers on a fundamental human need better than any other framework (though it could still use plenty of tweaking).
We are defined, he explains, by thymos, a drive for recognition. Almost as much as we need food to live, we demand to have our worth acknowledged. We want respect. And this can be fully realized only in a liberal society where all people have equality under the law. Although “stuff”—Fukuyama’s word—might still happen, since the late 18th century, an increasing number of people have lived with a political system that has at least the potential to scratch everyone’s thymos. And this is why we have reached the end. Full stop.
But there is a problem: It’s really dull here. As much as we desire the autonomy and dignity that come with recognition, we are also drawn to the risk and struggle that were involved in achieving that recognition in the first place. Just because liberal democracies now satisfy the thymotic urge, this doesn’t mean that humans don’t still want something to die for. As Fukuyama explains it in the memoir, “the peace and prosperity brought about by a liberal order based on equal recognition is not enough for many people. They do not want to be recognized as the equals of every other person on earth.” Our horizons have been “flattened,” and it has made us restless and angry.
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This is sad. It is depressing to think that we are incapable of just enjoying the fruits of liberal democracy, and of doing the incremental renovation work of making it function even better for the largest number of people. Instead we “struggle for the sake of struggle,” as Fukuyama put it in his original essay, because we “cannot imagine living in a world without struggle.” Eventually, this means turning on liberal democracy itself—inventing conspiracy theories to stoke our fury, valorizing strongmen, idealizing deadly premodern practices and values—which is how Fukuyama understands the populist and antidemocratic rebellions of the past decade.
All of this might sound cynical if it didn’t have some serious explanatory value. Take his critique of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses. Without ignoring the very real death and destruction in Gaza, Fukuyama says these students are basically bored: “What they want is a break from their lives of steady but unheroic striving to get into those universities, and to experience danger and risk in pursuit of a just cause that has never previously been a major part of their lives. No more than the MAGA right do they have a clear vision of what type of future society they want to live in.” We have plenty of energy for tearing things down, he thinks, but liberal democracy is a logic problem that has already been solved, and it cannot be unsolved or reconfigured.
Fukuyama wants to be able to say I told you so. And on these grounds, his book does remind us that he did. But there is little comfort in this. What he has identified is a human problem: the blink of an eye that separates utopia from dystopia. We got what we always wanted, but it is not enough and never will be. “We have means of distributing resources a bit more evenly and should undertake to do that,” Fukuyama, the ever lucid analyst, writes. “What we lack is a way of distributing respect.” That desire for recognition won’t be sated, and this fact is the most dangerous thing for all of us.
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