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                                                                                WORLD, Page 31

AMERICA ABROAD

Terminator 2: Gloom on the Right


By Strobe Talbott


    In 1989 Francis Fukuyama wrote a recondite essay on
political philosophy for a small neoconservative quarterly, the
National Interest. It caused a sensation, largely because of its
title: "The End of History?"

    Well, like that other terminator, Fukuyama is back, this
time with a book. The End of History and the Last Man, to be
published in the U.S. this week and in 12 languages around the
world next month, has earned advance raves from various worthies
of the right, including George Gilder, Charles Krauthammer,
Irving Kristol and George Will. The book is certain to be widely
discussed, as the original article was, although probably not
so widely read. Its 418 pages are dense with difficult words and
concepts, many of them borrowed from Plato, Hegel and Nietzsche.
(For a definition of megalothymia, see page 182; for a
metaphysical discourse on what The Bonfire of the Vanities tells
us about the zeitgeist, see page 329.)

    Yet the thesis is simple enough. After millenniums of
evolution, revolution and war, the forces of freedom are finally
triumphing over those of dictatorship. The bad news is that the
combination of market economics and elected government, now
breaking out all over, is the best we can do; since we have
arrived, we have nowhere else to go. We may end up "secure and
self-absorbed," suffering from "the boredom of peace and
prosperity," devoid of the "striving spirit" that gives humanity
its sense of direction. Homo politicus is on the brink of
becoming "the last man" -- the ultimate couch potato, "less than
a full human being, an object of contempt."

    Fukuyama's dark musings about the future are rooted in his
view of the past, especially the past 40 years. Like many
others, he exaggerated the threat of communism. Now he is
exaggerating the significance of its disappearance, and he is
worried that without a clear-cut, epic struggle between good and
evil, we will go soft and flabby.

    Throughout the cold war the American right defined itself,
its opponents, the national purpose and the life of the planet
in terms of the Great Other, the global menace centered in
Moscow. The McCarthyite witch-hunts of the 1950s grew out of a
wildly unrealistic fear that the reds could take over the
country. In the early '60s, many Western experts were slow to
recognize the Sino-Soviet split because it contradicted their
belief in a monolithic enemy. In the '70s, conservatives argued
that leftist tyrannies were ascendant in the world and
impervious to the kind of internal reform and people power that
has now toppled the Soviet Union.

    Part of the fallacy then, which Fukuyama perpetuates, was
an obsessive focus on ideology. Of course ideas can be
wonderful, or terrible, and potent; you don't have to be a
Hegelian to know that. But Fukuyama invests abstractions --
comprehensive categories and grand postulations -- with more
weight than messy reality will support. For instance, in a chart
intended to show how the number of "liberal democracies" on
earth has grown, he includes Singapore, where there are laws
against chewing gum and failing to flush public toilets; Sri
Lanka, where murderous ethnic and religious violence continues
nonstop; and Colombia, where narcoterrorists butcher judges and
parliamentarians in broad daylight.

    At the same time, he gives short shrift to the spread of
Islamic fundamentalism and the resurgence of nationalism,
seemingly because neither phenomenon fits his paradoxical thesis
that mankind is entering a state of grace and risking terminal
boredom. To cope with the awkward fact that the red star still
flies over the head of 1.2 billion Chinese, he argues that the
Beijing regime no longer qualifies as totalitarian; it "has
become just another Asian authoritarian state." This distinction
would not impress the victims of Tiananmen.

    Fukuyama's point is that even in China, where communism
remains the official line, it has lost its "dynamism and appeal"
as an idea marching through "History." He is so much under the
influence of 19th century German philosophers that he sometimes
capitalizes Important Nouns. That quirk is telling: Fukuyama
takes the intellectual underpinnings and pretensions of
political movements more seriously than almost any politician
does. The perfect example is his treatment of communism. That
doctrine long ago proved to be a recipe for the accumulation and
consolidation of raw power by a conspiratorial elite, not a
monument to the theories of Marx -- or, for that matter, of
Hegel, whom Marx admired almost as much as Fukuyama does. In
fact, the more successful avowed communists were in practice,
the more cynical they were about the theory.

    As many of its own practitioners came to recognize,
communism was a bum idea. In the U.S.S.R., it barely survived
the threescore years and 10 that the Bible prescribes as the
mortal life-span. Its passing should free our "striving spirit"
to concentrate on all sorts of other challenges, such as the
growing conflict between the haves and the have-nots and the
need to refine liberal democracy, not just in places like Sri
Lanka but in the developed world as well. So Fukuyama can cheer
up. The continuation of history will be plenty interesting.