The End of History and the Age of Oligarchy

Few essay titles have received as much attention, or as much ridicule, as “The End of History.” When Francis Fukuyama used it for his 1989 reflections on the end of the Cold War, he didn’t actually mean to say that historical change itself had ended; only ideological strife over the best means to organize societies. The collapse of the eastern bloc had settled matters, he believed. There was a Right Answer. The Western model of societies organized as representative democracies with free market systems tempered by social safety nets had proven definitively superior to the Communist model. Even as ethnic conflict flared in many post-Communist states during the next decade, the argument was still plausible. Bosnian Muslims and Serbs might not want to live in the same state, but most of them still wanted to live in a representative democracy with a free market system tempered by a social safety net.

Today, Fukuyama reminds me of no one more than the Marquis de Condorcet. During the French Revolution, shortly before his death, this brilliant French thinker wrote a short book entitled Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. It was a perfect distillation of Enlightenment historical philosophy and Enlightenment hope, and all the more remarkable for being composed in the shadow of the Terror. It foresaw humanity striding into a future in which the revolutionary principles of liberty and equality would become universally accepted, war and social conflict would cease, and science would extend the human life span. But Condorcet was a poor prophet. He utterly failed to foresee the economic and technological changes associated with industrial capitalism which would, within decades, transform the world beyond recognition, and render his predictions entirely off base.

Fukuyama was similarly blinkered. In his case, what he failed to see was the impact of capitalist globalization and new information technology. To be fair, not many people were focusing on these developments amidst the sensational political events of 1989, just as few of Condorcet’s contemporaries were paying much attention to the birth pangs of industrial capitalism amidst the political turmoil of the French Revolution. Yet just five years after Fukuyama published his essay, the three North American states signed the NAFTA free trade accord, while the World Wide Web became freely accessible to all users. Together, globalization and the internet made possible the accumulation and movement of capital on a scale and at a speed never before dreamed of. They put unprecedented pressures on states to pursue comparative economic advantage, developing profitable sectors and businesses and abandoning unprofitable ones. Processes of deindustrialization already underway for decades went into hyperdrive. Economic disruption of all sorts, along with continuing ethnic and religious conflict around the globe, spurred massive waves of migration. Countries became more vulnerable than ever to financial shocks originating half a world away.

These changes have not ushered in a new age of ideological conflict, but rather an age of oligarchy. The new class of oligarchs first became visible in Russia, thanks to the brazen looting of the country’s natural resources by former Communist officials after the collapse of the USSR. Equivalents arose in East Asia as Communist elites embraced forms of crony capitalism. But equivalents have arisen in the West as well, thanks to the concentration of wealth made possible by neoliberalism and internet technology. And everywhere, oligarchs of course act in their material interest, spending fortunes to purchase political influence so as to protect and expand even larger fortunes.

The political results have been dire. Deindustrialization, economic shocks, spiraling inequality, and the drastic weakening of mainstream media have combined to erode the sense of unity and common purpose that still existed in Western societies during the Cold War (if often in fragile form as the memory faded of shared sacrifice during World War II). In the age of oligarchy, the increasingly dominant driving force in political life is resentment on the part of people who feel left out and threatened by forces beyond their control. Logically, this resentment should focus on the oligarchs themselves, but these figures have the know-how and resources to deflect it. And nothing has helped the work of deflection more than the internet and social media, which so powerfully divide voters into silos, and feed them information and opinion that turns popular anger instead against politicians, professors, journalists, government bureaucrats, and other supposed feckless and uncaring “elites.” In the 2024 Trump campaign, billionaire oligarchs educated at elite institutions formed an unholy alliance with populists supposedly fighting for the struggling, non-college educated masses.

That alliance can come under strain, especially over issues of immigration (as we saw last week in the spat over H1B visas between Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy on the one hand, and MAGA figures like Laura Loomer and Steve Bannon on the other). Indeed, the oligarchs’ contempt for ordinary working-class people can go far beyond anything ever uttered by Hillary Clinton—for instance, oligarch Marc Andreessen’s now notorious remark “I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep these people quiet.” But in a world where Elon Musk can purchase one of the most important social networks and bend it to his purpose, while paying a quarter of a billion dollars to help elect his favorite presidential candidate, I am betting the oligarchs can keep the populists in line, while using them to corrode the structures of democracy. For the moment, American democracy remains formally intact, but the new Trump administration promises unprecedented levels of corruption, oligarchs acting with virtual impunity, and a cowed opposition.

So is this the direction history is actually moving? The real “end of history”? Not a world of moderate capitalist democracies, but a world of ultra-wealthy oligarchs dominating the courts of strongmen while democracy dwindles into a shell of its former self, with the anger of ordinary people deflected onto more vulnerable targets, and their misery soothed with video entertainment and pharmaceuticals—bread and circuses? A new Roman Empire quickly moving into its most decadent phase? Instead of George Orwell’s boot stamping on a human face, forever, instead an eternity of Elon Musk’s sneer? (I might almost prefer the boot).

Since I don’t have the chutzpah of a Francis Fukuyama, I’ll refrain from making this prediction. Who knows what other changes might be around the corner, still unseen (at least by me), that will shuffle the cards of history yet again and send us hurtling onto an unexpected path. Historians, thankfully perhaps in this case, make very bad prophets.

But I am not placing much hope in the American political opposition—either the liberal or progressive left versions. Too many liberals remain too moralizing and self-righteous about the political scene. They abhor Donald Trump so deeply that it has become impossible for them to believe anyone could vote for him in good conscience. So they make their appeals to his electorate through audibly gritted teeth and mostly without conviction. They continue to hope against hope that simply pointing out Trump’s manifold flaws and warning of “fascism” will eventually, somehow, bring his voters back to their senses (the saddest case is that of Timothy Snyder, who, after years of warning about an imminent Hitlerian coup, has now been reduced to posting puerile jokes about “Mump,” i.e. Musk + Trump). They still play down the very real material basis for the resentment that led to Trump’s victory in November, even as their warnings about Nazis in the streets distract from the real danger that Trump poses. Easier to blame Fox News and racist “deplorables” for the nation’s woes than to examine their own failures.

But many progressives are no better. They have seen the economic roots of the present disaster more clearly than most liberals, but they have their own forms of moralizing, self-righteous blindness. For one thing, they refuse to confront the reasons why the progressive left itself has failed so miserably to appeal to the American electorate. One reason is not especially hard to see. For decades now, much of the progressive left has repeatedly denounced the United States as an irredeemably racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, imperialist, settler colonialist and warmongering nation—not just a nation that has failed to live up to its own high ideals, but a nation marked from its earliest days by a kind of original sin. Not surprisingly, this attitude of contempt does not help them win votes from most ordinary Americans. But rather than address the issue, these progressives pretend that only the economy matters, and that if only the Democratic party presented a genuine left populist program, it would sweep every election. As a result, they downplay the extent to which Trump’s successes have derived in part from his ability to exploit cultural issues in a toxic media environment and they have reserved their fiercest anger and scorn for the “resistance liberals”—whom they castigate as complicit in the neoliberal changes that spurred Trump’s rise in the first place. Easier to blame Rachel Maddow and The Atlantic magazine for the nation’s woes than to examine their own failures.

But will any return to traditional ideological strategies reverse the progress of oligarchy? Given its advance across so much of the globe, and the powerful forces driving it, it’s not clear that either the liberal or progressive strategies have much chance of success. Sometimes there are no good answers. Still, again, as both Condorcet and Fukuyama found out, history has a way of surprising us.