MEN VS LAST MEN:

[H]is deterministic concept of the friend-enemy distinction, his insistence on its universal applicability, and the danger of fascism are not the only reasons to disagree with Schmitt's vision. We should also disagree with it because it doesn't work. The sort of spiritual meaning and community the state provides is the febrile, astroturf, empty community of demagoguery and passion. It is both false and unsustainable.

Fukuyama not only understands this; as McAleer rightly notes, he warns against it in his 1992 book in the section on The Last Man. But Fukuyama didn't stop there. He gave us a book-length treatment of something similar in what may actually be his finest work, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (2018). "The modern concept of identity places a supreme value on authenticity, on the validation of that inner being that is not being allowed to express itself," he argues. Fukuyama argues these are the psychological roots behind identity politics, nationalism, Islamism, and more. Nationalism, for example, is "based on an intense nostalgia for an imagined past of strong community in which the division and confusions of a pluralist modern society did not exist." Humans' need for recognition and validation is a pre-political insight of psychology and spirituality that has enormous political consequences. McAleer in his critique implies Fukuyama was too enamored of systematic and mechanistic thinking. That may be true of the earlier work, but the latter is hardly that.

But it is fair to ask if Fukuyama has sufficient grounds on which to answer the psychological and spiritual challenges he rightly identifies. Fukuyama wants us to reaffirm the value of democratic equality and reject the siren calls of identity politics and nationalism. But why should we? If liberal democracy is spiritually empty--if recent history has rendered a verdict of its own--why stick with it? Of course, the alternatives we know about are terrible, but what should keep us from trying to find new ones?

We should not try to find new political options that are more spiritually fulfilling because politics is not supposed to be spiritually fulfilling. Liberalism is spiritually empty by design; the emptiness is a feature, not a bug, of the ideology. But Fukuyama leans too heavily on the optimistic, Enlightenment version of liberalism, which has lost sight of one of the main selling features of liberal thought. Because of its optimism, Enlightenment liberalism bleeds too easily into the progressivism of the contemporary left--which is just the latest intolerant political religion to try to take over our public square.

The right answer is a chastened liberalism that remembers its other roots: the Christian belief in original sin, fear of what mankind is capable of doing to itself, and a distrust of concentrations of power. Reinhold Niebuhr's Christian Realism was one version of what that might look like, and he articulated the best case for democracy from more pessimistic grounds. McAleer recognizes that there is a gap or a missing piece in Fukuyama's thought but misidentifies it. The gap is that Fukuyama does not make use of the resources afforded by religious thought. It is an odd omission, considering that Fukuyama, in speaking of identity, recognition, thymos, and resentment, is addressing essentially spiritual questions.

But the gap leaves room for the next generation of thinkers to appreciate the best of Fukuyama's thought--including the vision and sweep of The End of History, the staggering ambition and learning of his two-volume magnum opus on The Origins of Political Order and Political Order and Political Decay, and the deep psychological insight of Identity--and still see room for more.

Tweet   @brothersjudd