I remember the first time I heard of Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History”, and I remember thinking “no one can be stupid enough to believe that.”
But I knew I was wrong, because it kept popping up. The article became a book, even, and fools further down the intellectual stupidity chain made careers out of sub-theses, like Thomas Friedman’s “the world is flat”.
The thesis of the “End of History” was that the ideological wars were over: democratic market capitalism had won, everyone knew it, and history was in effect over because the great ideological war of the 20th century between capitalism/democracy, communism and fascism/democracy had ended. Everyone admitted that democratic capitalism had won and was the best system and now inevitably it would sweep the world and usher in an era of prosperity and relatively good government.
This is what elites wanted to hear after the fall of the USSR and Francis was the one to tell them. He was considered a great intellectual, made lots of money and elites proceeded to act as if he were right.
There were a lot of knock on consequences but there two were most important. The first was that without a competing model, western elites felt free to really rev up the immiseration train started by Reagan and Thacher. Post-war elites had been genuinely scared of Communism, in the “we could wind up dead” way and that had driven a lot of their acquiescence to cutting ordinary people a good deal. (A lot, not all. Much of it was just that the Great Depression cut their legs out from under them, and FDR then broke their kneecaps.)
The shipping of industry to allies and to the third world did not start at the end of the Cold War, but it did go into overdrive. The old police was to make sure that the countries it was sent to were not a real threat: either small to medium developing, or American allies. Now, however, the offshoring and outsourcing train traveled to China. Deng had opened up markets and privatized a large chunk of the economy, and Fukuyama had said that capitalism lead to democracy, so by shipping all that industry to China, well, the West would make them into a democracy.
The Chinese Communist party, in this storyline, were a bunch of suckers, who were inviting in the very forces which would overthrow them.
The line in poker is that if you don’t know who the sucker at the table is, it’s you, but the real danger is when you think someone else is the sucker, and they aren’t.
The CCP had understood Americans and the West very well. Ironically they were aided in this by Marxism and their belief that capitalists were blinded by greed. They offered Western elites cheap labor and high profits and dangled the dream of access to a market of a billion people.
There was a time when it was understood that what made countries mighty was industry, and that you kept the industry at home. In the post-war era that was relaxed: by you still didn’t send your industry to anyone who might well become an enemy.
But history was over and there were no enemies and the West, with its transnational elite largely shorn of patriotism figured they’d co-opt Chinese elites and make them no longer nationalist.
They didn’t understand that the CCP didn’t feel that way: they were proud of being Chinese and they also believed that if they lost power a lot of them would wind up dead. They obsessively studied the fall of the USSR (and its communist party) and were determined that wouldn’t happen to them. And they deeply resented the west, including America, for the “century of humiliation.”
Sure, they were willing to go to a mixed economy with a lot of capitalism, but they were determined to stay in charge and never become democratic capitalists, and they wanted to return China to its natural place as the richest and most important country in the world, a position it had occupied for most of the last 2,000 years (before that it was India, and before that it was Mesopotamia with Egyptian interregnums.)
So you had two bets. The West, led by America, bet that if they shipped industry to China, China would become just another country like them, happy to be part of an international community running on laws that had been created when China was at its weakest.
The Chinese Communist Party bet that they could let some capitalism in and catch up in technology, and even exceed the West in terms of industrial base.
We now know who was right, and it wasn’t the West. Our tech boycotts are a sign of weakness, not strength. We know we can’t stay ahead of them without restricting their access, but it’s very much a case of slamming the barn door after the horses have left. The tech lead moves to where the manufacturing floor is. Britain stayed in the lead technologically for about 20 years after the US became the #1 manufacturing power, for example, but it was a lagging indicator, and ironically Britain had done the same thing America has done with China: it invested big time, built the factories and transferred a ton of tech.
Fukuyama was full of it. He sold a fairy tale to an elite desperate to believe they had won forever and he in selling it and they in believing it took the exact steps required to ensure it wasn’t true, by empowering the only nation in the world strong enough to challenge America. (India was never in the running due to severe corruption and governance issues.)
But the people who engaged in this foolishness (from the POV of the Americ and its allies) reaped their mortal reward: the elites became stinking rich, and Fukuyama become wealthy and was regarded as a genius for telling the story his audience wanted to hear, even if it was obviously wrong.
History never ends. There is no end-state ideology or system and when someone tells you the world is exactly as wonderful as you want it to be, run.
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