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As I see it | How Fukuyama goes from the end of history to the end of the West
China’s ruling model may be the only remedy for what the political writer argues is the erosion of free speech and free elections by media-controlling plutocrats
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Alex Loin Toronto
It must have been quite an intellectual or spiritual comedown going from “the end of history” to “the decline of Western civilisation”.
For a political writer who first made his name by claiming the final historical triumph of Western liberal democracy and free-market capitalism over all other economic and political systems, the decline of his own society – à la Oswald Spengler, who wrote The Decline of the West – seems to have occupied Francis Fukuyama greatly of late.
I write this not in mockery but in a show of respect – for his intellectual honesty. In just this year alone, he has written about this not once, but twice – first with the essay, “Elon Musk and the Decline of Western Civilization” and then, just last month, “Our Coming Plutocracy”.
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He already wrote about that back in 2021, in another essay titled “Silvio Berlusconi and the Decline of Western Civilization”.
In all three essays, the ideals of free speech and free elections – the foundations of liberal democracy – are contrasted with the reality of their degradation, which has led to plutocracy and the rule of the wealthy, ultimately spelling the end of capitalism.
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“When historians 50 or 100 years from now investigate how and why Western civilization collapsed, they would point to Silvio Berlusconi as the chief villain,” he wrote.
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