The End of History?

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama's essay with the above title and the book that followed in 1991 posited that with the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the universalization of Western liberal democracy would be the final form of human government and thus the end of that particular chain of history.

Nice try, bro. Today, Fukuyama himself says that with the advent of Trump and his gang of dictators and tinpot despots, he doesn't know what's coming next. Which leads me to the whole notion of history, as I hear it so often from the TV pundits and read about it online. 

First, God bless all the folks I see and hear and read; they are angry and thoughtful and well dressed and articulate. They are on the side of truth and light. But what gets me every time is when they say, “History will not be kind to ...” or “the judgment of history is waiting for ...” or “so and so will go down in the annals  of posterity as … .” 

How do they know what history will make of this shitstorm? There is to me an almost smug certainty of this judgment of history, as if they're saying, “All this will go away and folks like us will get down to the business of writing the history of it and we will obviously get it right and settle all scores along the way.” 

If Trump is re-elected, history will begin again, a history that will be written by the winners, as the saying goes. This history might very well rehearse Donald Trump's ascendancy to president for life or establishment of a dynasty with his children following him to the presidency. Much as important people vanished from Soviet history under Stalin, so might all  traces of Barack Obama vanish from any Trumpian history. 

This new history might glowingly tell of Trump's heroics in making our borders safe and the beautiful wall that Mexico paid for, of the historic treaty with Russia in which Vladimir Putin became an American cabinet member and Trump built his Moscow Tower, in his words “the crowning achievement of my illustrious career in government, politics, and real estate, and paid for with your tax dollars per the treaty which my Senate approved.”

Trump's history will be written by a monopoly of hand-picked “scholars” much as Trump was able to stack the judicial and legislative and electoral deck to win re-election. Helpful Russian hacking in the election will be known in Trumpian history as “precast political aid.”

So when you hear or read folks presuming on history, hope with all your hearts and minds that they are right that history and posterity will not be kind to Donald Trump and his cutrate cabinet and all the Republican flotsam in the Senate and anyone else responsible in any measure for the damage Trump has already done to our democracy. 

They see an end to this tragedy. An end to the already shameful history of Donald Trump. It is an end devoutly to be desired.