In his recent New Left Review essay Zhang Yongle reads The End of History and the Last Man, he finds a work of political theory struggling to remain coherent in the face of its most grotesque offspring: Donald Trump. Fukuyama emerges not as a tragic figure, but as a man who mistook surrender for insight, a theorist whose dream of thymotic1 equilibrium (a liberal-democratic regime balancing reason, appetite and spirit) has been hijacked by a real-estate tycoon whose only conception of dignity is a golden toilet. For Zhang, Fukuyama is a flawed but earnest ideologue of liberal hegemony, and Trump a perverse response to its failings. The arc of the essay bends towards understanding, maybe reconciliation, even rehabilitation.
That’s a mistake. Fukuyama wasn’t trying to interpret the world. He was trying to lock it in place. The End of History is not a philosophy of political order. More a doctrine of political closure. It’s not the summation of liberalism’s triumph, but a pre-emptive strike against the possibility of anything else.
So in that sense, it succeeded.
Fukuyama’s thesis wasn’t about the end of war or the end of conflict. It was about the end of ideology. History, in his formulation, is the record of humanity’s ideological struggle: from feudalism to capitalism, from monarchy to democracy, from revolution to reaction. By claiming this struggle had resolved in liberal democracy, Fukuyama wasn’t forecasting peace. He was burying politics.
He wasn’t the first. The phrase “end of ideology” had circulated since the 1950s, particularly among Cold War liberals desperate to neutralise both communism and right-wing populism. Figures like Daniel Bell, Edward Shils, and Seymour Martin Lipset helped reframe liberal democracy and capitalism as the natural outcome of modern development. Less a political choice than a historical inevitability. Lipset, with his theory of American exceptionalism, argued that socialism never took root in the United States because democracy and prosperity had already solved the problem. That became the line: revolution was either premature or redundant. Bell, who once caucused with the Trotskyists but remained firmly social democratic, treated radical politics more as an intellectual curiosity than a viable path. For these thinkers, ideology meant instability. Stalinism, mass movements, and anything that hinted at upheaval were cast as threats to stability. In its place came the managerial consensus: growth, stability, administration.
This is important, they didn’t interpret the future. Just helped shut it down.
Bell’s The End of Ideology, like Fukuyama’s The End of History decades later, became a lightning rod. For the New Left of the early 1960s, it was practically a provocation. Student radicals read it not as a sober sociological diagnosis, but as a smug defence of the status quo. As Todd Gitlin later recalled, Bell got hammered. In a political moment when being ideological meant being alive to injustice, Bell’s call for moderation came off as complacency. And while some of the backlash may have overstated the case (Bell wasn’t a reactionary, and he did believe in reform) his vision of “incremental change” was still grounded in the assumption that the liberal centre must hold.
That assumption would become the hallmark of postwar technocracy: politics not as struggle, but as fine-tuning.
The future would be managed, not fought for.
But the postwar decades didn’t conform to this vision. The Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, May ’68, national liberation struggles from Algeria to Angola, all demonstrated that ideology hadn’t died. If anything, it was resurgent. The dominant class had not secured consent; it had merely postponed confrontation. The Cold War was never won by ideas alone, but by coups, assassinations, proxy wars and debt.
Fukuyama appeared at the moment of exhaustion. The Soviet bloc was imploding, the ANC was at the negotiating table, China was digesting Tiananmen. Reagan and Thatcher had subdued (destroyed?) domestic labour movements. Capital was on the move: privatising, outsourcing, deregulating, financialising. The world stank of victory and something rotting underneath it. Into this moment, Fukuyama injected a secular theology: history had ended. Liberal democracy, coupled with market capitalism, was the final form of human government. The battle was over.
Zhang treats this pronouncement as a bold, perhaps naive, declaration of equilibrium. But it was more than that. It was ideological counter-revolution. The End of History did not describe a world without alternatives; it helped eliminate them. It offered philosophical cover for a global capitalist consolidation, just as the last organised forces of systemic opposition were being dismantled.
Fukuyama’s sleight of hand was to make this closure seem benign. He invoked Hegel and Kojève, spoke of thymos and mutual recognition, and assured readers that dignity had found its form. But the dignity on offer was procedural: the vote, the contract, the market. Class was absent. Empire was euphemised. Capital, the driving force behind the global transformations of the 1990s, was never named.
The real ‘end’ The End of History celebrates is the end of working-class agency. So it’s not about recognition. It’s about a kind of resignation.
This is where Zhang’s account, for all its insight, remains too polite. He treats Fukuyama as an idealist sidelined by events. But the events were the consequence of the ideology itself. The triumph of the market was accompanied by the gutting of the welfare state, the hollowing out of industry, the assault on unions. The world was not becoming Denmark. It was becoming more unequal, more brutal, more volatile.
Into this volatility stepped Trump. Not as a reactionary outlier but as a logical consequence. Trump is not the enemy of Fukuyama’s system; he is its grotesque inheritor. Where Fukuyama thought markets would sublimate thymotic drives into productivity, Trump redirected them into spectacle, resentment, and revenge. Recognition came back, but only for the chosen. The rest were told to wait, again.
Zhang sees Trumpism not as a breakdown, but as a new form of hegemonic storytelling. What he calls ‘winnism’, a kind of improvisational style that bends politics around Trump’s instinct to dominate every encounter. In this reading, Trumpism is a media-savvy update to the logic of consent: chaotic, yes, but still a way of organising allegiance.
But that understates the rupture. What Trumpism reveals isn’t just a shift in tone or style. It’s the return of raw ideology after the collapse of centrist consensus. Fukuyama’s vision tried to seal history in procedural amber. No more grand conflicts, just tweaks and management. Trump tore that seal off. He didn’t kill liberalism. He exposed its corpse. This isn’t narrative improvisation. It’s politics in the wreckage, unmediated, vicious, and newly emboldened.
Zhang hesitates to call it what it is. Trumpism isn’t just spectacle (though that’s a big part of it) or rupture. This is a soft-fleshed, digitally enhanced form of fascism, built not in opposition to liberal democracy but from its ruins. It fuses resentment and chauvinism, collapses legality into loyalty, and feeds on the sense that politics no longer serves ordinary people.
But that’s a nonsense. Trump 2.0 doesn’t serve ordinary people. Unless of course your definition of ordinary includes billions in the bank and a Bond villain bolt hole in New Zealand or Hawaii. The populist veneer is just that: a projection screen for private jets, bigger police budgets, and stock buybacks. The real base isn’t the rustbelt diner crowd. It’s hedge funds, fossil capital, and venture libertarians waiting for their freedom cities, treating democracy as a temporary inconvenience. For everyone else, Trumpism delivers austerity dressed as vengeance, surveillance sold as security, and endless culture war to keep the heat off capital.
There may be no brownshirts, but there are masked ICE raids, militias in waiting, and churches that bless the flag before they bless the poor. Where classical fascism offered national rebirth through violence, Trump offers algorithmic grievance and executive revenge.
Call it what you like, but this is what liberalism looks like when it gives up pretending. The promises of dignity, equality, and universal rights have long been threadbare. Trump didn’t tear them up, he just stopped pretending they mattered. There is no consensus left to maintain, no legitimacy left to stage-manage. What remains is power without performance, capital without cover. Trumpism isn’t the end of liberalism. It’s what’s left when the mask slips.
Both Trump and Fukuyama are responses to the same crisis: the impossibility of sustaining American hegemony under the terms that defined the post-Cold War order. Fukuyama offered a theory of equilibrium without material support. Trump now offers confrontation without coherence.
The task now isn’t to mourn liberalism’s disarray or fear Trumpism’s return. It’s to understand how both are symptoms of an exhausted order. This is an empire that’s lost the capacity to universalise its own ideology. The future won’t be secured by restoring balance. It will be fought over, again.
History didn’t end.
What returns now is struggle.
Footnotes
- The term thymos originates in Plato’s Republic, where it describes the spirited part of the soul that craves recognition, honour, and status. Francis Fukuyama, drawing on Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel, uses “thymotic drives” in The End of History and the Last Man (1992) to explain the political struggle for dignity. For Fukuyama, liberal democracy’s promise of universal recognition satisfies these drives; for his critics, it merely suppresses them—leaving them vulnerable to capture by nationalism, racism, or reaction. ↩︎
