MixedLondon Review of BooksKlein is an energetic and insatiably curious traveller who seems to have something vivid and illuminating to report about almost every part of the world. Some might feel, however, that she skips lightly over evidence that complicates her narrative of innocence besieged by corruption. It would be unfair to suggest that if she hadn’t believed it, she wouldn’t have seen it with her own eyes. But her high-altitude generalizations seem less fresh than her ground-level observations ... Klein is willing to go [far] to deny the decisive role of imbecility and obliviousness in the making of the Iraqi disaster ... Klein’s basic argument is curiously difficult to follow. One problem is her conflation of free-market ideology with corporate greed ... Some of the most memorable passages in Klein’s book describe stunning examples of influence peddling, sweetheart deals, kickbacks, corporate scams, nepotism, fraudulent overcharging, cronyism, asset seizures and electoral corruption ... This hope that ordinary people will ‘at last’ take control of large historical processes may explain, by backward reasoning, why Klein assumes that such processes are now tightly controlled by a predatory elite adhering to a sinister doctrine. If that were the case, then refuting ‘the shock doctrine’ would be a first step towards wresting control of world history from the corporate masters. Unfortunately, the developments she so tellingly describes, such as the proliferation of barricades and other techniques for managing class conflict, have deeper and more impersonal roots than greed and ideology. Current trends may be stymied or reversed, but, if this happens, Klein’s admirable aspirations for democracy and justice are not very likely to play much of a role.
Francis Fukuyama
PanThe New York Review of BooksFukuyama’s analysis is flawed in several ways. Three decades ago, he argued that the human desire for respect and recognition was the driving force behind the universal embrace of liberal democracy. Today, he depicts the human desire for respect and recognition as the driving force behind the repudiation of liberal democracy. The reader’s hope for some account, or even mention, of this extraordinary volte face goes unfulfilled. Nor does Fukuyama squarely address the impossibility of explaining recent ups and downs in the prestige of liberal democracy by invoking an eternal longing of the human soul. What’s more, he fails to consider the possibility that after 1989 the obligation for ex-Communist countries to imitate the West, which was how his End-of-History thesis was put into practice, might itself have been experienced in countries like Hungary and Poland as a source of humiliation and subordination destined to excite antiliberal resentment and an aggressive reassertion of nationalism. Similarly, to blame the rise of white nationalism in America chiefly on the left’s profligate attentiveness to marginalized groups is to deemphasize the multiplicity of factors involved ... Finally, Fukuyama’s occasional suggestion that white nationalism reflects a rational concern that new immigrants will not successfully assimilate can also be questioned. Could not extreme nationalists be more afraid that newcomers will successfully assimilate? After all, the implication of successful assimilation is that the identity of natives is something wholly superficial and not really an indelible inheritance that connects them profoundly to their dead forefathers.
