For those who didn’t live through the days of 1989–1990, it’s impossible to characterize the sense of elation. We had dealt with the Cold War for decades of our lives and were raised with an ominous sense of the “Evil Empire” and its reach throughout the world.
Its fingerprints seemed everywhere from Europe to Central America to any local college in the United States. Even U.S. mainline religions were affected, as “liberation theology” became a stalking horse for Marxian theory expressed in Christian terms.
In what seemed like the blink of an eye, the Soviet empire unraveled. It followed a peace made between the U.S. and Soviet presidents and a seeming exhaustion that swept through the old empire. In a matter of months, states all over Eastern Europe fell: Poland, East Germany, what was then called Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Hungary, even as states absorbed into Russia’s borders broke off and became independent. And, yes, and most dramatically, the Berlin Wall fell.
The Cold War was framed in ideological terms, a great debate between capitalism and socialism, which easily became a competition between freedom and tyranny. This was the debate that enraptured my generation.
When the debate seemed settled, my whole generation had a sense that the great parentheses of communist tyranny was over, so that civilization as a whole—indeed the entire world—could get back to the job of human progress and ennoblement. The West had discovered the perfect mix to create the best possible system for prosperity and peace; all that remained was for everyone else in the world to adopt it as their own.
Strangely in those days, I actually briefly wondered what I would do with the rest of my life. I had studied economics and wrote about the subject with growing fervor. If the great debate had been settled, did I really have anything else to say? All essential questions had been answered once and for all.
His idea was essentially Hegelian in that he posited that history was constructed by large philosophical waves that could be discerned and nudged along by intellectuals. The spectacular failure of totalitarian ideologies and the triumph of freedom should serve as a signal that these systems don’t serve to ennoble the human spirit.
What survived and what has proven to be right, true, and workable is a special combination of democracy, free enterprise, and states that serve the people through generous and effective health and welfare programs. This is the mix that works. Now, the whole world would adopt this system. History has ended, he said.
I was surrounded by some pretty smart people who doubted the whole thesis. I too was critical of it simply because I knew that the welfare state as presently constituted was unstable and probably headed for financial ruin. One of the tragic aspects of the economic reforms in Russia, its former client state, and Eastern Europe was its failure to touch education, health care, and pensions. They had settled into a model of not capitalism but social democracy.
Social democracy, not classical liberalism, is exactly what Fukuyama was advocating. To that extent, I was a critic. However, in ways I didn’t entirely understand at the time, the truth is that I accepted the larger historiographic model. I really did believe in my heart that history as we had known it had ended. Humankind had learned. For the duration, everyone understood that freedom was always and everywhere better than slavery. I never doubted it.
Keep in mind, this was 30 years ago. In the meantime, we have been surrounded by evidence that history didn’t end, that freedom isn’t the world’s norm nor even the U.S. norm, that democracy and equality are not exalted principles of world order, and that every form of barbarism of humankind’s past is dwelling in our midst.
We can see it in the Middle East. We can see it in China. We see it in mass shootings in the U.S., in political corruption and in knock-down-drag-out political machinations. The evidence is even at our local drug stores that are having to lock up even the toothpaste to keep it from being stolen.
The thesis of 1992, the alleged inevitability of progress and freedom, today is in tatters all over the world. The grand forces have not only failed to take care of us; they have also fundamentally betrayed us. And more so every day.
This shift has been the single most decisive turn in world events in the past decades. It was hard to deny that it had already happened after 9/11, but life was good in the U.S., and we could observe the wars abroad like spectators watching a wartime flick on TV. Mostly, we stayed in a state of ideological stupor as anti-freedom forces at home grew and grew and the despotisms we once despised abroad multiplied in power within our shores.
Looking back, it does seem like the “end of history” framework inspired some millenarian thinking on the part of U.S. elites: the belief that democracy and quasi-capitalism could be brought to every country on the planet by force.
The year 2020 put a fine point on it as the war for control came home. Domestic bureaucracies ran roughshod over the Bill of Rights, which we had previously believed to be the parchment on which we could rely to protect ourselves. It didn’t protect us. Neither were the courts there for us because, like everything else, their functioning was either throttled or disabled for fear of COVID-19. The freedoms that we had been promised melted away, and all the elites in media, tech, and public health celebrated.
We’ve come a very long way from those confident days of 1989 through 1992, when aspiring intellectuals like me cheered the seeming death of tyranny abroad. Confident in our belief that humankind had a marvelous capacity for looking at evidence and learning from history, we cultivated a conviction that all was well and there was little else for us to do but tweak a few policies here and there.
Now, I’m asking myself the question: Was Spengler advocating or merely predicting? It makes a huge difference. I’ve not revisited the book to find out. I almost don’t want to know.
No, history didn’t end, and there should be a lesson for all of us in this. Never take a certain path for granted. Doing so feeds complacency and willful ignorance. Freedom and rights are rare, and perhaps they and not despotism are the great parentheses. It just so happened that they were themes that formed us in an unusual moment in time.
The mistake we made was in believing that there is logic to history. There isn’t. There is only the march of good ideas and bad, and the forever competition between the two.
