American Renewal and the Continuity of the West

It is a pleasure to respond to Spencer Klavan’s graceful and inspired reflections on the prospects for America as we move closer to the 250th anniversary of the founding. He admirably eschews polemics and avoids an excessively narrow preoccupation with the most heated issues of the day, concerning himself with broader and deeper matters. At the same time, he writes as a partisan of the American project and the broader civilization—Western civilization—of which it has been a particularly vital and noble expression. Klavan raises big questions without succumbing to fashionable, or once-fashionable, theses such as “The End of History” or the ideological temptation of Year Zero-ism, which distort the past and present, as well as the prospects for the future.

Klavan’s discussion of Francis Fukuyama’s effort to revivify his “End of History” thesis in the closing days of the Cold War is quite good, although one might wish to go a bit further than he does. He is undoubtedly right that Fukuyama never intended to suggest that events of significance will cease to occur, that history will somehow come to an end. He meant rather that the fundamental political problem had in principle been solved: soft, secular, free, market-oriented, and technologically minded liberal democracies are the only viable political order for the present and foreseeable future. Despite some atavistic holdouts (for example, Islamist fanatics and residues of decrepit Communist tyrannies), liberal universalism would succeed the cacophony of conflicting regimes, nations, and ideologies that had hitherto defined the historical experience of man.

Fukuyama, no Marxist himself but rather a consummate centrist and an extremely well-informed political observer, nonetheless gave a broadly Marxist interpretation of the West’s victory in the Cold War. He attributed it less to some combination of chance, courage, and statesmanship, not to mention the essential contradictions at the heart of Communist theory and practice (although Fukuyama did not completely ignore these factors), than to the vicissitudes of the historical process itself. Fukuyama’s utopian account of liberalism’s triumph was the first reason to hesitate in accepting his thesis.

Moreover, Fukuyama passed over Hegel’s rationalized Christianity and his “conservative” correction of the excessively abstract and disruptive conception of human rights put forward by the party of progress. On these points, Hegel was far closer to Burke and Tocqueville than to the modern revolutionary spirit. Instead, Fukuyama took his point of departure from the Russian-born Hegelian-Marxist theorist Alexandre Kojève, a particularly brilliant French bureaucrat who was the sometime intellectual sparring partner of Leo Strauss.