Greatest Hits Vol.1

The End of Fukuyama
(Nosara, 2000, published by Laissez Faire City Times)


For twenty-something years, I mistakenly believed that my book manuscripts and shorter works were ignored for lack of merit. Now, thanks to Dr. Francis Fukuyama, I understand why I failed as a political pathfinder. Americans are impervious to new ideas, no matter how splendidly illuminated, because there are no new ideas which Liberal Democracy is disposed to entertain. The End of History argues that anything submitted after the Battle of Jena in 1806 is basically irrelevant. I wish somebody had told me this in 1975. I could have saved a pile of money on postage.

In his latest book, The Great Disruption, Dr. Fukuyama also advises that "social capital is not a public good" — which is both reassuring and amusing, if you think about it. However, Fukuyama's argument in The End of History makes thinking an optional accessory for aspiring social capitalists. Universal mental impairment is Francis Fukuyama's theory of history in a nutshell, and it seems to be an empirically airtight case.

Unconscionable incompetence accurately describes contemporary political debate. U.S. presidential candidates have been progressively dumbed down at an alarming rate, and carefully coached numbskulls are vying for office this time around. Why all the dead air? — partly because Newt Gingrich's Contract With America fizzled in a brainless publishing scandal, but more importantly, because a conservative Federal deputy bureaucrat, Francis Fukuyama, proclaimed the end of Political History.

Religious power brokers like Ralph Reed saw this preemptive obituary of new ideas to be cosmologically correct (i.e., God's Destiny for America) and, hey, presto! — foreign policy debate promptly ended in President Bush The Elder's affirmation of the Ten Commandments. He targeted Saddam with bipartisan support and bombed Baghdad to enforce Texan Old Testament law. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wellheads.

At the time, journalists were busy celebrating the triumph of liberal democracy. Poland and East Germany were sold at auction. The Soviet Union collapsed. We The People won the Cold War with God's help, although it was unclear exactly what God did on our behalf. CBS News and The New York Times proclaimed with one voice that godless communism was beaten and broken. All of humanity were saved and our future was unobstructed, aside from a few undemocratic enemies of Israel — a legacy of First and Second Wave territorial competition. But Third Wave horizontal networks would deliver us from evil, solving every problem and freeing every man, woman, child, and plankton on earth, because the Dialectic of World History decreed a happy ending for all.

Sound asleep in state university bunkers from sea to shining sea, not one pink-toed professor of history or politics challenged this doctrine or its assumptions during the past eleven years. Why all the soothing silence? — because Francis Fukuyama was preaching to an appreciative college of public servant cardinals. The schoolmen are politically constrained from cheering aloud and killing a fatted calf in his honor, because taxpayers might correctly guess which side of the public good Dr. Fukuyama is buttering.

Like my childhood hero, Sherlock Holmes, who became curious about a guard dog who did not bark when the villain came to call, I find it compelling to understand what Fukuyama quietly slipped past thirty thousand academic guardians of U.S. political philosophy. Readers who like democracy, decency, and prayer in public school have nothing to fear. Francis Fukuyama is your new standard bearer and champion of family values. He quotes Dan Quayle admiringly.

But there's a Silent Majority fly in Fukuyama's family ointment. More than half of the American electorate do not vote and do not care for anything except their personal fortune. To this dishelved rump of a free people, I bring extremely bad news. It's time to put on our Silent Majority dunce caps and do some emergency homework. If you let Fukuyama get away with his "social capital" spin on history, nothing will change. Satire and apathy, multigrain bread and video circuses in a costume drama featuring Oprah's diamond earrings and Sam Donaldson's toupee will remain your uninterrupted civic experience and your children's future — nothing freer or further evolved than a monotony of Politically Correct gossip, which folksy celebrities will indulge nonstop, repeating themselves like good boys and girls.

Despite a pretense of normalcy, the U.S. political stove is red hot. It demands our urgent attention as adult citizens. We are undeniably responsible for the safety and welfare of children, who perceive and mimic our emotional expressions — whether we are habitually glum or joyous or some smiling shadow of self. This is the power and deeper meaning of political history, believe it or not. If you feel that America is mostly free, mostly an unimpeded and open society, like a frontier full of adventure, then your kids will grow straight and tall in the conviction that life is an open road.

However, this is a profoundly uncommon sense of American history. Most of us believe that liberty exists only in the bedroom, that elections and office holders are necessary, and that the adventure of living consists of pleasing neighbors, teachers, coworkers, customers, and cops, who want nothing fundamentally changed — ever. Forty percent of U.S. national income is disbursed by government. Fukuyama in particular and the Beltway Elite in general argue that this is a happy arrangement, after sixty years of increasingly complex regulation and "strict liability" which holds U.S. citizens criminally culpable for doing something that is not morally or logically wrong, but might be displeasing to OSHA tomorrow morning, for instance. Since 1937, the Federal power to regulate commerce in constitutional law has included the prerogative to destroy commerce and quash economic liberty — a doctrine of tyranny triumphant, proclaimed in a U.S. Supreme Court footnote. Hmph. I can play just as rough, see my Historical Note, below.

Ours is a history of national shame, that Americans lost their birthright of freedom. Slaves to the perceived good of the politically numerous, our shame evokes no pride, inspires no discussion, summons no political leadership worthy of respect and admiration. It forces us to go home, to laugh at televised buffoons, and to tell bitter anecdotes of U.S. citizenship, since liberal democracy is an expensive and time consuming farce. Political knowledge is a hopelessly dull subject, deterring debate. It consists mainly of reciting names and titles of public officials and the regulations and tax tables of innumerable local, regional, state, national, and international bureaucracies. Children learned to say "I dunno" instead of asking "why?" because their parents ceased to ask why the American Experiment turned into a socialist state. It certainly didn't start that way. What happened to liberty?

It is a question of highest importance and greatest hazard. The political stove is glowing red hot with embarrassment, because America made its history of liberty into a dusty museum tour of Philadelphia, concealing an archaic relic that few U.S. citizens have bothered to study. Webslingers certainly haven't. They believe Tom Hanks defeated Adolph Hitler and played a cool role in the conquest of space. Many of my younger friends are convinced that man's best hope for a free society is in isolated space colonies. This demonstrates pretty emphatically how fanciful and cartoonish Third Wave freedom fighters are. They think virtual reality is real. Their bible, The Sovereign Individual, reads like a kid's Christmas wish list, beginning with instant personal freedom, courtesy of Fukuyama's (that is: Hegel and Marx's) Dialectic of
World Technology, an amazingly durable can of very old worms. If you mention dialectical history in conversation with second-generation Objectivists, they will spend the next two hours of life carefully debating whether a eunuch should be immortalized in feminist ballad as a Hero of Hegelian Interpretations of Ayn Rand. In today's climate of Politically Sensitive libertarian speech, nothing is fully right or wrong, except the obvious right of infants to Nintendo and Netscape, our Third Wave babysitters of first and last resort.

Human happiness is not confined to ignorance. It is a huge mistake to assume that one can forgive and forget the political world, shrinking it to the mild clowning of George Will's devotion to baseball and Bill Maher's latest chortle. As frustrating and tiresome as philosophy sometimes seems, the only way to find a political exit is to get acquainted with the intellectual furniture.

In his 1989 debut as the voice of World History past, present and future, Francis Fukuyama argued that your brain and my brain and the world of political ideas are completed — a final result which cannot be fundamentally improved. We're stuck with liberal democracy forever, whether we like it or not, Fukuyama claimed. This explains why Americans no longer care about voting, or thinking, or questioning conventional wisdom. Our social conventions are huge, and we are individually small in spirit, unable to justify our empty love of television or to explain our faith in the statistical probability of finding something really cool on the internet eventually. Humbled by their user-friendly lifestyle of electronic playthings, most folks are indeed grateful that history is over. They would be terribly upset, perhaps mentally scarred for life, unable to face the uncertain future, if a revolutionary idea crashed the Disney-ABC share price or preempted a screen of half-time stats on Monday Night Football. Conservatives, liberals, rednecks, and Jews all bow their heads at the same national prayer breakfast, petitioning God for more of the same, thank you.

Contrary to Fukuyama's happy-talk harmonium, in reality there does exist indeed a potential force of revolution, easily capable of ending the majoritarian Toys R Us Welfare State — and it is precisely this potential for political change that Fukuyama is compelled to deny. Those who praise the status quo are threatened to the bone by the existence of human potential, anything that could conceivably upset their predictable paychecks and Federal pensions. It's important to remember that Fukuyama came to intellectual prominence as a career policy wonk, employed by the State Department and its Rand Corporation contractor. Take my word for it, he's a statist.

Fukuyama depicts the end of history as our existing political institutions, directed chiefly by bureaucrats and tax-exempt scholars. It is a rare treat, to hear evil speak quite so confidently in favor of itself. Nothing has tainted democracy so fully and microscopically as the federal-state-local bureaucracy and its intramural struggle for control of "free" public education. The U.S. has hundreds of thousands of officials and state-subsidized scholars, who do nothing but marshal and publish phony evidence to demonstrate that public employment is a result of irresistible History.

Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? — a no fault fascism. Don't blame politicians, don't mock the institution, don't scold the electorate, don't cringe at clumsy campaign antics or conduct in public office that reveals an incomprehensibly shallow national character. Liberal democracy is the ultimate and final flower of History, according to Fukuyama and his extended clan of kleptocrats in socialist Europe. Certainly, that's the root of the problem. It is inaccurate to say that Fukuyama is an American thinker. He explicitly relies on Friedrich Hegel, a 19th century Prussian, whose ideas inspired Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. Not a word of U.S. political history enters Fukuyama's foundations of political history. He asserts that mankind's quest for liberty and justice ended successfully at the Battle of Jena in 1806. As bizarre as it sounds, that's what this debate is all about. Fukuyama says that our potential for political change ended two hundred years ago. No wonder everyone's bored and stupefied. There is nothing further to discuss. The goal of Human History is jet aircraft, carpeted concourses, peanuts, cocktails, keyboards, cars and cocaine — a comfortable "conspicuous consumption" that America swills energetically and which every starving peasant on earth presumably envies and wants to enjoy. For this reason, the business strategies of McDonald's and Microsoft are absolutely identical, to share an unearned economic rent of family friendly brand identities in a world of ever-widening, all-inclusive consumption.

It's a distinct threat. Sometimes I think it too likely, that the End of History will be sexually inert, with millions of nerds trapped in digital realms, gawking at fantasy images and popping rave drugs like X and LSD to make indoor life interesting. I know several bright, handsome men in their mid-20's who prefer to remain closeted with computers day and night, interrupted only by DVD cartoon compilations and cheeseburger wrappers — and who are psychologically unqualified to romance a woman, no matter how cooperative the lady in question may be. It is not for lack of testosterone. The Third Wave digiratti are not homosexual. But they are sexually dysfunctional, unable to grapple with the physical reality of females, whom they worship from a safe distance like smitten schoolboys. A nerd's plight consists of feeling overwhelmed by a complex operating system he does not comprehend,
because females are neither Windows nor Linux. This is why John Gray's stand up comedy Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus became a Third Wave default faith. There is no ctrl-alt-del command to reboot a romance, and the only executable submodules are marriage and family life, success at which requires more effort than an occasional mouse click.

If it seems odd that I should speak about sex in connection with the End of History, then you do not see the central issue as I see it. Fukuyama and his conservative clan want to stop progress. Procreation is our most important progress. In the relation between private mentor and student, it is possible to coach, challenge, guide and inspire a new man or woman, based on wisdom acquired by an elder who had fewer choices and less luck. Dad's advice is usually two-thirds caution, a common sense benchmark hammered home by practical experience. Don't touch the stove. It's hot. The national dad in question is a Dead White European Male (pick one: Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Thomas Paine). His advice to our multicultural progeny consists of a single proposition, that liberty is sacred to a free society. A society free
from what? — from government.

The goal of expanding liberty presupposes new ideas. Without new ideas, we stay stuck in the past, because today's political establishment is yesterday's solution. The last time America did anything strenuous in defense of Liberty was 1776. The War of Independence was a giant step forward. But the Declaration's premise of equality took a Civil War and two centuries of struggle to deliver something like one person, one vote, regardless of race, religion, gender, brainpower, etc. In hindsight, voting and its attendant political vanity was not a very good idea. However, it required 200 years to explore a simple idea like democracy, and it behooves us to start asking what's next. What's next will take a long time to discuss and understand. New ideas, by definition, are unconventional and risky. You have to surrender the familiar, to go forward. Standby to jetison Old Glory. Let's noodle on New Glory.

In twenty years, I've authored a quarter million words. Here, shorn of filibuster, are my Top Seven political ideas — innovative proposals that Francis Fukuyama, Ralph Reed, and many others hope to suppress by denying the existence of valid political innovation. Ready?

(1) Women should be granted by constitutional amendment a separate, co-equal branch of legislature, the entire House of Representatives, for instance. Men can keep the Senate. New laws shall require passage by both sexes.

(2) Women should be exempted from the criminal law and responsible for law enforcement. This will end male input on abortion and domestic violence. I trust women will do justice.

(3) Religion is a mental illness. Separation of church and state implies the end of tax-exempt status for those who preach the glory of God. A free society does not make the pious more tax-free than other citizens.

(4) In reality, government is an illusion. We live in actual, constructive liberty. The ultimate thing at issue is legal philosophy — not law enforcement — because it is impossible to force cowardice upon anyone. It is false to blame politicians and bureaucrats. The Sons of Liberty did not hold elections. They went directly to war and won the right of self-government. We face the same issue. It is our duty to throw off a new set of chains and roll the rock of Liberty another mile.

(5) The new constitution should consist of a single proposition. I evolved my thinking on this matter several times during the past twenty years and recently issued a final communique that I'm willing to defend. No one is legally entitled to judge his own cause of action or to punish another without due process of law and fair public trial by jury.

(6) We do not need a public treasury to provide for national defense or domestic tranquility. In point of legal fact, the U.S. government is bankrupt, and it is laughable to hear anyone speak of paying the national debt. When this becomes irrefutably obvious in 2015, I suggest that we privatize the U.S. military-industrial complex, rather than remain its tax slaves. I don't see the point of forbidding foreign ownership, since U.S. policy is driven by Israel and the Security Council, cordially treating Russia and China as equals in a balance of power. Let's talk IPO. Give the Pentagon to Merrill Lynch and let them syndicate World Cop Inc. I'm sure that Britain, Germany, Japan, and most of New England will buy a piece, to keep crude flowing northward from the slave-states of OPEC.

(7) Ayn Rand was right. It is imperative to strip from tyranny every scientific, technical, and entrepreneurial genius on earth — a strike of the men of the mind — some of whom should be deployed to nudge along the collapse of New Rome on the Potomac. Aggressive, heroic action, personal and collective, is the key to victory.

So long as you believe that politics is the art of the possible, Fukuyama wins, and radically new ideas lose. The American Revolutionary War of Independence was not an exercise in "the possible." A majority of Americans thought it was impossible to resist the King's Officers and win colonial freedom in 1776. The Declaration of Independence was an act of treason, punishable by death. Hit the books for a snap quiz. How many signers of the Declaration were put to death or imprisoned, their fortunes destroyed, their families punished? What was the total civilian economic price of freedom? How many years did we fight a Revolutionary War? How many were killed in battle or died in British prison hulks because Thomas Paine correctly predicted victory and rightly demanded action?

My discussion of Fukuyama is rapidly coming to a close. His theory is nothing but an elaborate excuse to hide in the closet, claiming that the future is foreclosed to anything unexpected, because liberal democracy is sorta okay. Better the devil we know. When Fukuyama extols the virtue of "social capital" networks, he's blowing smoke up your butt. This is a long-standing tradition in Hegelian philosophy, which Karl Marx and Chris Sciabarra adopted as well. Keep talking and talk some more. Write books full of jargon and footnotes. Coin new words and stretch the goo of rubbery neologisms to a mysteriously paradoxical form of infinity. Straddle every epistemological fence, declare victory, and call it World Destiny.

There is no such thing as an impersonal history, other than the record of personal choices of individual men. It boils down to one basic choice: to live privately and free, or to march in somebody's army, taking orders from a public official. In the United States of America today, it is uncertain if private liberty exists as an absolute right to anything. We are confronted daily, instead, with the end of some neighbor's law, some ancestor's faith, some barbarian's right to pig out. If you wish to live in freedom, it begins with the rejection of compliance. Moral necessity requires that you get environmentally unfriendly, sir. Withdraw the sanction of the victim.

Oh, dear. Another reference to Ayn Rand. See? I warned you that there would be some emergency homework involved. Fukuyama sails in William F. Buckley Jr's God Fearing Superpower Squadron, busily patrolling the sea of mainstream political debate to keep buccaneer Objectivists and atheists away from the microphone. In this respect, Fukuyama's theory is true, that history has ended. He and his shipmates suppressed any Objectivist threat to the Republican Party. Their victory inside a convention hall, however comforting to Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, was not quite the same thing as ending political history for all time. Insurgents like me went underground. We're busy seducing others to quit and join us. As Sherlock Holmes once said with the whole of his intellect aroused, "The game is afoot!"
I'm sure you recall that Holmes beat Scotland Yard's bureaucracy every time. This makes a handy myth to judge whether I'm right or wrong. I say a single genius can and will compel the world to something better than liberal democracy, defining a wider and deeper conception of liberty.

Fukuyama says no individual has political power, because moral and political consciousness are impersonal "social capital" that nestled for eternity on the war slogans of the French Army in 1806. Over and out. May the best mind win.

HISTORICAL NOTE
Incredibly, wholesale repeal of U.S. constitutionally limited government was announced in a five-line footnote in the Carolene Products decision, more than 60 years ago. FDR publicly threatened to "pack the Court" with new appointees, unless sitting Supreme Court justices reversed themselves and allowed New Deal regulation of every U.S. factory and farm, which the Court had emphatically and repeatedly ruled unconstitutional. Backed into a political corner and terrified that judicial independence might be wiped out by FDR and a Democrat Congress, the Court offered an olive branch to Roosevelt in a footnote that enshrined individual "preferred freedoms" itemized in the Bill of Rights (free speech, equal protection, speedy public trial, etc) — none of which specifically mentions the common law freedom to conduct a business, or to sell products to the public, or to operate a family farm. In Carolene, all economic power was ceded to Congress. Henceforth, no exercise of Federal muscle, no U.S. regulation, no prohibition of commerce in certain articles of trade would ruffle the Supreme Court's constitutional chicken feathers. To save our so-called "preferred freedoms" from New Deal totalitarianism, the Court abandoned private property rights and made personal economic freedoms (if any) wholely dependent on the whim of Congress. When Congress created regulatory agencies like SEC, FCC, DEA, FDA, etc, bureaucratic procedures and nonsense edicts became supreme law of the land, immune to judicial review. You can't sue anyone in the Federal government for damages, no matter how painful or inane or arbitrary a regulation might be, regardless of whether that regulation was selectively and unfairly forced upon a particular trade or a single business enterprise. The will of Congress and their alphabet soup tyranny is sovereign in U.S. law. That's why elections are always such a frightful passage. The lucky winner becomes a Public Servant, and We The People remain serfs, no matter who we choose to rule us next.

This arrangement can and will be changed fairly soon. Help wanted.

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