How Francis Fukuyama Helped Me To Understand The Force

I had one of those nights last night when I woke up with the feeling I hadn't fully figured something out. It clearly stemmed from Francis Fukuyama's Atlantic essay that I linked yesterday. I would summarize it via the following excerpts. First,

[Russia and China] were the vanguard of a broader authoritarian wave that turned back democratic gains across the globe, from Myanmar to Tunisia to Hungary to El Salvador.

But we mustn't lose heart. Indeed,

The long-term progress of modern institutions is neither linear nor automatic. Over the years, we have seen huge setbacks to the progress of liberal and democratic institutions, with the rise of fascism and communism in the 1930s, or the military coups and oil crises of the 1960s and ’70s. And yet, liberal democracy has endured and come back repeatedly, because the alternatives are so bad. . . . When I wrote an article in 1989 and a book in 1992 with ["the end of history"] in the title, I noted that the Marxist version was clearly wrong and that there didn’t seem to be a higher alternative to liberal democracy. We’ve seen frightening reversals to the progress of liberal democracy over the past 15 years, but setbacks do not mean that the underlying narrative is wrong. None of the proffered alternatives look like they’re doing any better.

So we get to the first inklings of a puzzle: authoritarian systems seem to have gained ground, and progress is neither linear nor automatic, but there's an "underlying narrative". Isn't that peculiar? We have an educated consensus that the world is essentially random (for example, in Darwinian theory), but there's nevertheless an "underlying narrative" that resulted in homo sapiens and eventually his Whig institutions, sort of. Don't ask me to explain, but Mr Fukuyama has apparently signed on to this. And he cites Hegel as his authority, which is important.

This is simply because Hegel has an "underlying narrative" that's generally consistent with 19th-century bourgeois secular optimism, and Hegelian dialectic is at the root of Fukuyama's confusion. I went looking for an explanation of Hegelian dialectic and found this in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

“Dialectics” is a term used to describe a method of philosophical argument that involves some sort of contradictory process between opposing sides. In what is perhaps the most classic version of “dialectics”, the ancient Greek philosopher, Plato. . . . [t]he back-and-forth dialectic between Socrates and his interlocutors thus becomes Plato’s way of arguing against the earlier, less sophisticated views or positions and for the more sophisticated ones later.

Whereas Plato’s “opposing sides” were people (Socrates and his interlocutors), however, what the “opposing sides” are in Hegel’s work depends on the subject matter he discusses.

. . . Note that, although Hegel acknowledged that his dialectical method was part of a philosophical tradition stretching back to Plato, he criticized Plato’s version of dialectics. He argued that Plato’s dialectics deals only with limited philosophical claims and is unable to get beyond skepticism or nothingness. . . . Hegel argues that, because Plato’s dialectics cannot get beyond arbitrariness and skepticism, it generates only approximate truths, and falls short of being a genuine science.

. . . Dialectics drives to the “Absolute”, to use Hegel’s term, which is the last, final, and completely all-encompassing or unconditioned concept or form in the relevant subject matter under discussion (logic, phenomenology, ethics/politics and so on).

So where Plato via Socrates will go only so far as to say, "this is absurd, it's a contradiction, we can't go there", Hegel says yes, we certainly can, because something new, inexorable, and absolute will arise from this contradiction. For Fukuyama, this is Whig History, "the rise of constitutional government, personal freedoms and scientific progress" as a teleological process, the "underlying narrative".

The problem for Fukuyama throughout the essay is that there are too many real-world obstacles to his Whig underlying narrative -- and of these, the greatest is Donald Trump, of all people.

Celebrations of the rise of strong states and the decline of liberal democracy are thus very premature. Liberal democracy, precisely because it distributes power and relies on consent of the governed, is in much better shape globally than many people think. Despite recent gains by populist parties in Sweden and Italy, most countries in Europe still enjoy a strong degree of social consensus.

The big question mark remains, unfortunately, the United States. Some 30 to 35 percent of its voters continue to believe the false narrative that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, and the Republican Party has been taken over by Donald Trump’s MAGA followers, who are doing their best to put election deniers in positions of power around the country. This group does not represent a majority of the country but is likely to regain control of at least the House of Representatives this November, and possibly the presidency in 2024.

Here's where I would raise my hand in the question period. "Mr Fukuyama, on one hand, you cite Hegel, who argues that the process of dialectics works of necessity to drive us to the absolute and unconditioned form of ethics/politics. Yet at the same time you see a need to struggle, as though this were a matter under question, and we in the US must struggle against Trump just as Ukraine struggles against Putin. But if there's an underlying narrative that the Whigs will prevail, why should we go to all this effort?"

And I could finally go back to sleep when I realized that Mr Fukuyama's answer would be, "Trust the Force, Luke!"

May the Force be with you all.