SIPA USA/PA Images. All rights reserved.In 1989, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s essay “The End of History?” for the National Interest declared the triumph of western liberal democracy: “what we are witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or a passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” But for Fukuyama, Donald Trump’s electoral defeat of Hillary Clinton marks a new age of populist nationalism: “a watershed not just for American politics, but for the entire world order.”
In the chorus of experts that seek to offer explanations for the US presidential election results, Fukuyama’s analysis has forcefully engaged with the concept of class. On several occasions following the election, Fukuyama has uncompromisingly emphasised that a class division precedes all other divisions related to identity. In a recent article for the Financial Times, he writes: “Social class, defined today by one’s level of education, appears to have become the single most important social fracture in countless industrialized and emerging-market countries.” Meanwhile, the US Democratic Party is now “the party of identity politics: a coalition of women, African-Americans, Hispanics, environmentalists, and the LGBT community, that lost its focus on economic issues.”
Natalia Koulinka: Does the concept of class have a chance to return victoriously to academic as well as public discourse?
