The Optimistic End of History
Truth is not truth.Rudy Giuliani, August 20, 20181
In 1987s The Art of the Deal, Donald J. Trump, then a rising star in the world of New York real estate, argued that in business honesty isnât always the best quality. Filtered through the words of ghost writer Tony Schwartzâa man who many years later would publicly express regret for abetting Trumpâs riseâthe young Donald argued that people have a compelling desire to believe in things that were bigger and greater than them.2 It was his belief that when promoting oneself and oneâs business, one should always want to play to peopleâs fantasies and desire for what is grand and spectacular. Trump called this âtruthful hyperbole.â Echoing the work of Harry J. Frankfurt, one might also call it âbullshit.â3
The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to peopleâs fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. Thatâs why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. Itâs an innocent form of exaggerationâand a very effective form of promotion.4
Three decades onwards, Donald J. Trump was elected President of the United States, coming to power on a platform characterised by nationalist grandiosity, plenty of âtruthful hyperboleâ about his own successes and aspirations, and a consistent appeal to narratives of victimhood and resentment. The latter broke with a decade old consensus on the part of both Democrats and Republicans, wherein the United States consciously postured as the benevolent hegemon responsible for the preservation and advancement of the liberal international order. Most worryingly Trump appealed to xenophobic sentiments which had long been latent within American political culture, and especially on the political right in the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement, but which many liberal commentators thought were long buried or at least permanently comatose. His election to the most powerful office in the Western world sent shockwaves through the neoliberal establishment, which had already been rocked by earlier populist uprisings.
Earlier that same year, a slim majority of British citizens voted to leave the European Union. Brexiters, as they came to be called, chief among them scion of Eton and Oxford Boris Johnson, cited concerns about national sovereignty, immigration, cultural homogeneity, and a sense that Britain was being victimised by out of touch Eurocrats who demanded the British pay more than their fair share. With that, one of the founding countries of the Eurozone struck a hammer blow against internationalist universalism.
This came on the heels of destabilising efforts by right-wing populists across the continent, many of whom climbed to power through appealing to similar binary narratives of national pride and concurrent victimisation by foreign invaders. In 2015 Poland, once held up as the brightest success story of the new European order, elected the far-right Law and Justice Party, which for the first time in the countryâs post-Communist history won an outright majority in the Sejm. They quickly stirred substantial controversy around the globe due to their nationalistic rhetoric, their denial of Polish participation in the Holocaust, and transparent efforts to seize control of the countryâs media and judicial apparatus. They also adopted an increasingly virulent anti-Islamic tone, with Interior Minister Marisuz Blasczak nostalgically comparing himself to Charles Martel âwho stopped the Muslim invasion of Europe in the 8th century.â5
All of these contemporary movements owe a debt to Viktor Orban, who became Prime Minister of Hungary in 2010 when his conservative nationalist party Fidesz won 52.7% of the popular vote and two-thirds of the seats in the National Assembly.6 Orban swiftly went about changing the constitution to enshrine traditional definitions of marriage and to reduce the number of seats in the legislature from 386 to 199. This latter change would prove beneficial in the 2014 election when he won a second large majority with only 44.5% of the popular vote while becoming a paradigmatic of Fideszâs signature tactics of changing national institutions and challenging liberal norms to benefit the government. This shift was articulated with impressive honesty by Orban, who in 2014 overtly called for Hungaryâs transition to an âilliberal state.â7 In 2015, the consequences were demonstrated with dramatic clarity as Orban became a vocal critic of the European Unionâs handling of the refugee crisis, demanding the refugees not enter Europe. As the crisis progressed, the basis for this hard-line policy became more and more clear. Orban increasingly criticised the European Union for infringing Hungaryâs sovereignty, and allowing tens of millions of Islamic âinvadersâ onto the continent.8 In 2018, he claimed that âmulticulturalism is only an illusionâ and declared that Christians and Muslims could never live together.
At the time these events were occurring, I was completing my Ph.D. in Socio-Legal studies at York, writing a dissertation arguing for the extension of voting rights to a wider swathe of people and arguing that international institutions and human rights law should be greatly strengthened. Much of this made its way into my first book Making Human Dignity Central to International Human Rights Law: Overcoming False Necessity for the University of Wales Pressâ series on international law. Naturally I watched these developments with considerable alarm and frustration. It seemed like events were moving in the opposite direction to what I wanted. Such is life of course.
But there was also a sense that something more significant was happening than just a few nationalist movements growing in strength and disrupting international institutions and liberal norms which were always deceptively fragile to begin with. Throughout my childhood from 1988 onwards, the end of the Cold War had led many to believe that sincere ideological conflicts were on their way out. The old isms which had rocked the twentieth century, and which I had been taught to regard with scepticism and even dismissal, seemed to many like relics of an earlier time. Nationalism, fanaticism, ethnocentrism, racism, and so on all appeared to be losing force. This was well captured in texts like Francis Fukuyamaâs famous The End of History and the Last Man, which argued that one way or another a relatively tolerant form of liberal democracy and globalising capitalism was likely the way of the future.9
Of course, Fukuyamaâs argument was always more cautious than some suggested. Moreover his triumphalist claim that liberalism was going to everywhere triumph seemed overstate, particularly once the American lead âWar on Terrorâ brought immense disruption to the Middle East. But the overall atmosphere was one of relative optimism and an implicit belief that things would only improve. The United States would eventually elect a new President and cease its violent quest for what Michael Ignatieff once called a liberal âempire lite.â10 It would settle into its role as a relatively benign hegemon using soft power to push for greater internationalisation and multicultural inclusion. Russia would continue its path to greater democratisation and liberalisation. Chinaâs economic prosperity and entry into the digital community would lead to the Communist party gradually reforming. India would take its rightful place as a great power and the worldâs largest liberal democracy. The European Union would continue to expand, perhaps to include the Ukraine, Turkey, and in our wildest dreams, even Russia. Proponents like Habermas were especially optimistic about the global ramifications of the latter development, hoping that the European project of promoting international law and the softening of borders would serve as a model for other states.11 And many of us in Canada felt that our countryâs openâif often troubledâembrace of multiculturalism and the withering away of nationalist sentiments would prove an inspiration for countries into the twenty-first century. If we would never be a world power, at least we could struggle towards being a moral model. Looking back, much of this seems remarkably naĂŻve. One of the primary goals of political analysis must now focus on developing an understanding of how such a dramatic shift occurred.
In hindsight we have no one but ourselves to blame for these developments, as few were willing to look closely at the cracks in these sunny narratives. When fissures appeared they were quickly dismissed as aberrations, states of exception, economic crises which deviated from the normally smooth operation of the neoliberal economic order, and so on. Even the Left, which one would expect would be critical of the developments listed above, very grudgingly came to accept them. As Slavoj Zizek repeatedly observed, we all became unwitting Fukuyamists.12 The collapse of the communist regimes was the final nail in the coffin for Marxist grand narratives about a utopian post-capitalist and liberal future to come. Most leftists in the developed world tacitly seemed to accept that the liberal-capitalist order was here to stay. Some, like Habermas and other deliberative democrats, accepted this development and sought to soften its impact by offering defences of a more robustly democratic welfare state. Some Marxists and post-Marxists like David Harvey 13 and Ernesto Laclau14 looked to more local and experimental movements, such as anarchist communes and the Mexican Zapatista movements in Chiapas, for inspiration on how to potentially enact small-scale regional change. Finally, many others, and by far the most infamous, turned to various forms of identity politics and affiliated theoretical positions, leaning heavily on the post-modern theories and philosophies presented by often brilliant thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, and others. These identity politics movements and their related philosophies became so affiliated with the Left, that by 2010 the two were almost interchangeable in popular discourse.
These movements are complex and multi-faceted, and I shall discuss them at length later. But characteristic to all of them was a reluctant acceptance of the liberal-capitalist status quo. While some of the more radical proponents at least presented themselves as opposed to liberal capitalism, their tactics and immediate ambitions were all predicated on contemporary structures remaining more or less intact. The ambition of the various identity politics movements was not about institutional or structural transformation. Rather their bywords were âinclusionâ and âparticipationâ for ethnic and religious minorities, women, members of the LGBTQ community, the...