George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

during most of his second term; he revelled in the accoutrements of his new office, and
gave the White House press corps all the photo opportunities and interviews they wanted
to butter them up and get them in his pocket.
These fatuous delusions of grandeur were duly projected upon the plane of the
philosophy of history by an official of the Bush Administration, Francis Fukuyama, the
Deputy Director of the State Department Policy Planning Staff, the old haunt of
Harrimanites like Paul Nitze and George Kennan. In the winter of 1989, during Bush's
first hundred days in office, Fukuyama delivered a lecture to the Olin Foundation which
was later published in The National Interestquarterly under the title of "The End of
History?" Imperial administrator Fukuyama had studied under the reactionary elitist
Allan Bloom, and was conversant with the French neo-enlightenment semiotic (or semiidiotic)
school of Derrida, Foucault, and Roland Barthes, whose zero degree of writing
Fukuyama may have been striving to attain. Above all, Fukayama was a follower of
Hegel in the interpetation of the French postwar neo-Hegelian Alexandre Kojeve.
Fukuyama qualifies as the official ideologue of the Bush regime. His starting point is the
"unabashed victory of economic and social liberalism," meaning by that the economic
and political system reaching its maturity under Bush-- what the State Department
usually calls "democracy." "The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first
of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism,"
Fukuyama wrote. "The triumph of the Western political idea is complete. Its rivals have
been routed....Political theory, at least the part concerned with defining the good polity, is
finished," Fukuyama opined. "The Western idea of governance has prevailed." "What we
may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular
period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of
mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as
the final form of human government." According to Fukayama, communism as an
alternative system had bee thoroughly discredited in the USSR, China, and the other
communist countries. Since there are no other visible models contending for the right to
shape the future, he concludes that the modern American state is the "final, rational form
of society and state." There are of course large areas of the world where governments and
forms of society prevail which diverge radically from Fukuyama's western model, but he
answers this objection by explaining that backward, still historic parts of the world exist
and will continue to exist for some time. It is just that they will never be able to present
their forms of society as a credible model or alternative to "liberalism." Since Fukuyama
presumably knew something of what was in the Bush administration pipeline, he
carefully kept the door open for new wars and military conflicts, especially among
historic states, or between historic and post-historic powers. Both Panama and Iraq
would, according to Fukayam's typology, fall into the "historic" category.
Thus, in the view of the early Bush administration, the planet would come to be
dominated more and more by the "universal homogenous state," a mixture of "liberal
democracy in the political sphere combined with easy access to VCRs and stereos in the
economic." The arid banality of that definition is matched by Fukuyama's dazzled tribute
to "the spectacular abundance of advanced liberal economies and the infintely diverse