The Rebirth of History: Part II

While post-modern conservatism is not doomed to failure due to some immanent dialectical process, it is utterly unable to rectify the social and political problems of the day.

In my last piece, I discussed how the late 1980’s and early 1980’s were characterized by a pronounced sense of optimism. Few people heeded Francis Fukuyama’s warning in the conclusion to The End of History: that many of us will long for history and the possibility of thymos-recognition by others for our being and its accomplishments. All of us were enraptured by the sunnier dimensions of the thesis and its seemingly optimistic claim that the great struggles of the past had been overcome. In the first piece, I discussed how post-modern culture contributed to the destabilization of this optimistic outlook, though few of us recognized it.

In this piece, I will go on to analyze the instabilities characteristic of the neoliberal form of governance, which was dominant through much of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. I will conclude by analyzing the rebirth of history with the rise of post-modern conservatism in countries across the globe. Post-modern conservatism emerged as a reaction to the trends discussed in both of these pieces. Unfortunately, I do not believe its resentment fueled identity politics is sufficient to overcome the problems that contributed to its rise. Indeed, in many respects it can only exacerbate them.

The Instabilities of Neoliberal Society

These technological and cultural developments might have remained relatively inert as a matter of politics. Certainly by themselves they would be of interest primarily to cultural theorists and media critics. But post-modern culture emerged as part of a dynamic and mutually determinative process in tandem with neoliberal society. And neoliberal society, which only a decade before had seemed the invincible end state of history itself, was in serious trouble by the mid-2000s. The War on Terror was exceptionally expensive and damaging, and eroded the fragile liberal faith that a new era of peaceful internationalization and tolerance was replacing one of violence and conflict. In addition to the material costs to many Western states, it caused a tremendous amount of moral damage to the conceit that the United States and its allies were invariably on the just side of history. This was exacerbated as we witnessed the first signs that xenophobia and nationalist paranoia were not just relics of a bygone era, but very much alive and waiting for the right cultural conditions in which to flourish.