Nearly 20 years ago, political theorist Francis Fukuyama declared that human history had come to an end.
Observing the Allies’ mid-century triumph over fascism and Gorbachev’s unraveling of the last great socialist state, Fukuyama wrote that the new, global dominance of liberal democracy (that’s liberal in the larger sense, not Ann Coulter’s) as a form of government marked “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution.”
For many, this certainty is splendid, but for others ““ many student activists included ““ it is at once enraging and profoundly depressing. The realization that there will never be another type of world has left our generation with less faith in our ability to effect change than any before it. “The end of history,” Fukuyama predicted, “will be a very sad time.”
Now Fukuyama isn’t completely right. Illiberal forms of Islamic government and China’s new breed of authoritarian capitalism have held on tenaciously in their parts of the world. Nevertheless, in Europe and the United States, a single brand of liberalism looks as if it will endure forever into the foreseeable future.
“We live in an undemocratic society,” said Babken der Grigorian, fourth-year political science student and secretary of Students for a Democratic Society at UCLA, a second iteration of the student movement that staged massive demonstrations in support of peace, civil rights and participatory democracy in the 1960s.
Under the dominance of liberalism, many students, like der Grigorian, feel as if they are without a choice. Today, he lamented, “the Democrats and the Republicans are nearly the same.”
In a sense, he’s right. Our two dominant parties both support free-market capitalism, a modest redistribution of wealth, and the continued exertion of American military power across around the globe.
In the grand scheme of history, disagreements between the two seem less philosophical and more technical, comprising opposing viewpoints on how best to achieve relatively similar goals. The question is no longer should the workers have control of the modes of production, but should they control 10 or 20 percent of their output.
This puts activists in a bind. Without any apparent potential for large systemic change, as they saw in the abundance and power of socialist, liberal and communist ideologies during the ’60s, it looks like there really isn’t much to do. “Organizing around ideologies is outdated,” der Grigorian said wistfully.
He offered, however, an alternative: Now the focus should be “organizing around movements.” To spread this idea, SDS will host a panel discussion on the topic Thursday at 7:00 p.m. in Moore 100.
The focus here is on bringing people together and moving them, with a goal of regaining the optimism of the ’60s. What’s unclear, unfortunately, is where the movement is going.
The impetus for SDS comes, in part, from restlessness. According to der Grigorian, many SDSers here were inspired to join by the spirit of punk, that fatalistic music genre which, at its height, embodied the impulse of youth disaffected by capitalism to rebel, and smash up things and themselves. If punk embodies the ennui of the end of history, then the new SDS represents a valiant attempt to escape it.
The end of history, then, need not be sad, and as SDS shows, we need not be bored or destructive in response to it. Liberalism, at least in theory, gives us the freedom and safety to explore and refine new ideologies that function within the system.
Its dominance is, in a sense, the anti-hegemony. If it appears that we have too few choices, we have the freedom to create more of them.
SDS, for their part, want a more pure democracy, in which citizens participate in society’s choices in proportion to the amount those choices affect them. The new populists, like presidential candidate John Edwards, want to ensure that the wealth of our system works to support not just some, but everyone inside it.
The libertarians want to expand liberty, arguing that those who make wealth, even if not by their direct labor, get to keep it.
So in the end we have unparalleled choice, just not the kind between two systems.
History has not ended. Rather, it has moved to a smaller stage, and that makes me profoundly optimistic.
Ready to make new history? E-mail Reed at treed@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.