The Reaction Against the End of History
Azar Gat, Francis Fukuyama, and the Conditions of Fascism
Recently reading Azar Gat’s Fascist and Liberal Visions of War: Fuller, Liddell Hart, Douhet, and other Modernists I happened upon his characterization of a “fascist minimum,” which is something like C. S. Lewis’ attempt to define “mere Christianity.” So here is Gat’s mere fascism:
“Fascism emerged on the heels of industrialization, urbanization, and the growth of mass society. Those who shared in the proto-fascist and fascist ‘mood’ rebelled against bourgeois culture, with its ‘decadent’ materialism, commercialism, atomistic and alienating individualism, and liberal-humanitarian values. They dreaded the further advance of plebeianism, mediocrity, and triviality expected with growing democratization. Espousing idealism and exalting youth, elementary dynamism, and vitalism, they called for comprehensive spiritual and cultural rejuvenation and the creation of a new man within radically reconstructed society. They sought to overcome divisive parliametarianism, capitalism, and socialism through the application of communal solution which would mobilize the energies and loyalty of the masses around unifying natural traditions, myths, and ideals. At the same time, they held that government should firmly remain in the hands of a worthy élite, the creator and leader of the New Order.” (Azar Gat, Fascist and Liberal Visions of War: Fuller, Liddell Hart, Douhet, and other Modernists, Oxford: Clarendon, 1998, p. 4)
As soon as I read this I immediately thought of the final paragraph of Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History?” (1989):
“The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world for some time to come. Even though I recognize its inevitability, I have the most ambivalent feelings for the civilization that has been created in Europe since 1945, with its north Atlantic and Asian offshoots. Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.” (Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest, Summer 1989)
An enormous commentary rapidly grew up around Fukuyama’s essay, and also around what may be considered its companion piece, Samuel P. Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations?” (1993). These two essays — both subsequently turned into books — defined grand strategy discussions during the 1990s, and they continue to echo today. As I have discussed both of these essays in other blog posts, I don’t want to do that at present. The question that interests me at present is why Azar Gat’s definition of a minimal fascism immediately brought to my mind Fukuyama’s sketch of the end of the history.
The connection between these two passages is the properties ascribed to a society seen, from the one perspective, as the end point of social development, while, seen from another perspective, is the point of origin for a reactionary social development. What Fukuyama described as the end of history, the end of the ideological conflict that had been making history, is what Gat described as the conditions of discontent prior to the appearance of a new ideology explicitly opposed to the values of the reigning liberal order.
So while Fukuyama in this original essay (he has published numerous clarifications and elaborations since then) speculates that boredom may eventually bring about the end of history, Gat’s understanding of a fascist minimum is that it is not boredom, but contempt and disgust. What for Fukuyama is an end point for civilization, is for Gat’s fascist minimum a point of departure. All of the conditions that Fukuyama describes are the conditions that Gat identifies as the raison d’être for fascism.
For Fukuyama, the end of history is the culmination of the liberal world order, the end point of possible development for liberalism — liberalism triumphant and unchallenged by any alternative ideology. And this explains a lot. Liberalism in power becomes aesthetically and morally repellent — smug, self-satisfied, lazy, undisciplined, indulgent, and, ultimately, self-destructive — to the point that it provokes a rebellion not out of boredom, but out of disgust. However, it is entirely possible that reactionaries follow a trajectory of becoming bored first, before formulating a reaction to the society that they found to be mind-numbingly banal, so Fukuyama may be right about the role of boredom, except that social evolution does not end with this boredom.
In the political cycles that have characterized western civilization, we often find that the fascist right appears initially as an aesthetic movement, as it is the artists who are among the first to feel the corruption of liberalism. For example, in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s “Manifesto of Futurism” (1909) we find many of themes of the “fascist minimum” given explicit exposition long before fascism as a political movement gained ground in Italy.
