Ex-Neo-Con identifies his former ideology with Leninism

[ck4829]

"I have numerous affiliations with the different strands of the neoconservative movement. I was a student of Strauss's protégé Allan Bloom, who wrote the bestseller "The Closing of the American Mind"; worked at Rand and with Wohlstetter on Persian Gulf issues; and worked also on two occasions for Wolfowitz. Many people have also interpreted my book "The End of History and the Last Man" (1992) as a neoconservative tract, one that argued in favor of the view that there is a universal hunger for liberty in all people that will inevitably lead them to liberal democracy, and that we are living in the midst of an accelerating, transnational movement in favor of that liberal democracy. This is a misreading of the argument. "The End of History" is in the end an argument about modernization. What is initially universal is not the desire for liberal democracy but rather the desire to live in a modern — that is, technologically advanced and prosperous — society, which, if satisfied, tends to drive demands for political participation. Liberal democracy is one of the byproducts of this modernization process, something that becomes a universal aspiration only in the course of historical time.

"The End of History," in other words, presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism. In the formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt, the neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support."
- Francis Fukuyama, After Neoconservatism

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/magazine/neo.html?ex=1298005200&en=4126fa38fefd80de&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
Pages 3 and 4.

[Jed Dilligan]

1. He still can't think

Universal desire for modernism is where he lost me this time.

[nealmhughes]

2. He's been waiting for the altar call for a while now.

Actually, the End of History is akin to inverted Leninism: it makes the fatal flaw that "politics" solves everything, that a bright sunshiny day will soon dawn for all..

It isn't bad prose, or bad philosophy, per se, just wrong conclusions.

It would be great if there was an Enlightenment process throughout the world, the universal human dignity and rights of representation which Fukuyama so ardently preached in Last Man, but just as Marx/Lenin discounted nationalism, tradition, and religion as powers, so did Fukuyama. I never realized it was a "neocon" tome when I first read it: the USSR was in tatters, Bulgaria and the Czechs talking about joining the EU, Poland NATO, etc. at the time of its publication.

I am glad he decided to leave being Saul and become Paul, if he ever was Saul.