Thread by @bronzeagemantis

This article attempt to show Fukuyama was right in End of History book--and he was more right than people who attaq him--but was wrong for reasons Roussinos doesn't emphasize enough: the academic conservative understanding of liberal democracy...

unherd.com/2020/09/why-fu… x.com/FistedBy/statu…

Fukuyama like other academic conservatives (who often imagine themselves heirs to aristocrats) understand liberal democracy as supremely tolerant, relativistic, and also prosperous, successfully catering to man's material needs, but neglectful of thymos, desire for nobility, etc.

This understanding is based in a false reading of history based on Strauss, Kojeve and some who followed their "debate," and who in a Cold War polemical setting misrepresented to their students the post-1945 world order as some kind of relativistic "liberal democracy"...

But post-1945 order in West wasn't a liberal democracy, but an aggressive managerial socialism meant to counter the other two world socialist competitors. Its continued existence always depended on mass mobilization against an enemy and on aggressive denial of human nature

Burnham for this reason has always been better than Strauss or Kojeve to understand our world, but even Burnham is limited in use because by 1960s-70s the machinery of this new socialism had already been subverted; the new state was redirected for factional benefit...

For this reason by late 1970's, the liberal democracy that academic conservatives imagine was no longer directed toward general prosperity, but the destruction of the middle class and extraction of national wealth; and it was never relativistic, but aggressively moralistic....

By our time but indeed by 1990's or late 80's the intolerant and vicious character of "liberal democracy" was clear for even the uninformed to see, but in fact these tactics have been used against the "hard right" in Europe for decades, and even against artists perceived as such

Many writers like Henry de Montherlant were physically attacked by "anteefa" in Europe with the blessing of local politicians and cooperation of local police (was not only case). Similar de facto suppression of "far right" views always took place in America as well

Fukuyama surely knows this to be true, having been academic himself he must be aware his conservative colleagues, for all their huffing and puffing about "providing study of older alternatives" would never e.g. touch someone like Giovanni Gentile except to attack...

This, despite Gentile's high intellectual value and historical importance...but is precisely powerful alternative that has to be suppressed. Instead focus among academic conservatives or fake Catholic intellectuals is "relativism" or "historicism," which are safe but irrelevant.

In same way the views I express on this account, in my book and show, which were a commonplace before 1940 in Europe and very popular, were completely suppressed (and continue to be) in the tolerant "liberal democracies" after 1945...

I will end coffee-fuel spergout: the intellectual frame used by Fukuyama and academic conservative world out of which he comes is false, based on wilful blindness on character of post-1945 regime. Always been based on hysteria, moral mobilization and, after 1970, expropriation...