Decades After the ‘End of History,’ Liberal Democracy Is In Retreat
About the author: Benn Steil is director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of The World That Wasn’t: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century
In his influential 1992 best seller, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama argued that “history”—understood in a Hegelian or Marxist sense, to denote the development of human societies over time—had come to an end. Liberal democracy and capitalism represented the terminus of millennia of ideological evolution. Nations such as the U.S. and the member states of the European Union he termed “posthistorical,” having come to rest permanently outside the ideological boundaries of history. They had arrived at the ultimate endpoint of political and economic organization, waiting only to be joined by China, Russia, and others retreating from the historical cul de sacs of authoritarianism.
The strength of Fukuyama’s thesis has been challenged by the subsequent success of those authoritarian states, particularly China’s quasi-market system. But China’s strides away from liberal democracy and laissez-faire economic organization are only half the story. Since China’s accession to the World Trade Organization, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the U.S. has become more like China. This is Fukuyama in reverse.
As popular demands grow for protection against the vicissitudes of foreign forces—migrants flowing in, factories flowing out—patience with invisible hands, Madisonian checks and balances, and the grinding machinery of liberal democracy plummets. Autocracy creeps in.
The spread of “end of history” thinking among the U.S. elite in the 1990s and early 2000s was striking. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush championed the view that economic integration would promote political freedom. They espoused the conviction that the internet and the attractions of free trade were irresistible forces pushing the remaining benighted “historical” nations toward liberal democracy and free markets. Future President Joe Biden welcomed China’s 2001 WTO accession “because we expect this is going to be a China that plays by the rules.”
None of this proved to be true. Since China joined the WTO, its economy has grown 1,400%. Since 2010, it has been the world’s largest exporter. It has also become a systematic violator of basic rules and principles of the WTO, which was created specifically to integrate market economies. China practices state-supported intellectual property theft. It forces foreign companies operating in its markets to transfer technology to local enterprises. It engages in widespread commercial espionage. It provides state-owned and favored domestic firms with massive subsidies, enabling and encouraging them to undercut competitors abroad and dominate foreign markets. All the while it has, certainly since the ascension of President Xi Jinping in 2012, become progressively less liberal politically, using the internet and advanced technology to expand state surveillance and control of private behavior.
The end of history, it seems, is marked not by an ever-widening embrace of liberal democracy and free markets, but by the progressive centralization of national political power in a “unitary executive”—including greater power, vested in one man, to restrict trade with, and investment by, foreign entities.
That change isn’t limited to China.
Since the 2001 al Qaeda terrorist attacks, the U.S. executive branch has arrogated vast powers from the other branches in the areas of mass electronic surveillance and the use of military force. Trade, tariff, and investment policy is now set, sometimes hour by hour, through executive order. State subsidies, while still well below Chinese levels, have been showered on favored industries. Firms are compelled to share sensitive data and communications access, and to cut off financing links with targeted entities. Federal law enforcement, most notably at the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has been openly politicized. Even U.S. election law seems now to be on soft ground, with President Donald Trump issuing mass pardons to the Jan. 6 Capitol rioters and suggesting he might fight for a constitutionally forbidden third term.
Whereas it would be wrong to blame the rise of Chinese economic power for trends that are discernible earlier, and for very different reasons, compelling link the so-called China shock—marked by the devastation of many U.S. communities from the loss of manufacturing jobs—to the rise of political polarization and popular demands for rapid and robust presidential action. Supranational limitations on presidential power, particularly the WTO dispute settlement appellate body, have been swatted away by three consecutive administrations—Republican and Democrat.
The full title of Fukuyama’s blockbuster was, of course, The End of History and the Last Man. “The last man” refers to Nietzsche’s profile of the docile, risk-averse individual who comes to dominate the landscape in “posthistorical” free-market liberal democracies. After the triumph of markets and democracy, the seemingly eternal human desire for struggle and heroism dies away, replaced by the flabby longing for comfort and ease. So, too, in the unitary-executive version of history’s end, we arrive at “the last tariff”—that final, fatal retaliatory tariff, heaped upon earlier mounds of retaliatory tariffs, that so destroys any reason for trade that it makes all further tariffs redundant, sweeping away Davos man and his dream of globalization.
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