The twentieth century, it is safe to say, has made all of us into deep historical pessimists.
The opening line of the first chapter is the author’s way of saying that the greater, larger and more expansive perspective on history that once ruled over matters of philosophy was winnowed out by the unprecedented horrors of the 20th century. While each individual may be optimistic about their own future and even nationalistic groups may look forward with a sense of hope for the future, as a general rule the depths of depravity exposed not by deviance but as a course of normalcy in our lifetimes has taught us one thing above all others: the future will bring even greater depravity by an even larger number of supposedly normal people.
Whether or not we acknowledge our debt to him, we owe to Hegel the most fundamental aspects of our present-day consciousness.
Three 19th century German philosophers inform the author’s contention that history has come to an end with the perfection of liberal democracy and capitalism, after which no other theoretical possibility carries any true potential. The author dismisses Karl Marx as being completely wrong. Friedrich Nietzsche’s Ubermensch becomes his model for the last man. Standing above all others—towering over the march of 20th century history—is Georg Wilhelm Hegel, the philosopher to whom he attributes the most scrupulous reading of history as a template for expectation of the future course of the world.
Nietzsche's last man was, in essence, the victorious slave. He agreed fully with Hegel that Christianity was a slave ideology, and that democracy represented a secularized form of Christianity.
The author argues that for Nietzsche, the ultimate success of either communism or liberal democracy would be the ultimately victory of the slave over the master. Neither can successfully exist with preservation of the old order; both require an uprising in the name of equality. But it is the liberal democracy that prevailed because—with Nietzsche’s pronouncement that god is dead—democracy represented the smoothest transition for those raised upon the tenets of the slavery morality guides their ideology.
…if a country's goal is economic growth above all other considerations, the truly winning combination would appear to be neither liberal democracy nor socialism of either a Leninist or democratic variety, but the combination of liberal economics and authoritarian politics…or what we might term a "market-oriented authoritarianism.”
If the author has been shown to have widely missed the mark in some of the predictions he made in the early 1990’s, he almost seems prescient in predicting the wholesale jettisoning of the traditional democratic world order as the second decade of the 21st century came to a close. The American turn toward “market-oriented authoritarianism” in which economic growth was placed ahead of civil rights, global alliances, respect for democracy, sanctions against tyrants, the purity of its electoral system and any and all other considerations represents a new sort of political state never seen before; intensely nationalistic at its core, but willing to pivot on opinion and attitude in the name of furthering economic growth. The consequences of this new, untried form of “market-oriented authoritarianism” is not one that can be immediately undone with the election of a new leadership dedicated to restoring the old order. Only the distant future will reveal whether even a short-term adoption of this ideology will result in wholesale damage or unexpected purification to the liberal democratic system which the author identifies as the ultimate victory of progress and civilization.
