historic states, or between historic and post-historic powers. Both Panama and Iraq
would, according to Fukayam's typology, fall into the "historic" category.
Thus, in the view of the early Bush administration, the planet would come to be
dominated more and more by the "universal homogenous state," a mixture of "liberal
democracy in the political sphere combined with easy access to VCRs and stereos in the
economic." The arid banality of that definition is matched by Fukuyama's dazzled tribute
to "the spectacular abundance of advanced liberal economies and the infintely diverse
consumer culture." Fukuyama, it turns out, is a resident of the privileged enclave for
imperial functionaries that is northeast Virginia, and so has little understanding of the
scope of US domestic poverty and immiseration: "This is not to say that there are not rich
people and poor people in the United States, or that the gap between them has not grown
in recent years. But the root causes of economic inequality have less to do with the
underlying legal and social strcutures of our society, which remain fundamentally
egalitarian and moderately redistributionist, as with the cultural and social characteristics
of the groups that make it up, which are in turn the historical legacy of premodern
conditions. Thus black poverty in the United States, for example, is not the inherent
product of liberalism, but is rather the 'legacy of slavery and racism' which persisted long
after the formal abolition fo slavery." For Fukuyama, writing at a moment when
American class divisions were more pronounced that at any time in human memory, "the
egalitarianism of modern America represents the essential achievement of the classless
society envisoned by Marx." As a purveyor of official doctrine for the Bush regime,
Fukuyama is bound to ignore twenty years of increasing poverty and declining standards
of living for all Americans which has caused an even greater retrogression for the black
population; there is no way that this can be chalked up to the heritage of slavery.
It is not far from the End of History to Bush's later slogans of the New World Order and
the imperial Pax Universalis. It is ironic but lawful that Bush should have chosen a neo-
Hegelian as apologist for his regime. Hegel was the arch-obscurantist, philosophical
dictator, and saboteur of the natural sciences; he was the ideologue of Metternich's Holy
Alliance system of police states in the post-1815 oligarchic restoration in Europe imposed
by the Congress of Vienna. When we mention Metternich we have at once brought
Bush's old patron Kissinger into play, since Metternich is well known as his ego ideal.
Hegel deified the bureaucratic-authoritarian state machinery of which he was a part as the
final embodiment of rationality in human affairs, beyond which it was impossible to go.
Hegel told intellectuals to be reconciled with the world they found around them, and
pronounced philosophy incapable of producing ideas for the reform of the world. As
Hegel put it in the famous preface to the Philosophy of Right: "Wenn die Philosophie ihr
Grau in Grau mahlt, dann ist eine Gestalt des Lebens alt geworden, und mit Grau in Grau
laesst sie sich nicht verjuengen, sondern nur erkennen; die Eule der Minerva beginnt erst
mit der einbrechenden Daemmerung ihren Flug." References to Hegel's owl of Minerva
have been a staple of Washington coktail-party chatter during the Bush years. As
Fukuyama put it: "The end of history will be a very sad time....There will be neither art
nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history....Perhaps
this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history
started over again." [fn 3]