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Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

Im not sure if the guy who declared "the end of history" in the 90s is really best poised to comment on this. The deep, societal rot that set this polarization in motion essentially kicked off shortly before he famously declared western civilization to be akin to perfection.

It seems pretty clear from this essay that he thinks that polarization is a surface level issue best dealt with by tweaking "how we talk to each other" across the political divide rather than addressing the underlying structural issues that indirectly trigger a deep level of anger and resentment like staggering wealth inequality.

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He's such a hack, and the End of History was dumb even back in 92. Guess what he is saying resonates with some people, cause he keeps getting attention despite his work being neo-liberal fanfiction.

You make it sound like there's a large roster of public intellectuals worth listening to. Why lump him in with the Tucker Carlsons of the world?

Excuse me but what is the point of your comment? Anything general about intellectuals in my comment is all in your own head. And what does some American pundit has to do with anything?

Uncharitable metacomment aside, I can't clarify much more.

You said he's a "hack," I'm saying it's relative. If Fukuyama is a hack, then that doesn't leave many public intellectuals left.

There's Chomsky.

Anybody really worth listening to is probably not going to be as corporate friendly as Fukuyama so they probably wont get much of an airing on the mainstream media.

I like Chomsky, but your criticism makes no sense. You can’t be a serious intellectual unless you hate corporations? Have you looked around lately? People love corporations and the products corporations make. And there is no better system than corporate neoliberalism, that we have figured out, for giving people the material things they want in large quantities. I just got back from Disneyland. It’s neoliberal paradise and people love it. People in my third world home country want to come to America and buy a house in Texas with four bedrooms and a pool and take their kids to Disneyland.

There’s lots of good criticisms to be made of the system. But there’s also a serious intellectual case for why systems that facilitate people getting the material things they want is a good thing. To write that off completely is intellectual laziness; a desire to wish away the difficult parts of your own position.

Chomsky who loves to downplay genocide if done by a leftist party and the political system he advocates is so hilariously unproven and basically can not actually work. But sure he is really worth listing too.

You did not add anything of value to the discussion, and it has nothing to do with my comment. You not even bringing a real argument for anything to the table. An absolute preposterous idea that Fuku being an idiot says anything about other public intellectuals. Don't make me, or anyone else, the target of your own internal discussion. Especially such nonsense.

The Origins of Political Order was a good book. I felt it had a reasonable way of structuring the understanding of how different societies came about and how a different mix of rule of law, accountability to the people, and the existence of a state.

Despite wealth inequality you can have societies which aren’t at each other’s throats. Not to say we want that society, but that is not directly related.

I also think that while the suggestion is facile on the surface, there is something more psychologically substantive —I’m not sure it’s sufficient but it certainly would help.

The root of our issues in the US is the selling out the lower classes’s potential by the government and industry to offshoring, thus reducing their economic power and outlook.

Of course if we hadn’t pursued globalization we’d be less advanced and things would be more expensive —imagine a kind of Switzerland, but while the potential is less open ended the lower classes and the middle classes would be less diverged from themselves as well as from the wealthy. So an executive to staff disparity might be 10x instead of 100x.

I think it's only theoretically possible, in practical terms it is not. With enormous wealth inequality you get an oligarchy class who will use their wealth/power to chip away at the societal stabilizers that would keep the worst excesses of wealth inequality in check like the social safety net, strong labor rights, etc.

In any case, I agree that selling out the lower classes for is pretty much guaranteed to make them angry, resentful and susceptible to the charms of right wing populists wanting to ascend to power upon a platform of blaming one or more convenient minority scapegoats.

> Despite wealth inequality you can have societies which aren’t at each other’s throats.

Can you name just one civilization with staggering inequalities which has not been subject to social conflict?

> The root of our issues in the US is the selling out the lower classes’s potential by the government and industry to offshoring, thus reducing their economic power.

I don't think this argument holds. The US was the theatre or major class struggle long before the neoliberal offshoring waves. Popular riots and massacres by the local authorities is nothing new, see for example the battle of Blair Mountain in 1921: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain

More to the point, the GDP/capita in the USA has kept growing over the years despite offshoring. The fact that some parts of the population struggle to feed themselves is due to conscious wealth-capturing schemes from the rich and government-friendly corporations. Or as Warren Buffet once put it, "Actually, there’s been class warfare going on for the last 20 years, and my class has won".

When the people realize how duped they've been with empty promises and scapegoats, they are bound to loose their shit and be at someone's throat.

50 years ago a high school graduate could get a decent job, buy a house and raise a family without too much sweat. Even HS dropouts had a fighting chance. That ain’t happenin no more.

As Buffett alludes to, this is recent. In the last 30 years -as a consequence of offshoring. Cobbling shoes and pickin up garbage ain’t glamorous but they're a living. All the mills closing shop in the south affected working class black employment, in the northeast it affected working class white employment. But add up all the industries affected.

Now we’re beginning to offshore food. The laborers who used to cross the border for jobs now have jobs in their own countries which may be better may be worse…

It’s all done by a greedy gov and greedy industrialists who turned to globalism and away from supporting local economies to the detriment of the lower and middle classes.

> Can you name just one civilization with staggering inequalities which has not been subject to social conflict?

There are no societies, especially unequal or not, without social conflict. If there are no external enemies internal ones will swiftly be found.

“Only the dead are safe; only the dead have seen the end of war.” George Santayana

>Can you name just one civilization with staggering inequalities which has not been subject to social conflict?

Sweden has rather high level of wealth inequality (about the same level as the US) while being quite stable politically and socially.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_in...

> Sweden (...) quite stable politically and socially.

There are riots in Sweden too [0], and what some consider to be terrorist activities from the far left to the far right [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Riots_and_civil_disor...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_Sweden

Barbados, Singapore, New Zealand...

Also, with regard to Sweden, they have been a destination for poor refugees who on average integrate less than ideally into their society, given social, economic, political and spiritual differences between host country and new arrivals.

I challenge you to go to Sweden, travel threw it for 4 weeks and then honestly say its a society that is at each other throat.

I challenge you to go to anywhere that's not obviously a civil war and say that they're at each other's throats.

That argument makes no sense: a lot of people have very exotic tourism in Paris, New York, or in Guadeloupe. Yet for those who look beyond the surface the situation is shocking and on the right day of BLM / gilets jaunes protests you may believe the entire society has lost their shit (when in fact it's just the logical conclusion of a tiny minority of officials/businesses exploiting the entire population).

What a actual metric then would you use to suggest a country is 'at each other throat'. How do you measure that?

People want to find these grand narratives. But if you actually look into the data, the real cost are actually mostly related to health care, car ownership and housing police (or city/town planning).

If the US fixed its city planning, stopped pushing every family to have many cars and managed its health care system with even minimal efficiency the data would look much different.

Offshoring is a bad argument, because that has happened in many places to a large extent and the results are not that American.

You can disagree with what Fukuyama wrote in "The End of History" but what he wrote isn't what most people (who haven't read it) think he wrote. The strawman version that most people think he wrote is "Yay! The Cold War is over! Everyone will instantly become democratic and capitalistic!". What he actually wrote is that democracy and capitalism is the eventual end state of human society, even if it may take centuries to get there for everyone. I think history shows that dictatorships and economic systems that deny market forces are ultimately short lived. Yes, right now democracy and capitalism have a lot of detractors, and it may be that these will temporarily fail even in some Western countries. But even if they do, I doubt these new regimes will last long and eventually people will have to go back to what works.

It's an embarrassingly bad take. "The sociopolitical system that I am benefiting from also happens to be the inevitable final and best one" is something that so many people have claimed over the years, and has failed each time. And that's not to mention the fundamental contradictions between democracy and capitalism, the existential threat capitalism has posed to the entire world via climate change, the fragility of pseudodemocratic institutions past and present, and dozens of other problems. But sure, the system we have had for less then a tenth of the duration of many ancient empires is final and complete, and everyone should just give up on finding solutions to its many problems that might inconvence those currently in power.

When people say things like "the existential threat capitalism has posed to the entire world via climate change" one has to wonder if they know about the horrendous pollution (often far worse than in the West) that existed in the Soviet Union and related countries. The issue isn't about "capitalism" but industrial society in general. If you want to get rid of that, fine, but I don't think you'll find many people willing to go back to an agrarian or hunter-gatherer society.

It's not about pollution, it's about actively spending billions to prevent any solutions once we knew it was a problem.

He said that now fascism and communism had been "defeated" that there will be no more competition for liberal democracy.

Yet he's arguing both here and elsewhere about how to defeat liberal democracy's new domestic and foreign opponents.

> I think history shows that dictatorships and economic systems that deny market forces are ultimately short lived

like 99% of history is monarchies and dictatorships, democracy is a blip on the radar

I'm not sure it makes sense counting societies prior to the industrial revolution because most issues in society before then depended just on the control of arable land. The industrial revolution changed the entire dynamic. Dictatorships, whether communistic or fascistic haven't lasted long in this era, and nearly all surviving monarchies turned into meaningless shows of pageantry (and those that survived as actual rulers like some in the Middle East, did so because they were oil states and are unlikely to last long as the world moves away from reliance on fossil fuels).

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