If there isn't a famous aphorism about how blithe ideological triumphalism gets proven wrong by the real world 100% of the time, there ought to be. For instanc

If there isn't a famous aphorism about how blithe ideological triumphalism gets proven wrong by the real world 100% of the time, there ought to be. For instance: >The ideological challenge mounted by the other great alternative to liberalism, communism, was far more serious. Marx, speaking Hegel's language, asserted that liberal society contained a fundamental contradiction that could not be resolved within its context, that between capital and labor, and this contradiction has constituted the chief accusation against liberalism ever since. But surely, the class issue has actually been successfully resolved in the West. As Kojève (among others) noted, the egalitarianism of modern America represents the essential achievement of the classless society envisioned by Marx. This is not to say that there are not rich people and poor people in the United States, or that the gap between them has not grown in recent years. But the root causes of economic inequality do not have to do with the underlying legal and social structure of our society, which remains fundamentally egalitarian and moderately redistributionist, so much as with the cultural and social characteristics of the groups that make it up, which are in turn the historical legacy of premodern conditions. Thus black poverty in the United States is not the inherent product of liberalism, but is rather the "legacy of slavery and racism" which persisted long after the formal abolition of slavery. This sounds blithe, silly, and downright ahistorical by today's standards. 26 years were apparently all it took for class conflict, in fact world-wide class conflict, to re-emerge alongside imperial and religious conflicts, environmental challenges, and energy shortages as a chief driving factor in a conflicted, multipolar geopolitics. Meanwhile, the "democratic, egalitarian" West appears to have ended up neither democratic (in the sense that state policy reflects the will of the common people as expressed through such devices as polls, elections, and social movements) nor egalitarian (in the sense of income and wealth inequality, in the sense of social gaps between races and classes, and even in the sense of applying human-rights laws universally). >The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world for some time to come. Even though I recognize its inevitability, I have the most ambivalent feelings for the civilization that has been created in Europe since 1945, with its north Atlantic and Asian offshoots. Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again. It really must be asked what Fukuyama was thinking when he actually published this nonsense. The only possible "End of History" would be the extermination of the human race.