Bonus - Trump and the End of History w/ Lee Jones (Preview)

0:00You're listening to American Prestige. To listen ad-free, you can subscribe at AmericanPrestigePod.com. Find the link in our show notes. Hey Prestigeheads, Danny here. I wanted to let you know about two upcoming book talks I have that are free to attend, but you need to RSVP to them. The first will be held on Wednesday. It's online and will be hosted by the Quincy Institute, and it'll start at 9 a.m. PST, 12 p.m. EST. You can register for this talk at the link in the show notes. The second talk will be held on Thursday in Seattle, and it's in person only. It'll be held at Elliott Bay Book Company, and will start at 7 p.m. You can RSVP at the link in the show notes. Both of these events again are free, because I think it's important to model a post-capitalist society. Hope you can make it, and as always, keep on rockin' in the free world. Hello Prestigeheads, and welcome to American Prestige.

1:16I'm Danny Bessner here, as always, with my friend and comrade Derek Davidson. We are very excited to welcome to the podcast today. Someone who I have wanted to have on for a long time, someone who I always enjoy listening to and learning from, and that is Lee Jones. Lee is a professor in political economy and international relations at Queen Mary University of London, and he's also one of the co-hosts of a podcast that I quite enjoy, Alphabunga. Bunga. Lee, thank you so much for joining the pod today. That's great pleasure, Danny. So why don't we just jump in? Because one of the things that I really enjoy hearing you talk about is the state of international relations, broadly speaking, from almost a systemic level. There's a lot of different ways one can approach this, and there's a couple of questions that I'd like to ask you. So first of all, one of the things that the podcast that you co-host, Alphabunga, Bunga, is known for is this notion of the end of the end of history. I'm not sure if they were or you guys were the first to coin that.

2:18I imagine not, but in the left sphere, I think that you have been among the most important people to advance this idea. So could you let me know? Do you agree with this concept, or maybe even before that, what does this concept mean? And then we could go from there, because I think it really does relate to the state of international relations and geopolitics, broadly speaking. Yeah, sure. Alphabunga, Bunga or Bunga Cast, as it's now called, because nobody could Google for it when that very clever German Italian name was saying to you. I apologize. Yeah, that's why it was renamed Bunga Cast. But that's been going since 2017, which was the same year that I created a course at my university called Politics at the End of the End of History. And I think now you can find everybody saying it's the end of the end of history, but I'd like to say we were first. Well, I disagree. So this might be interesting. I like to immediately disagree with this notion. So we could go. At least as Fukuyama meant it.

3:20But yes, we go. You go. So it is based on Fukuyama's famous essay where he understands through a kind of bowed-larized reading of Hegel, he says, look, history with the capital H was the contestation between multiple ideologies in the 20th century that meant liberalism, fascism and communism. Liberalism and communism had defeated fascism in 1945. If that just left liberalism versus communism. And the end of the Cold War was the defeat of communism which left liberalism as the soul, ideology governing mankind. And although he expected small-age history events to continue, he basically said that the ideological contestation that has fueled human history from his perspective, that's over. And so capital H history is also over. And he said that he's often seen as being triumphalist into some extent. He was. But he also said that the end of history would be a sad time, replaced into the replacement of politics by bureaucracy, the management of things.

4:23And we think it's not the key. Basically, applying that like the classical virtues, capital V will not be able to be enacted. That's what I think he's doing in that last paragraph there. I think that's why. Right. Right. And honor is like not a thing of the end of history. I think that's basically what he's saying there. That liberalism has rationalized a way, almost the ancient virtues. I was just teaching that through cities. So I'm like in that space. And you could like see, he's definitely someone who like read that and is in that space. But yeah. I think that's probably right. And I think if you look at Fukiyama's subsequent development as one of the co-sponsors of the project for the new American century as a Neocon, he found that was a problem. Because without these grand ideological projects to unite the American Republic, what was there, apart from the dissipating forces of liberalism and consumerism. So he thought you've got to kind of re-inject some kind of moral purpose into foreign policy and we know where that ended up.

5:25And now he's opposed to Neocon. But our view is that Fukiyama's diagnosis was basically right. And the period from 1989 to 2016 was the end of history. And then the global financial crisis was the kind of key material turning point. But then the key political turning point was the kind of expression of that in politics in 2016, Brexit, Trump, etc. etc. And what we're witnessing now is the end of the end of history. So the crumbling of the neoliberal order that has existed since 1989 without any new order being put in its place. So it's a double negative. It's the ending of an end without something really beginning. And so that's why I tend to view Trump and his impact on global politics in terms of decay rather than the dawn of a new order, which can be sketched in the kind of coherent way. So we agree 1,000 percent. And maybe this is just like how we eat. I mean, I agree with everything you just said, except the 2016, how you frame 2016 because

6:32Fukiyama had two predictions, one which is obviously wrong. The second prediction, which is that liberal democratic forms of governance will now spread throughout the world. And I took it upon myself to read that everything Fukiyama wrote from the beginning of his career to the end of history. And so he was very much in that decade-ish long period. I forgot if he really starts in 1979, his first essay is like some co-written minor piece. He's like 78 or 79. I forget when he really starts going. But basically he's very much of the notion that becomes most famously articulated in Clinton's WTO speech of 2000 that economic liberalization leads to political liberalization. Kind of a postmodernization theory. So Fukiyama is writing this over and over again throughout the 1980s. His specialty before he became known as sort of this like grand Theorist of Liberalism. He's basically a specialist in Soviet behavior in the third world. That's what he focuses on, whether it's Afghanistan or Pakistan or even elsewhere.

7:36This is what Fukiyama writes about when he's at Rand in the 80s. And so that tradition is clearly incorrect. This notion that economic liberalization will functionally lead to political liberalization incorrect. Right before that, I think literally it might even be the same sentence or the sentence before that. He says that liberalism is what the famous phrase of mankind's endpoint of ideological evolution. I forget the exact phrase that Fukiyama uses. And to me, I think from that's right. I mean, what you just said is precisely correct, which is that liberalism was the last. At least, I mean, obviously things could change. I'm talking about at the time of speaking in 2026, liberalism has not been replaced by any ideological position. I think that liberalism itself is dissipating because from almost a macro historical perspective, I think we might view the, you know, from the French Revolution until 2016,

8:37the long, very long 19th century, extremely long 19th century, as being uniquely ideological. And that what wound up happening when liberalism, quote unquote, won with the collapse of the Soviet Union and as basically every nation on Earth, except perhaps North Korea, participates in form of capitalist political economy, is that the ideological sort of skin of liberalism, that is what's dissipating as opposed to capitalism. So Fukiyama was right for the wrong reasons. I mean, I think he implies that states will become liberal. So I'm not saying that he predicted this, but he is right in the sense that nothing is replacing liberalism. And this might be just where we disagree on Maga generally speaking, because I don't think Maga is like a particularly ideological movement. I don't think it's like the expression of paleo conservatism at best, it's the expression of impulses that one can find dating back to the founding of the Republic. That this is not, and this is where I disagree with people saying that Papu Kaden

9:41was a direct inspiration for Trump pointing to like two lines. He said in an interview in the year 2000 or something like that. It's like these are very like profound impulses in American history about how the United States should approach geopolitics. So I don't think our understanding of what's actually happening is going, is divergent whatsoever, but it's in the meaning of what's happening that we may depart. Yeah, possibly. You could respond to that or not. I mean, just briefly, I think the key thing is that Foucaillomra expected liberal had Germany to be stable.