In re. the Red State piece on Fukayama, I’m a big fan of what we’re doing on Iraq, but I’m delighted that, as the the Red State piece admits, President Bush doesn’t defend it on Hegelian-style philosophical grounds.
The real “heresy” here isn’t just the premature declaration that history is over. It’s forgetting the limitations of human nature. Even if (maybe that should be especially if) we’ve found the best possible economic and political systems, don’t they still contain the seeds of their own destruction? The more free and prosperous we become, the more spoiled we’ll get, and the less we’ll be willing to cultivate the virtues that maintain those systems. So that sooner or later, history (of the most painful and ugly kind) will start up all over again. Right?
