9/11 and Fukuyama's End of History

 We've come to another anniversary of 9/11. 

This is the first major anniversary of 9/11 that's taken place during the second Trump term. There have been several that have been significant for me. First is the 10th anniversary, which took place around the time of my return to the USA, when I asked myself what it meant to be an American. Then there was the one in 2018, which was around my return to NYC, which in many ways was a different USA from where I had been staying in "Mexico". Then there is this the 9th of November 2016, which was when Donald Trump was elected the president of the USA. And that's the date that puts 9/11 into perspective. 9/11 was one of those events that seemed more significant to the USA than to the rest of the world. Just like the JFK assassination, which may or may not have changed much in history. 

9/11 was significant in many ways. It was the day that marked the end of the "holiday from history". It was the end of the era where America was the undisputed hegemon of the world. The Afghanistan and Iraq wars that followed it were so shocking and horrible that I couldn't imagine looking back at those wars from the vantage point of the future and thinking to myself, "that wasn't so bad. Those were kinder and gentler times". That was the end of the nice parts of the post Cold War era. When liberal democracy was something to aspire to. When the tech world hadn't yet controlled every single aspect of our lives. When you could trust the US because it was a liberal democracy, and when you could trust liberal democracy to run the world. Those were the days when we still marvelled that the Cold War could end peacefully. In truth, the Cold War would not end peacefully. But it took between 1989 to 2022 in order for a major war to erupt between Europe and Russia. 

What we also witnessed was the devolution of power. It was supposed to be a good thing that you no longer had power concentrated in states and governments. Fascism and Communism were supposed to be the twin nightmares of the middle 20th century, and they fought each other in WW2, and fascism was defeated. Defeating communism would take longer. Soviet communism was defeated by 1989, but Chinese communism evolved into something that Westerners find it very difficult to understand or articulate. 

And yet, after the "defeat" of Soviet Communism, another peril was rising up. It turned out to be the corporatocracy. Many things happened: the internet happened, and changed the way the world worked. Big tech happened. The CCP happened. People thought "nobody's in charge, and that's OK". It turned out to be "nobody's in charge, and that's not OK". The global south started to rise, and challenge the exalted status of the westerners in the world. And the rise of the far right populism in the West is essentially the West lacking maturity when it comes to the downfall of the status when it comes to what it means to be a westerner. 

And that brings up to Ezra Klein's defence of Fukuyama's "End of History and the Last Man". I don't know if Fukuyama was very naive about the impact his essay would have on the discourse in the West. The true story of "the End of History" is not what the essay was actually about. The true story was that the chattering class would latch onto something like Fukuyama's essay and make it into something of a "happily ever after" story that would prove to be the triumph of the West. Right at the moment when the rest of the world was catching up to the West. Then Ezra Klein could say some version of "it's not really the end of history, because what Fukuyama is really saying is that the spiritual quest that sustained the USA in its struggle against Communism is gone, and that's a tragedy. It is always some kind of tragedy when you get your immediate aim in life. 

But that flies in the face of calling it "the end of History". You can't call anything the end of history if there's some major reason, some conceivable reason why we will go back to the state of affairs whereby things are taking place over and over again, the way that they have always taken place. The people of 1989 made a great mistake in supposing their concerns about the big themes of history would be echoed over and over for all time henceforth. The central concern of the day was the free world versus the communists. They ignored the other eras in history where the central themes would be different. At some other points, people were concerned about the power of the papacy, about monarchy, about the struggle between the great powers: the Spanish, the Dutch, the British, the French. Today, there is a confrontation between the waning western supremacy and their uneasy relationship with the rest of the world. And this is not a 100% friendly relationship, and yet it is never as contentious as what it was like during colonial days. There is the rise of the technocracy, which could mirror the rise of the bureaucracies of fascism and communism, and yet are different from them, because they represent a different sphere of power, which is mostly (with the exception of the CCP) something that takes place separately from state power. 

Furthermore, for the first time in a long while, there has been a great crack in the notion that liberal democracy represents the best form of government. The notion that the flagship country of the democracy project - the USA - could elect a knave or a villain like Donald Trump to the presidency is a body blow to the prestige of what democracy means. The narrative of 1989 - that most countries would tend towards democracy because it's better than all the alternatives - is hopelessly shattered. You could say that liberal democracy does not matter anymore, in which case the triumph of liberal democracy could not possibly carry the weight of the statement that its triumph represents "the end of history". The end of history has to be about something important. Liberal democracy mattered in 1989 because governments were consequential. And if governments were consequential, then the "triumph" of liberal democracy leading to the election of presidents like George W Bush and Donald Trump who were the biggest disgraces to the office in USA's history. 

The only possible saving grace to Fukuyama's calling this "the End of History" is that the issue of free world vs communism no longer mattered, that so much of our system ran on autopilot that governments no longer mattered. But doesn't that rather herald the destruction and decay of the system? Governments are no longer holding up the system. It is resting not only on governments, but large corporations and large NGOs and various arrangements of various levels of formality. You didn't just have to study the workings of the state to understand how the world worked, or just have to study the western world. The ecology of the system became far more complicated than it's possible to understand from the mental models you could have in 1989. For all the political turbulence that seemed to characterise the landscape in 1989, the Cold War was a time of relative stability when it came to technological advancement. The internet would still be a few years into the future. We barely understood the ramifications of globalisation. The people who protested against economic globalisation were right about it being as much a force of evil as of good. But they also failed to understand that the most salient aspect of globalisation is not whether it's good or bad: it's that globalisation is inevitable and anybody who tried to stop it would be crushed. 

The most significant aftermath of the Afghanistan War, other than the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, was the disorderly withdrawal of the US forces from Afghanistan. On balance, it meant that while the US managed to avenge 9/11 by killing Osama Bin Laden, the human costs of the Afghanistan War meant that you had to file that under a great tragedy. 

The other thing to note is that it's just as well that Fukuyama is a Japanese American. That's the best kind of American with which you can deliver that message. You need a guy who doesn't 100% look like a real American, to explain to the rest of the world what it means to be an American. Whether that guy is a French guy by the name of de Toqueville, or a foreign looking guy like Fareed Zakaria, or a guy who somehow managed to get elected to the highest office, like Barack Obama. The message of what it means to be American always looks more credible if it doesn't belong to a guy who looks like he descended from one of Mayflower's Pilgrims. Better still if Fukuyama's an Asian. He's a Japanese. His people used to be the bad guys, but they've now come to their senses.