Sorry, I didn’t post this two weeks ago, but, frankly, things have been tough so far this year, and I don’t get paid to blog. But these are important reflections of how top elites in USA are thinking, so we just have to get around to noticing and discussing them.
There were two important articles in Foreign Affairs, the quarterly journal and associated website run by the Council on Foreign Relations. Yeah, yeah, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Tri-laterals and all the tin-foil hat stuff notwithstanding, the simple fact is that some very powerful and very influential people have paid some eye-popping amounts of money to be counted as members of the CFR. And Foreign Affairs has a long, and I would even dare say, proud and enviable, history of publishing important articles that signaled major shifts or developments in USA policies, such as George Kennan’s July 1947 X article explaining the new policy of “containment” of the Soviet Union.
The first article two weeks ago, “America in Decay,” was written by Francis Fukuyama, the neo-conservative economics and political science professor whose 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man provided unceasing thrills and pleasure to USA elites by arguing that the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe marked not only America’s victory in the Cold War, “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.” (That’s what USA elites want to believe, and they get upset when we the people start showing signs that we’re not happy with the new corporatist paradise they’ve constructed for themselves, and locked us in as their supposedly prosperous and cheerful serfs. That’s a big reason why the Democratic Party’s support for Occupy was so faltering and feeble.)
The gist of Fukuyama’s article is that it has turned out that Western liberal democracy is not the end point of human political development, and there seems to be more history in the offing, because it has been replaced by – holy unforeseen development, Batman! – oligarchyand plutocracy. Of course, Fukuyama does not use these words, but the idea is clear enough: his subtitle is “The Sources of Political Dysfunction.”…..please click here to read more on the original site.
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