Exh Hudson

 From Hudson Institute 2001 

In an article in the Wall Street Journal, on October 5, 2001, Francis Fukuyama declared that his "end of history" thesis remains valid twelve years after he first presented it shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Fukuyama’s core argument was that after the defeat of Communism and National Socialism, no serious ideological competitor to Western-style liberal democracy was likely to emerge in the future. Thus, in terms of political philosophy, liberal democracy is the end of the evolutionary process. To be sure, there will be wars and terrorism, but no alternative ideology with a universal appeal will seriously challenge the ideas and values of Western liberal democracy as the "dominant organizing principles" around the world.

He correctly points out that non-democratic rival ideologies such as radical Islam and "Asian values" have little appeal outside their own cultural areas, but these areas are themselves vulnerable to penetration by Western democratic ideas. The attacks of September 11, notwithstanding, "we remain at the end of history," Fukuyama insists, "because there is only one system that will continue to dominate world politics, that of the liberal-democratic West." There is nothing beyond liberal democracy "towards which we could expect to evolve." Fukuyama concludes by stating that there will be challenges from those who resist progress, "but time and resources are on the side of modernity."

Indeed, but is "modernity" on the side of liberal democracy? No doubt, Fukuyama is very likely right that the current crisis will be overcome, and that, at the end of the day, there will be no serious ideological challenge originating outside of Western civilization. Nevertheless, I would like to suggest that there already is an alternative ideology to liberal democracy within the West that for decades has been steadily, and almost imperceptibly, evolving.

Liberal democracy has traditionally meant a self-governing representative system comprised of individual citizens who enjoy freedom and equality under law and together form a people within a liberal democratic nation-state. Thus, liberal democracy means individual rights, national citizenship, and democratic representation. Yet, all of these principles, along with the very idea of the liberal democratic nation-state, are "contested" today within the West, suggesting that we have not reached "the end of history" in the ideological sense delineated by Fukuyama.

It is entirely possible that modernity thirty or forty years hence will witness not the final triumph of liberal democracy, but the triumph of a new type of transnational hybrid regime that is post-liberal democratic, and in the context of the American republic, post-Constitutional and post-American. I will call this alternative ideology "transnational" or "global" "progressivism." This ideology constitutes a universal and modern worldview that challenges in theory and practice both the liberal democratic nation-state in general and the American regime in particular.