In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

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 v...