The Future of History: By Francis Fukuyama

Can Liberal Democracy Survive the Decline of the Middle Class?  

Something strange is going on in the world today. The global financial crisis that began in 2008 and the ongoing crisis of the euro are both products of the model of lightly regulated financial capitalism that emerged over the past three decades. Yet despite widespread anger at Wall Street bailouts, there has been no great upsurge of left-wing American populism in response. It is conceivable that the Occupy Wall Street movement will gain traction, but the most dynamic recent populist movement to date has been the right-wing Tea Party, whose main target is the regulatory state that seeks to protect ordinary people from financial speculators. Something similar is true in Europe as well, where the left is anemic and right-wing populist parties are on the move.

There are several reasons for this lack of left-wing mobilization, but chief among them is a failure in the realm of ideas. For the past generation, the ideological high ground on economic issues has been held by a libertarian right. The left has not been able to make a plausible case for an agenda other than a return to an unaffordable form of old-fashioned social democracy. This absence of a plausible progressive counter narrative is unhealthy, because competition is good for intellectual debate just as it is for economic activity. And serious intellectual debate is urgently needed, since the current form of globalized capitalism is eroding the middle-class social base on which liberal democracy rests.

THE DEMOCRATIC WAVE:  Social forces and conditions do not simply “determine” ideologies, as Karl Marx once maintained, but ideas do not become powerful unless they speak to the concerns of large numbers of ordinary people. Liberal democracy is the default ideology around much of the world today in part because it responds to and is facilitated by certain socioeconomic structures. Changes in those structures may have ideological consequences, just as ideological changes may have socioeconomic consequences.

Almost all the powerful ideas that shaped human societies up until the past 300 years were religious in nature, with the important exception of Confucianism in China. The first major secular ideology to have a lasting worldwide effect was liberalism, a doctrine associated with the rise of first a commercial and then an industrial middle class in certain parts of Europe in the seventeenth century. (By “middle class,” I mean people who are neither at the top nor at the bottom of their societies in terms of income, who have received at least a secondary education, and who own either real property, durable goods, or their own businesses.)

As enunciated by classic thinkers such as Locke, Montesquieu, and Mill, liberalism holds that the legitimacy of state authority derives from the state’s ability to protect the individual rights of its citizens and that state power needs to be limited by the adherence to law. One of the fundamental rights to be protected is that of private property; England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688–89 was critical to the development of modern liberalism because it first established the constitutional principle that the state could not legitimately tax its citizens without their consent.

At first, liberalism did not necessarily imply democracy. ..
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/136782/francis-fukuyama/the-future-of-history#


A related, but differently oriented article by me on the idea of history's end:
http://dilipsimeon.blogspot.com/2011/11/twenty-first-century-end-of-history.html

The End of History or the beginning of transformation?
The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War are events of great magnitude. Because we are living through them, many of us do not appreciate fully the significance of what has happened - but as the new century unfolds it will become clearer. For certain liberal intellectuals these events signify the end of history itself - that is, history interpreted as the realisation of the idea of progress. Thus, Hegel’s celebration of the Prussian absolutist state is replicated in Fukuyama’s understanding of liberal capitalism as the final point of arrival of historical evolution. This ideologically coloured concept of history carries the implication that the future can unfold only as an endless vista of capitalist accumulation, and that there is a logical and natural connection between capitalism and democracy. Such theories are linked to classical political-economic notions of capital as a ‘natural’ phenomenon, or an ahistoric “factor of production”. 

The same presumptions underlie the view that capitalism is an economic system which mysteriously combines greed and profiteering with the fulfilment of human interests through what Adam Smith named “the hidden hand” of the market. Contemporary history has also been witness to the ideological rise of monetarist triumphalism, and neo-liberalism, the politically inspired dismantlement of the gains of social-democracy, and an all-round crisis of vision that affects both left and right-wing political forces. It has heralded an era of identity politics and fragmentation, creating more and more barriers between ordinary people on the one hand, coupled with structural adjustments geared toward maximum freedom for MNC’s and speculative capital, on the other. After 9/11, it been engulfed in the first overt phase of an emergent world order, one of whose characteristics is a global assault on civil liberties and long-standing legal conventions on human rights in wartime. It is now a matter of intense debate whether this phase is the last gasp of American imperialism, or the first expression of a more global and esoteric empire, the Empire of Capital.

The idea that capitalism is a permanent arrangement is an assumption that we must challenge. But there is a problem here. Right-wing triumphalism may indeed be challenged when placed in historical perspective. However, radical theory cannot approach the gigantic historical events of the century gone by without performing a thoroughgoing critique of its own past. Is it capable of doing this?.. read more:
http://dilipsimeon.blogspot.com/2011/11/twenty-first-century-end-of-history.html