The Wykehamist The Wykemamist Common Time 2017 No. 1474 | Page 7

Neither the failure of both Chavismo and
radical Islam to replace liberal democracy, nor
the reluctance of Russia and China to embrace
it, necessarily disprove Fukuyama’s thesis that
the end of history has come. Rather it is
necessary to look at the liberal democracies
themselves to show that Fukuyama’s position
can no longer be sustained. The events of the
past few years have seen a notable change in the
political and ideological discourse of the West:
a rejection of liberalism and the rise of the new
wave of nationalism. Through this re-emerging
political movement, sometimes labelled by
commentators as the ‘New Nationalism’, the
ideas of liberal democracy, free trade,
globalism and multiculturalism, which
Fukuyama and many others considered proven
as universally good, were repeatedly rejected
by the social group that had been almost
forgotten during the past twenty years – low-
earning white workers. In the words of Michael
Hirsh, a political commentator for POLITICO,
‘Displaced working people of the world are
uniting – in their demand for disunification.’ In
the United States, for example, what might have
seemed brilliant trade and economy-boosting
policies in Washington, had actually damaged
the fortunes of this neglected group. These
policies including the free-trade agreements
such as NAFTA or, had it been passed, TPP, as
well as support of immigration in the interests
of economic growth. It took Donald Trump and
Brexit leaders to give voice to those who were
damaged by these measures instead of
prospering, to cast doubt on the absolute truths
of liberal democrats and to show that history
was moving and evolving again.
This new nationalism is not a local issue based
uniquely on the frustration of American
working class in the Rust Belt or British
workers dissatisfied with the flow of Eastern
European immigrants taking their jobs. It is a
part of a broader, global phenomenon, which is
based on different levels of rejection of liberal
values and promotion of economic, political
and cultural sovereignty. Its great two successes
of 2016 were far from unique, they were just a
tip of an iceberg that consists of similar
movements all around the world: from France’s
Front National to the Central European populist
governments of the Visegrad Four, Putin’s
pseudo-tsarist regime in Russia, Erdogan’s
Islamic nationalism in Turkey, the fragile and
dwindling democracies of Africa, Narendra
Modi’s Hindu nationalism in India, or Shinzo
Abe’s Shinto sentiments presented during the
last G7 meeting.
It can hardly be predicted how far this new
protectionist political development will go,
whether it will succeed or what the
consequences of the potential erosion of the
EU, NATO or other international organisations,
if this were to happen, would be. Nevertheless,
it is crystal clear that Donald Trump, Boris
Johnson, Victor Orban and others have
postponed the end of history presupposed by
Fukuyama, they have challenged the
intellectual snobbism of Western elites. They
have shown them that, even though they had
dominated the public debate, their views were
not the only ones and neither necessarily the
right ones, that liberal democracy was not the
universally and unanimously accepted way of
government, and that the metaphorical
evolution of ideology is not yet at an end.
But maybe there is no way of stopping it at all,
maybe history is not teleological, there is no
goal nor end to it. Perhaps it is absurd, given the
unprecedented rise of historical consciousness,
to stick to the old ideas of history as something
that is aiming to its conclusion. History did not
start out all of a sudden somewhere between
Euphrates and Tigris, at one single and
precisely definable moment on the timeline.
Maybe it is, similarly to biological evolution,
just an infinite chain of interactions and causes,
cumulative progress that not only lacks the
beginning, but also an end. Fukuyama himself
saw a potential criticism of his theory in the idea
that the end of ideological evolution cannot
come without the end of a biological and
technological one. This problem is even more
acute now than it was at the time he wrote The
End of History and the Last Man, as the time
has come when science has made
unprecedented progress in the areas of genetic
engineering,
computer
science
and
nanotechnology. It has therefore, potentially,
accelerated our own biological evolution. In the
world of cyborgs, computer programmes that
can outsmart humans, or Harari’s homo deus (a
new, faster, stronger and smarter human species
created through genetic engineering), the
‘ideal’ way of government will keep developing
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