How it Ends

by Robert Bruce (April 2013)

Part 1

Slouching To Despotism

Once upon a time convergence theory was all the rage in academia, with modish thinkers like John Kenneth Galbraith insisting that the bureaucratic regulation of capital and the rise of the managerial expert would render the ideological conflicts of the Cold War redundant. Like most clever people, he placed great faith in technocrats and the Keynesian idyll of the post war period was to prove a heyday for Comte’s engineers. By the seventies however markets and conviction politics were back, and in 1989 the fall of the Berlin Wall settled the ideological contest once and for all. Soviet style planners might (just) have been able to produce guns and butter, but fibre optics and semiconductors needed help from an invisible hand. The class war was over and the bourgeoisie had won.

In an age of small and petty visions much ink has been spilt attacking Fukayama’s predictions, but his notion that liberal democratic institutions were the essential adornments of modernity has stood the test of time better than the Left’s faith in the crisis of capitalism, as anyone surveying the Left’s response to the global depression would have to admit. In the 30s both the Left and the Right embraced the Plan, in 2013 most centre Left parties are resigned to the effective dismantling of the welfare state and pious declarations of faith in ‘community’ (in the UK this has spawned Blue Labour a vacuous parody of small town niceness elevated into a political creed). Whatever its origins the financial crisis has become a crisis of social democracy. The market reigns supreme, and democracy has no serious political adversary, but this is as much a weakness as a strength.

Fukayama was always acutely aware of this. When he padded out his essay into a book the title expanded to the End of History and The Last Man, an extension which neatly hinted at the source of his misgivings. The phrase is particularly associated with Nietzsche but it is in Tocqueville’s masterpiece Democracy in America that this base material makes its most dramatic entrance. These are ‘the innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives’. The Last Men give us democracy as the lowest common denominator, a default system born of a desire for repose rather than the struggle for recognition that provided democratic aspirations with their transient lustre.

 

The author is a low ranking and over-credentialled functionary of the British welfare state.

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