Indignity Vol. 2, No. 65: Francis Fukuyama stuck in a time loop.

THE WORST THING WE READ THIS WEEK™

Photo: Justin Anderson

The End of Current Events

WHAT DOES AMERICA’S electoral future hold? Gasoline prices, the nation's dumbest determinant of political legitimacy—the Mandate of Exxon—are falling again. The Senate rallied itself from stupor and dysfunction to quickly and confidently pass a version of Joe Biden's seemingly moribund second reconciliation spending bill, complete with measures meant to do something about the climate catastrophe. The Republican Party, inflamed by its victory over Roe v. Wade, has launched into a state-by-state attack on reproductive rights so nakedly unpopular that even the voters of Kansas, given a chance to address it at the polls, chose to beat it back. 

It's hard to say politics looks more hopeful than it did a few months ago, with the right wing still accelerating its accelerationism and Donald Trump making noises about running for president again. But at least things look different. 

Or do they? In a blog post last week—cross-posed on his own website, American Purpose, and on the orthodox heterodox site Persuasion—the pundit Francis Fukuyama offered his own assessment of the political situation. Fukuyama is best, and mostly only, known for being the person who greeted the last days of the Cold War with an essay and book announcing the arrival of "the end of history"—that is, "the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."  

The punchlines, at least, turned out to be universal and inevitable. But as history chose to keep on going, so did Fukuyama.