Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The "end of history" was only the beginning

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet.

We begin today with Matt Bai of The Washington Post suggesting that today’s political landscape can be viewed as ultimately filling of a great power vacuum leftover from the end of the Cold War.

Americans, for better or worse, have always been defined by existential struggle. From the founding of the country, grounded not in any shared ethnicity or religion but rather in the novel idea of human liberty and self-rule, we’ve been bound together by the idea that the country isn’t just a place to live. It’s a living force for the advancement of humankind.

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Then came the end of the Cold War — what the social theorist Francis Fukuyama optimistically called “the end of history.” By this, he meant that absolutism in all its forms — monarchy, fascism, communism — had finally exhausted itself, to be permanently replaced by liberal democracies created in our image. We were supposed to be living through, in effect, the last battle of the broader American revolution.

Fukuyama was wrong, of course; liberty did not enjoy some final triumph over autocracy in the world, or even much of a honeymoon. But he was right in the sense that the civilizational clashes that had long dominated our political discourse suddenly disappeared.

As far as the collapse of external rivals like the Soviet Union, I think that Bai is correct but his thesis is incomplete.

The “civilizational clashes” within American “political discourse” (racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, economic inequality, etc.) continued unabated through the 1990’s. 

Meanwhile, “the rivals without” (primarily Russia and China) have increasingly learned that by utilizing the (relatively) new technologies of social media to spread misinformation and disinformation, the internal American pot remains stirred to the point of boiling nowadays.

(To give a recent example, some TikTokkers saying that Americans should have heeded the letter of Osama bin Laden about Israel and Palestine. The handling of COVID-19 by the Trump Administration is yet another example.)