Bill Kristol offers a brief rejoinded to Francis Fukuyama and also the mushy left. A taste:
Does that make Bush-supporting, liberal-democracy-promoting, Iraq-war-defending neoconservative "Leninists," as Francis Fukuyama has recently charged? No. Does it mean we believe--as Fukuyama defines Leninism--that "history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will"? Does it mean that history does not automatically move in the right direction, that justice does not necessarily or easily prevail? Yes.
It would be nice to believe, as Fukuyama does, that "a long-term process of social evolution" is under way that will inevitably produce liberal democracy. It would be nice to enjoy the comfortable complacency of a historical determinism that suggests--as Fukuyama has it--that what we most need to do is to embrace a "good governance agenda" on behalf of a long-term process of "democracy promotion" that "has to await the gradual ripening of political and economic conditions to be effective."
Indeed, it would be nice if we lived in a world in which we didn't have to take the enemies of liberal democracy seriously--a world without jihadists who want to kill and clerics who want to intimidate and tyrants who want to terrorize. It would be nice to wait until we were certain conditions were ripe before we had to act, a world in which the obstacles are trivial and the enemies fold up. Unfortunately, that is not the world we live in.
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