Play It Again, Uncle Sam

Rumors of the end of history have been greatly exaggerated.

Cǎlin Georgescu, far-right pro-Russia candidate for president in Romania, speaks with journalists on November 26, 2024.

Just in time for Thanksgiving, here’s a little news item out of Bucharest:

Reuters, November 24 — A hard-right critic of NATO who has praised Russia is set to face a center-right opposition leader in a presidential election runoff in Romania that could undermine its pro-Western stance after a shock outcome in the first-round vote. With 99.9% of votes counted after voting on Sunday, independent hard-right politician Cǎlin Georgescu, 62, had 22.95% of votes. Center-right contender Elena Lasconi, leader of the opposition Save Romania Union, lay second with 19.2%.

The outcome was a huge shock as pre-election opinion polls had made Social Democrat Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu the frontrunner. The candidate of the center-right Liberals, Ciolacu’s coalition partners, also failed to secure a place in the election runoff, which will be on Dec. 8.

“I have voted for the wronged, the humiliated, those who feel they do not matter in this world,” Georgescu said on Sunday. “Today, the vote is a prayer for the nation.”

Sound at all familiar? It should. Over the past five years, politics have turned sharply — and by sharply, I mean “extremely, nationalistically, increasingly dictatorially” — rightward in Hungary, Poland, Estonia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Serbia and Croatia. You may also recall that 35 years ago all of these countries were Communist. Then they became capitalist democracies promoting economic and human rights. Now they are mainly autocracies, where demagogues skim their treasuries while pandering to disappointed citizens seething with resentment about the so-called New World Order.

That’s Eastern Europe. In Western Europe, the heart of liberal democracy around the world, Austria, Belgium, Spain, France, Germany, Greece, Switzerland (!), the United Kingdom (!!), Sweden (!!!), Finland (!!!!), Denmark (!!!!!) and the Netherlands (!@#%&!) are experiencing insurgencies from the same hard right, pandering to disappointed citizens seething with resentment about the so-called New World Order. So horrified are citizens over immigration and the cost of living, nationalist parties are kingmakers in ruling coalitions in eight of 27 countries. The coming European Union parliamentary elections may well turn liberal democracy upside down.

Meantime, on the other side of the Atlantic — where in Latin America leftwing politics recently reigned in Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Chile, Bolivia, Argentina and Peru — the right is also on the march. Though Brazil’s mini-Trump Jair Bolsonaro has been sent packing, Javier Milei in Argentina, Jose Antonio Kast in Chile and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador are reminding the continent not only of Bolsonaro but of Chile’s reactionary Pinochet years. In Colombia, recently elected leftist president Gustavo Petro was promptly paralyzed by populist protests over his socialist agenda.

You may even further recall that in points north, disillusioned (and catastrophically misinformed) MAGA hoi polloi have elected a sociopathic, dictatorial criminal to the US presidency, a scoundrel who built his movement by shamelessly pandering to disappointed citizens, horrified about the cost of living and immigration, and seething self-destructively with resentment.

“I think that it’s not good for global democracy,” the noted political philosopher Francis Fukayama told the Foreign Affairs podcast.

I think that Trump’s victory has already been celebrated by all the wrong people … people like Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin … have all, I think, taken encouragement.

It means in Europe, for example, that the National Rally in France, or Brothers of Italy, other populist political parties are going to jump on the bandwagon and push the entire region to the right.

Interesting. I quote Fukayama not to validate my fears, but to cling to one slender hope that I’m mistaken about impending doom. He is, after all, the soothsayer who in 1992 published the galloping best-seller The End of History and the Last Man. If we imagine history as a prolonged prizefight between Enlightenment and darker ideologies, Fukayama’s book slapped the canvas and declared victory to liberalism in a knockout. In his words, “the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

It didn’t quite work out that way. Around the world, democracy is being democratically emasculated by the masses who listen to golden oldies from nationalist siren singers and vote to play it again, Sam. And suddenly, three decades later, Fukayama is saying an entirely different and most alarming sort of sooth: the end of liberalism. What to make of his about-face? Shall we seek context from, say, the Romanian parliament? Or perhaps from Aesop.

Shall we panic about gathering global fascism, or this time ignore the fabled Boy Who Cried No Wolf? As I say, I’m desperately hoping the professor is mistaken once again. But too much is at stake to rely on hope. We must all of us race full speed up the hill to protect the flock.