Francis Fukuyama has spent three decades as the left’s favorite punchline — the man who declared history over just as it was starting up again. Matt McManus’s review of Fukuyama’s new autobiography, In the Realm of the Last Man, argues that the joke has cost us the argument. Almost nobody reads past the title, and the parts nobody reads are the ones that called it.

What The End of History and the Last Man actually said:

  • The last five chapters warned that the problem was “the last man” — that a prosperous, self-satisfied liberal democracy might not call forth what is highest in people
  • Fukuyama drew on Nietzsche and the Greek concept of thymos, the desire for recognition, arguing that liberal societies deliver material comfort but have never offered equal recognition to all their members
  • Megalothymia — the craving for superiority — meant some would find the life of a bored, well-paid technocratic manager intolerable and would want to be men of destiny instead
  • The book’s closing pages name “a developer like Donald Trump” as exactly that type: someone whose life was “not the most difficult” and whose cause was “not the most serious or the most just”

The autobiography’s other virtue, per McManus, is candor about how Fukuyama got to the neoconservatives and how he left. He studied Foucault and Derrida in Paris, recoiled from what he saw as a nihilistic project, fell in with Strauss, Bloom, and Kojève, and signed a 1990s letter urging the invasion of Iraq — later admitting the decision “was psychological, and not a matter of policy judgement or moral disagreement,” a “mental block against taking a public stand against the views of longtime friends.”

Where McManus turns on him is the left half of the ledger. Fukuyama witheringly dismisses Foucault and Derrida rather than engaging them, calls the Gaza encampments the work of students wanting “a break from their lives of steady and unheroic striving” while somehow missing that Washington is allied to Israel and not to Russia or Sudan’s RSF, and claims the left has no systematic vision of a post-liberal society — a claim that collapses against Nordic socialism, twenty-first-century socialism, or liberal socialism, all of which exist in print.

The sharpest cut is meritocracy. Fukuyama admires Michael Sandel but never engages The Tyranny of Merit, so he can diagnose resentment without asking where it comes from. He still cheers meritocracy and gives one cheer for megalothymia as a spur to excellence, even as liberal societies tell the poor to save their pennies, cut the Budweiser, and either go to college or buy Bitcoin early. A ruling class that owes nothing to anyone, above a population told it has only itself to blame, is a resentment factory — and the myth was propagated by liberals, not by their enemies.

McManus’s closing line is the one worth keeping. Fukuyama has drifted from Reagan-Bush neoconservatism to Clinton-Biden centrism and calls that progress. But it was the failure of exactly that centrism that paved the road to Trumpism, and it will not save anyone from it.