Sixty years ago on November 17th 1956 Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Premier, said before an audience of Western ambassador’s in Moscow, “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!” The error of the statement is a forgone conclusion for most who have witnessed the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union, but was he wrong? Is this the end of history, as Fukuyama predicted?
To recap, Francis Fukuyama made the following bold and controversial statement in 1989:
What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war 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.
This sentiment has held up for fifteen years and stands in stark contrast to Khrushchev’s expectations for a world dominated by Communist ideology. It would seem that society has struggled for thousands of years to organize itself and the job is done — western Democracy is the de-facto way to politically organize ourselves. It seems that Democracy is on the march everywhere.
But we know that history continues to unfold and after a period of pragmatism people will yearn for ambitious goals. If these goals include the abolition of poverty and gross inequality, it is hard to see how such ends will be met within the framework of Western liberal democracy. We may yet need to discover how to organize ourselves to overcome basic problems with the human condition. It is clear to most observers that Communism didn’t work, but I think it would be rash to conclude that it could never work.
By this I don’t mean to endorse central planning, statism or totalitarianism — the unfortunate side-effects of 20th century Communism. Rather, I think it would represent a colossal lack of imagination to assume that the only manner of self-organization for humanity is to “live and let live.” We can, and should, set the bar higher. Doing so without coercion is the conundrum that all socialists wrestle with.
In the meantime, it will be interesting to see how the current political void is filled. While most American progressives were not advocates of Communism, the existence of the Soviet Union offered a counter balance and affected the political middle ground — a locus that has shifted dramatically to the right in the past fifteen years. Liberal policies could be enacted to placate the radical left and conservatives benefited from a definable opposing force. I find it telling how William F. Buckley laments the state of discourse among the right in the Wall Street Journal:
Conservatism is no longer sutured together by “the galvanizing thread that the Soviet Union provided. And for that reason I think conservatism has become a little bit slothful. It could be very decisive when the alternative was the apocalyptic reordering presented by the Soviet Union. . . . But in the absence of those challenges, there were attenuations. Those attenuations at this point haven’t been resolved very persuasively.”
For now we craft policy without the counter balance we’ve become accustomed to, but in sixty more years we may know whether Khrushchev or Fukuyama made the right prediction. Then again, the future has a way of working itself out in ways that no one expected. We are constantly reordering our social structures. “Men make their own history,” wrote Marx in the Eighteenth Brumaire, “but they do not make it just as they please.”