A quick refresher: The basic gist of Fukuyama’s argument is that liberal democracy is the best and final answer to both the “social question” and the “political question” as 19th century thinkers put it (lengthy explainer here). The long dialectal, often bloody, contest over various forms of government—monarchy, authoritarianism, fascism, communism, liberal democracy, etc.—has been settled, and liberal democracy won. Fukuyama used the term “history” in a very specialized, Hegel-drenched, way. He didn’t argue that the clock would stop and events would no longer happen. From the Hegelian perspective, the “end of history,” Fukuyama explained, “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.” For Marx—the quintessential hedgehog—history would end with the withering away of the state and everyone living in perfect communism. For Hegel, it would be the liberal state. […]
Anyway, one of the great, prescient insights in The End of History is that liberal democracy cultivates a kind of “boredom” that causes people to want to overthrow it. “Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause,” Fukuyama wrote. “They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.”
And there you have all the explanation you need for the post-liberal, neoreactionary, “Do you know what time it is?” right. Ditto all of the post-liberal, anti-Enlightenment, critical theorists and neo-Marxists of the left. And let’s not forget the deracinated and alienated goobers who signed up to join ISIS or the trustafarian jabroneys and grad students who simp for Hamas. It’s not monocausal, of course. But, you get my point. As I’ve said before, boredom kills.
But where does the boredom come from? “Tocqueville explained that when the differences between social classes or groups are great and supported by long-standing tradition, people become resigned or accepting of them,” Fukuyama wrote. “But when society is mobile and groups pull closer to one another, people become more acutely aware and resentful of the remaining differences.”
The narcissism of small differences is one of the great drivers of human conflict. From college faculty fights to intramural libertarian fights, to the Russia-Ukraine war, groups that are very similar often have the nastiest conflicts. There’s something about people sharing most of the same cultural, religious, and political assumptions that makes the remaining disagreements seem wildly more important than they should be. Huge differences between cultures don’t bother people the same way as small ones because the big differences aren’t threatening. European Catholics weren’t all that outraged by Confucianism, Hinduism, or Shintoism, but man, Protestants got under their skin. Why? Because Protestantism was a threat to the way Catholics defined themselves, and vice versa. You fight enemies, you hate traitors. You try to convert pagans, you punish or exterminate apostates and heretics (vast swaths of antisemitism in various eras can be chalked up to this dynamic). You see this everywhere in politics. The hard left hates “neoliberal” moderates far more than they hate conservatives, even though they agree on so much more. If the Trumpified corners of the Christian right hates anybody more than they hate David French—pro-life, devout, Christian, David French—I don’t know who that person is.
Given that a President Kamala would likely be constrained by a GOP Congress, she should offer two fake existential crises that they could work on together: establishing control over the border and the budget. Summon all Americans with a vision of sacrifice to get the government’s economic house in order and make believe we’ll be enduring major sacrifices. Recall that when Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich managed it both sides were able to take credit and government t seemed to be working.
