idiotic) school of Derrida, Foucault, and Roland Barthes, whose zero degree of writing Fukuyama
may have been striving to attain. Above all, Fukayama was a follower of Hegel in the interpetationof the French postwar neo-Hegelian Alexandre Kojeve.
Fukuyama qualifies as the official ideologue of the Bush regime. His starting point is the
"unabashed victory of economic and social liberalism," meaning by that the economic and political
system reaching its maturity under Bush-- what the State Department usually calls "democracy.""The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable (^)
systematic alternatives to Western liberalism," Fukuyama wrote. "The triumph of the Western
political idea is complete. Its rivals have been routed....Political theory, at least the part concerned
with defining the good polity, is finished," Fukuyama opined. "The Western idea of governance has
prevailed." "What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of aparticular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of
mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final
form of human government." According to Fukayama, communism as an alternative system had bee
thoroughly discredited in the USSR, China, and the other communist countries. Since there are no
other visible models contending for the right to shape the future, he concludes that the modernAmerican state is the "final, rational form of society and state." There are of course large areas of (^)
the world where governments and forms of society prevail which diverge radically from
Fukuyama's western model, but he answers this objection by explaining that backward, still historic
parts of the world exist and will continue to exist for some time. It is just that they will never be
able to present their forms of society as a credible model or alternative to "liberalism." SinceFukuyama presumably knew something of what was in the Bush administration pipeline, he
carefully kept the door open for new wars and military conflicts, especially among 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 residentof 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 smoderately redistributionist, as with the cultural and social characteristics of the groups that make itociety, which remain fundamentally egalitarian and (^)
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 pronounchuman memory, "the egalitarianism of modern America represents the essential achievement of theed that at any time in (^)
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