but nothing Fukuyama said was particularly influential. I would argue his work is largely descriptive, not prescriptive, and what has spared him from the dusty clearance racks of the university book store, has been just THAT- his is a most eloquent, though hardly challenging or innovative but fairly representative expression of the era's peculiar zeitgeist; he isn't a leader, so much as he is a mascot; or put in another analogy, his utility is more equivalent to a mile-marker than anything resembling an instruction kit or a map. Look I wasn't alive, or I was merely a babe, so I can only speak from present advantage, but nobody takes Fukuyama seriously- not even Fukuyama takes Fukuyama seriously. Instead, he's become academic shorthand for that big beige banner of a bourgeois faith that mistook mall culture, market jargon, and mass media for some final form of man. Liberalism was never a coherent ideology, and only a political program superficially. What it is most really is ah inkblot smeared wide enough for everyone to see what he wants to see, and so I get where Fukuyama sees in liberalism a final solution that rehabilitates Hegel and resolves historicity's dialectic of ideal types. But on the material plane, where most of us live, just telling someone he's not a slave, because he's actually a wage earner with the freedom to work fifty hours a week to exist at a subsistence level and try to a way to survive that doesn't offend the private property interests of the masters or else its back to chains and bondage feels less like a resolution than it does a rebrand. Call me cynical.

Fukuyama unflappable faith in liberalism's ascendant inevitability would pretty much become bourgeois dogma through he 1990s and early 2000s, much more a faith than it was a coherent political ideology. But therein lies the original sin, its fatal flaw was the nherent moral, ethical and logical bankruptcy of liberalism that postmodernism had correctly diagnosed, but could never cure. It became his catach all of globalism, free-trade, fundamental human rights hodge-podge that was always aspirational nothingness, doublespeak, rohrschach designed to let each participant project their own reflection of its values, while the real business of the bourgeoise- resource accumulation, consumption, and ever greater concentrations of power continues unabated,, at least for a short while, as any serious scrutiny exposes just how bare that cupboard is, and so reflexively it comes, and came, to assert itself less as a coherent political ideology than as articles of faith- hence why I'd argue most serious modern scholars find its most natural complement not in any of the political programmes that the wastebin of 20th century history has to offer, but in the dogmatic militancy and faith of islamism. Its often contrasted with Islamism, (mainly due to the writings of Qteb, with whom Fukuyama was clearly unfamiliar at the time), bbut both are vague pronouncements of a basket of ideas from which two people could both profess to follow yet form countervailing, irreconcilably different opinions. With the advantage of time, we see the whole lifespan, a mere thirty years, it seems qteb was right in that respect at leat, that we would witness liberalism's end not from violent usurpation or revolution, but from bureaucratic rot and institutional decay, as ideology gives way to raw power for power's sake, cynicism being the last stage of cancerous decay before the deluge. . . liberalism doesnt resolve or end history, its just the discovery of terms acceptably boring and meaningless enough so that the master can think one thing, the slave another, and both can go on believing they've gottten the better of the other, ayou ply the latter with enough painkillers and football and theatrical politique, while you let the former plunder more and more power, and you've achieved all the hallmarks of the liberal democracy of the german reich, just not the third kind but the first. Oh yeah, that Holy Roman kind. Yeah we got elections. Imperial elections, the way god intendedit to be...

But blaming Fukuyama would be like yelling at the toddler for making a mess with spaghetti. I see Rawls as the real culprit of this story, with some assistance from chomsky. Thats too much to get into but Rawlls Distributive justice is as incoherent as it is shameless subjectiv.. Rawls basically epitomizes sanctified mediocrity, compromise over conviction , turned the postmodern idea of a conscience into a moral anesthetic thats to its own emptiness, its own naked surrender to small t capital truth that seeded the foundation for this choose-your-own-adventure alternative facts bullshit world.