PanThe BafflerFukuyama’s takedown of neoliberalism makes the book an interesting read for a moment, but it becomes hollow and deflating as the criticism gets lost in his attachment to \'economic individualism\' as the locus of liberalism. All we get then is the realization that neoliberalism went off the rails because its foundations were \'historically contingent.\' Attention neoliberals: beware of history ... Fukuyama writes that he is not concerned with policy; his book is about the principles of liberalism. That is too bad, because it prevents him from wrestling with the contradictions of classical liberalism ... In rejecting the notion that illiberalism is produced from liberalism, Fukuyama ignores how the two are concurrent—how liberalism can tolerate inequality to the point that it will undo its principles ... Missing from Fukuyama’s book is any substantive discussion of United States foreign policy ... ultimately offers readers a worldview that rejects progress in favor of revanchism. Fukuyama turns out not to be the neoconservative he is often labeled, but a conservative akin to Edmund Burke, someone who would prefer a lasting plutocracy over a liberalism that might temporarily destabilize society so that, in time, more individuals obtained political rights. Whereas the neoconservative project is premised on global disruption—what is more disorderly that forcing, and enforcing, democratic governance through the barrel of a gun?—Fukuyama’s project is anti-modern. He wants a liberalism without liberals ... On the one hand, therefore, Fukuyama has a book-length straw man ... can be read as an inadvertent indictment of the past thirty years of history and what we have done to make sense of it. Fukuyama would prefer that capital not be rapacious, that people not be selfish political beings, that materialism not yield greed, that we chasten the impulse to confirm our preconceived biases. No such world exists. And it cannot, given how the events after the Cold War were interpreted in ways that led us to this moment. Fukuyama’s argument relies on world history to rewrite his own, to correct the history he failed to foresee in 1989. For teleology, whether in the hands of historians or former government officials, is ultimately a reactionary and artificial effort to attribute order to complexity. Unable to arrange history in a triumphalist narrative, in an arc that bends toward democracy, Fukuyama asks us to forget the present to preserve the past.
