The “end of history” as the end of “real America”?
Some thoughts on the historical significance of the early 1990s and the Right’s reaction to the end of the Cold War – based on John Ganz’s brilliantly challenging “When the Clock Broke.”
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Ganz explores a very specific constellation – shaped by the devastations brought about by Reaganism, severe shifts in the country’s economy, and the End of the Cold War that generated, among the political establishment, a complacent sense of liberal democracy’s inevitability. 2/
When Francis Fukuyama (in-)famously diagnosed the “end of history” in the spring of 1989, he captured something crucial about this particular moment: It was hard for mainstream observers to imagine anything but a liberal democratic future, a perpetuated status quo. 3/
The political center eagerly bought into the posthistorical framework, the center-left parties that rose to power on either side of the Atlantic in the first post-Cold War decade certainly acted and governed as if the grand ideological struggles for a better world were a thing of the past. 4/
The biggest blind spot of the pervasive post-historical thinking was that it vastly overestimated the extent to which liberal democracy, in the form it existed across the “West,” was actually satisfying every individual’s desire to be recognized as equal. 5/
In the early nineteenth century, German philosopher Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel had defined history as a series of conflicts or contradictions over what idea, what societal and political order would best satisfy this human desire for recognition. 6/
Fukuyama argued that this struggle was over, as humanity had found the answer in liberal democracy, and no serious competitor remained that could reasonably claim to have any sort of comparably universal appeal for humankind. Therefore, history had ended. 7/
But this diagnosis underestimated the severity of the conflict over claims for true equality, and how much resistance the idea of equality engendered once it was extended beyond straight white men and beyond a formalistic understanding of equality to all spheres of life. 8/
It is not an external authoritarian foe, but the internal conflict over whether or not all human beings – regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion – should indeed have a right to be recognized as equal that is threatening the democratic project itself. 9/
A sizable portion of the electorate in most “Western” countries is evidently not on board with that vision and instead drawn to illiberal ideas that maintain discriminatory “traditional” or “natural” hierarchies and established power imbalances. 10/
When the Clock Broke takes this “posthistorical” moment seriously and powerfully dissects how the end of the Cold War opened the door for those who emphatically rejected liberal democracy to move closer to the mainstream and make their case to a mainstream audience. 11/
Ganz quotes Joe Sobran, rightwing columnist for National Review, Pat Buchanan’s confidant, and aggressive antisemite, who wrote: “Now that democracy has overthrown communism, we can turn to the problem of how to overthrow democracy.” 12/
For the rightwing protagonists of “When the Clock Broke,” democracy – any attempt of leveling what they saw as “natural” hierarchies of race, gender, wealth – was the enemy. To the hard Right, liberal democracy wasn’t the end of history, it was the end of “real America.” 13/
And for a brief moment, that claim found quite a bit of mass and mainstream approval, even if those who advanced it ended up losing. These ideas, protests, and movements didn’t succeed in the moment, but they nevertheless were historically significant. 14/
Ganz’s book offers, first and foremost, a careful and detailed dissection of the American condition in that precise, peculiar moment, and the despair and anger and grievance this particular constellation produced.
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