By Robert Stark

The 2020s started off with a global pandemic and now a major war, two black swan events. Could this be the official end to “The End of History,” a political concept that is most often associated with the book that Francis Fukuyama wrote after the end of the Cold War? Fukuyama argued that not only was liberal democracy ascendent, having achieved total hegemony, but that its success was because it was the perfect system that could stand the test of time and triumph over historical cycles. There was a moment in the 90s where this seemed to be the case and politics felt like a side note.

One could make the case that illusions of an “End of History” were shattered by 9/11, but for the most part, the first two decades of the 21st Century were more stagnant than chaotic. Most Americans did not feel directly impacted by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and even with the 2008 financial crisis, a potential depression was diverted by the bailouts, and the economy was propped up by stock buybacks, printing by the Fed, and quantitative easing. The same applied to politics with Occupy Wall Street fizzling out to be co-opted by woke politics, and later Bernie Sanders’ leftwing populist movement being co-opted by woke politics and MAGA becoming conservatism with edgier rhetoric.

The prophet of despair, Michel Houellebecq, predicted that post pandemic life would be “the same but worse.” Since the beginning of the pandemic, I have alternated between feeling that society was headed towards collapse and agreeing with Houellebecq, in that post pandemic life would just be a worse version of the 2010s. Basically that inequality and societal ills would get worse but society would remain semi-functional. While the early stage of covid and the following civil unrest felt apocalyptic, by the fall of 2020 and into 2021, even taking into account January 6th, there seemed to be some semblance of normalcy. Even prior to the pandemic, Trump bringing the US close to conflict with Iran ended up deescalating.

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