April 12, 2006
Anderson on Fukuyama completes a circle (for me)
In this week's Nation, New Left Review editor Perry Anderson reviews Francis Fukuyama's America at the Crossroads, and provides what is perhaps the most careful explication of the genesis of Fukuyama's break with neoconservatives and the most sweeping critique of its limitations yet published. A few excerpts:
In the tripartite structure of America at the Crossroads—capsule history of neoconservatism; critique of the way it went awry in Iraq; proposals for a rectified version—the crux of the argument lies in the middle section. Fukuyama's account of the milieu to which he belonged, and its role in the run-up to the war, is level-headed and informative. But it is a view from within that contains a revealing optical illusion. Everything happens as if neoconservatives were the basic driving force behind the march to Baghdad, and it is their ideas that must be cured if America is to get back on track . . . In reality, the front of opinion that pressed for an assault on Iraq was far broader than a particular Republican faction. It included many a liberal and Democrat.
And later:
[Fukuyama's] judgment [that Islamic terrorists have little chance of inflicting serious damage on American society] takes us back to the logic of his larger work as a whole. The celebrated argument of The End of History and the Last Man was that with the defeat of Communism, following that of Fascism, no improvement on liberal capitalism as a form of society was any longer imaginable. The world was still full of conflicts, which would continue to generate unexpected events, but they would not alter this verdict. There was no guarantee of a rapid voyage of humanity from every corner of the earth to the destination of a prosperous, peaceful democracy based on private property, free markets and regular elections, but these institutions were the terminus of historical development. The closure of social evolution now in view could not be regarded as altogether a blessing. For with it would inevitably come a lowering of ideal tension, perhaps even a certain tedium vitae. Nostalgia for more hazardous and heroic times could be foreseen.
Then, the damning critique:
Fukuyama remains fully committed to the American mission of spreading democracy round the world, and the use of all effective means at the disposal of Washington to do so. His criticism of the Bush Administration is that its policies in the Middle East have been not only ineffective but counterproductive. The promotion of internal regime change by the right mixture of economic and political pressures is one thing. Military action to enforce it externally is another, conducive to misfortune. In reality, there is no sharp dividing line between the two in the imperial repertory . . . There is not the faintest suggestion in these pages of any basic change in the staggering accumulation of military bases around the world, or the grip of the United States on the Middle East, let alone symbiosis with Israel. Everything that brought the country to 9/11 remains in place.
Anderson goes on to cite "The Israel Lobby," John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's essay in a recent issue of the London Review of Books, as a more thoroughgoing and useful critique of American foreign policy. While I haven't read the Fukuyama book, the excerpt printed in the February 19 New York Times Magazine leads me to believe that Anderson may very well be right.
Here's where the web of connections fostered by random reading is filled in. Anderson has been a prominent political theorist for forty years, but it was only recently, with the release an essay collection titled Spectrum (which incidentally features a lovely Morris Louis painting on its cover), that I became familiar with him. The book inspired Christopher Hitchens to sober his tone long enough to provide a cogent review in the March Atlantic. Elsewhere in his Nation review, Anderson makes reference to Paul Berman as an example of a pre-Iraq-war hawkish liberal. Berman reviewed Fukuyama's book for the New York Times Book Review and, lo and behold, Berman—for those three of you who read this site regularly, and the two of you who've made it this far into this post—came up in a post here in late December. There's no point to this promiscuous linking beyond pointing you to various reviews, books, and articles that are of interest, and to that end I'll add two more. The first is Julian Stallabrass's "Spectacle and Terror," the second of a two-part reckoning with Retort's Afflicted Powers in Anderson's New Left Review; the second is Michael Hardt's review and (separate) short feature about Afflicted Powers in the October 2005 Artforum. Phew.