I understand RIchard’s attempt to exaggerate in order to make his point, in order to counter the exaggeration of Fukuyama in order to undermine his points.
1) Democracy is irrelevant, but rule of law that approximates natural law is not. We use democracy to limit as we use rule of law of natural law to limit both power and populism. We live in a search for concurrency btween regions and classes not majority democracy: Concurrent Democracy requring commonality before positive legislation. We live under the Common Law, meaning concurrency of negative law(prohibition). Democracy(Majority) differs from Concurrency(between regions and classes). It is the left’s attempt to construct majority democracy over the long history of european trifuctionalism (look it up) that requires concurrency betwee classes, elites for each class, and regions of classes and their elites. Yet our success is dependent upon rule of natural law of sovereigty and reciprocity, trifunctional competition between the military-political, economic-legal, and religous-familial communities, and the classes that they serve, and …. limiting us to cooperation by competition resulting in the maximization of individual responsibilty for the common good, producing the maximum rate of innovation, adaptation, and evolution that created european advantage despite our small numbers in the bronze age indo european expansion and the invention of man as a competitor to nature, the iron age mediterranean expansion and invention of philosophy and empiricism, and the steel age of atlantic expansions and the development of science, industry, medicine, and technology.
2) The world does not reject the western model of classical liberal republican rule of law by the natural (common) law of individual sovereignty and reciprocity, an independent judiciary, and demand for concurrency between branches of government. Instead the world rejects what we today finally acknowledge as Woke, or, the migration of the class marxist movement to america and then outward from america as race marxism: the war against the institutions of cultural production of western civilization. Cultural Marxism(Anti Individual Responsibility), Sex Marxism (Anti-Male Feminism), Race Marxism (Woke), Even Truth Marxism (Postmodernism). Even then, the world’s primary rejection of the results of ‘liberalism (race marxism)’ are reducible to the prioritization of hedonism over the responsibile survivable family, and a commons that assist in the production of those families. This rejection manifests as throwing out all of western culture because of the extremes reached by the woke LGBTetc movement that overwhelm the disgust response of the majority who must raise children in that environment of developmental risk.
3) Both Russia and China failed because they remain agrarian imperial civilizations with borders assailable by the same peoples that have plagued all advanced civiilzations throughout time – the central asians of the steppe whose lack of fortune in possession of rivers and access to oceans in a terrible climate have prohibited capital formation – and continue to do so. Because of this perception of border threats, they cannot embrace ‘democracy’ without outright declaring the eternal war against ‘undevelooped hostile minorities’ that they are seeking to domesticate because no one has yet domesticated them and they’re a constant risk given the resource value of central and northern eurasia (West of the Urals, and north of Mongolia) we call Siberia. As such they are desperate to maintain their primitive imperial models both because of tradition, because of low public trust (see fukuyama’s Trust), because of the profitability of corruption for the ‘ruling corrupt’, and because they fear territorial disintegration at the expense of the core population (russian and han). Worse, they are in a condition where within a generation the core ethnic population will shrink such that if they do nothing to consolidate power, vs fear of future weakness. So, becasue of these conditions, they chose a period of western decline due to the internal conflict over the Woke Culture War, to OVERREACH the economic conditions of their current order, to extend power further to capture population and resources now while they percieve the early opportunity – an opportunity that will vanish.
4) I understand that the ‘credentialed classes’ and (including RIchard) tend to interpret intellectual work products, ideology, and philosophy as seriously as fundamentalists try to read into scripture, but the reality is that the military and state are much more serious people than the talking classes. They work with simple rules. Toward obvious ends. And they use the work products of credentialists and priesthoods (both are technically credentialists), and the self interst of the economic and financial spheres, to tell stories in the terms that satisfy those constituencies, that steer the public regardless of what pretense-to-knowledge they rely upon, to serve the rather simple strategic interests of the military, state, powers that be.
5) Fukuyama is right in that it is hard to defeat the natural aw of sovereignty and reciprocity with decidabilty provided by concurrency, commonality, and a division of institutions that mirror the division of labor, and human capital. It is however wrong to conflate the success of the west given our intolerance for irresponsibility with our tolerance for class marxism, cltural marxism, race marxism, sex marxism, and truth marxism, all of which produce rapid destruction of accumulated human behavioral capital that maximizes individual responsibility necessary to preserve competency sufficient for sovereignty and reciprocity. In other words, it’s pretty obvious the future direction of ‘the western model’ which is being undermined by ‘liberalism’ (woke, leftism), is to restore responsibility, sovereignty, and reciprocity, and meritocracy. and it’s also pretty obvious that this will be achieved by the same means it evolved: concurrency and commonality between small states that conduct different cultural experiences that through market competition continue the convergence to a science of politics, society, and economy and all the institutions they entail. And that convergence will look more like 1925 than it will in 2025. Why? Opinion in political matters is evaporating as fast as opinion in the rest of the sciences.
6) As far as I can tell, the science is rather obvious: the natural law of self determination by responsibility for sovereignty and reciprocity is simply an extension of physics and cannot be otherwise at any scale of population or time – becuase otherwise it must result in conflict inducing parasitism and predation. As far as I can tell the variation in the policy of the commons for which governments (markets for the production of commons) evolved, is necessary given group differences in cognitive sexual dimorphism, and group differences in depth an rate of neotenic resistance to sexual maturity and resulting aggression. Groups do indeed require different commons given their different rates of development, and their different perceptions of moral norm that is advantageous or disadvantagous to their instincts – instincts that appear unalterable without the incentives of agrarianism to cause us to compromise for survival. So in the absence of that constraint we are seeing post agrarian humanity begin to ‘speciate’ again, or at the very least, separate into polities that suit their instincts. Where those instincts all originate in the single cause of all human differences: sex differences in perception, congition, and value, due to the sexual division of labor between feminine immediate empathizing (feels), and masculine intertemporal systematizing (reals).
The end of history isn’t here. In fact, it’s just the beginnig of what will emerge. And that emergence MUST deterministically devolve into our extinction, or evolve to minimum variation from the laws of the universe, of which the natural law is just a slightnly more complex expression. That future will look much more like many european nation states, and in particular, the return of (hedonistic) city states. And the mixed economy intolerant (facist) to the mixed economy intolerant of intolerance (libertine) will be the only variable given the differences between us.
