The Age of America

At 73 years old, Francis Fukuyama has become a meme. He is the victim of a title too good to be true. “The End of History?” was the name of a landmark essay published in The National Interest and later expanded into his career-making 1992 bestseller, The End of History and the Last Man. So now, when this urbane philosopher posts pictures of himself at conferences on Instagram, his comment section is flooded with plaintive young people saying things like “mr fukuyama please end history again” and “francis history keeps happening what do I do.”

History would appear to be rolling on undeterred, however. It’s far too soon to say how Operation Epic Fury, Donald Trump’s sudden all-out assault on Iran, will affect the course of world events. But it’s safe to say at this point that even his well-wishers sure hope he knows what he’s doing. This dramatic act by the commander-in-chief of America’s titanic army is the latest of several fresh reminders that sometimes things really do happen. Others include the removal of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the calamities in Ukraine and Afghanistan, and Trump’s own election—both times. Cumulatively, these sorts of upsets have created the distinct impression that history might be starting up again. At the very least, it’s been an eventful millennium so far.

To be fair to Fukuyama, what he actually argued was not that consequential changes would cease to take place after the fall of the USSR. He considered it more likely that, after the victory of liberal democracy over Soviet Communism and imperial fascism, history would have a hard time going anywhere but backward toward more chaotic and brutal states of affairs. Contending with Karl Marx and G.W.F. Hegel, Fukuyama worked out a sophisticated argument that the forces of politics had conspired to produce not Marx’s proletarian uprising, but the rules-based Western order as an endpoint of civilization. He added that some people would likely find the resulting stasis less than satisfactory. The Nietzschean “Last Men” of Fukuyama’s title, bloated and complacent amid their supposedly perpetual peace, might give way to “first men,” regressive knuckle-draggers “engaged in bloody and pointless prestige battles, only this time with modern weapons.”

So one way of looking at our current precarious situation—the return of large-scale warfare in Europe and the Middle East, the increasingly powerful spasms of populist discontent, the buckling postwar settlement—is not as a refutation of Fukuyama’s sunniest predictions but as a confirmation of his worst fears. That’s basically how those who consider themselves keepers of the liberal order have reacted to its recent fracturing: as a regression into barbarism. “We Are Not Going Back,” a mantra of Kamala Harris’s short-lived presidential campaign, sums up the outlook of those determined to resist what they see as a historic reversal in every sense of the term.

Of course, it was always a little odd to expect that history would or even could stand still, come to an end, or move backward. History has only ever moved forward—making it somewhat pointless to debate whether it should do otherwise. Better questions might include which way forward history will take us next, and how, if at all, we might nudge it our preferred way. The classic American answers to these questions might then be worth revisiting at such a time as this.

After all, forward is America’s favorite direction to move, much as it is history’s. It’s not just the progressives, old and new, who feel this way: in the 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville described the peculiarly American confidence with which a sailor explained that his trimmest vessel would be cast aside in a few years and replaced with a newer model. The typical American, Tocqueville indicated, “tends unceasingly towards that unmeasured greatness so indistinctly visible at the end of the long track which humanity has yet to tread.” There’s always been something propulsive about this place and its people, something eager for the future. Pull out a dollar bill, and you’ll find the Latin motto put there by Charles Thomson, Secretary of the Continental Congress: Novus Ordo Seclorum. “A new order of the ages.” The advent of a new world.

What kind of new world? Revolutionary-era Americans were fond of likening themselves to the founders and defenders of the Roman Republic. But Thomson’s Latin tag came from the first generation of Rome’s empire, heralded by its consummate poet, Virgil. In his portentous Fourth Eclogue, Virgil saw a child coming who would usher in

The final age of prophecy:

The order of the ages now is born afresh.

The sign of Virgo now returns, and Saturn’s reign returns.

From heaven a new generation now descends.

The newborn babe Virgil hoped for was probably the much-anticipated son of Augustus, Rome’s first emperor, or else another future dignitary. But the unmistakable note of messianic grandeur, sounded by a man who lived not long before the birth of Jesus, tends to make Christians wonder if Virgil had forebodings of an even more profound transformation afoot than the one from republic to empire. Virgil saw all things being made new by a world-historic power, and he indulged in the prophet’s ambiguity about whether that power was Roman or divine. For his purposes, it may have been a distinction without a difference.

It’s not too much to say that early Americans left it similarly vague whether the plans that had lately been fulfilled were George Washington’s or God’s. They certainly saw themselves as instruments of a design that Providence had been working out since at least the start of European history. “In the theories of the Crown and the Mitre man had no rights,” said John Quincy Adams, reflecting on the revolution he had lived through as a boy. For centuries, Europe labored under “two principles of subserviency to ecclesiastical usurpation, and of holding rights as the donation of kings” until “our forefathers sought refuge…in the then wilderness of this Western World.” The story Adams was telling began with the invention of the wheel and climaxed with the Constitutional Convention. It featured America as the first nation ever truly established on “the agreement of soul with soul.”

The first—but not the last. Adams famously described America as disinclined to go looking for “monsters to destroy.” But he never doubted—as Christopher Flannery points out—that the sheer rightness of America’s ideals would prove irresistibly attractive. Soon copycat rebels would arise of their own accord to sweep away “all the rubbish of accumulated centuries of servitude.” As Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee later put it, America had begun to purge the “poison” of rank and title that ran “in the blood of Christendom.” Now that the Reformation and the Revolution had secured their twin footholds in the Western Hemisphere, the days of papal and monarchic despots were numbered. The New World Order wouldn’t stay in the new world.

There’s a version of this story that has grown increasingly popular in which America comes across as something totally unmoored from history, uniquely unburdened—to recall another Kamala Harris adage—by all that has been. Again, it’s not just the progressives who routinely lapse into talking this way.

Frank Meyer, that lynchpin of Reaganite conservatism, argued in a 1968 essay, “Western Civilization: The Problem of Political Freedom,” that “In England, both in practice and in theory, there arose out of the conflicts of the seventeenth century and the relaxation of the eighteenth, something closer to a society of personal freedom and limited government” than had yet been realized. “But the drag of established ideas, institutions, and power held that society back from achieving the political potentiality towards which it was moving.” It took the American colonists, “In the open lands of this continent, removed from the overhanging presence of cosmological remains,” to establish “a constitution that for the first time in human history was constructed to guarantee the sanctity of the person and his freedom.”

Fukuyama, for his part, has taken to proposing that America should want to cut itself off from the old world, cleaving to a vision of Western civilization “built around liberalism itself, encompassing Enlightenment values like openness, tolerance, and skepticism about received ideas,” including “the role of religion in politics.” In this retelling, America at its best really does proceed from a kind of Year Zero, and everything that came before—religious conviction, native allegiance, national or civilizational pride—must be at least suspect as an artifact of the World We Left Behind. Even the Founders “saw their new nation as a break with the European past,” argued Jamelle Bouie in the New York Times, objecting to a speech in which Secretary of State Marco Rubio invoked the shared Western heritage of America and Europe. The real America, Bouie proposed, is something else entirely: “a new civilization rooted in popular sovereignty and republican self-government.”

This attitude may bear some resemblance to the original American one, but it’s missing some key features. For one thing, even the most confident patriots of the founding era saw the dawn of the new age as a restoration of virtues which, though they had always been partially obscured by corruption, had equally always been present in the nations of Europe. Christian truth was, contra Fukuyama, chief among the things being recovered. The preachers of colonial America were overwhelmingly champions of the Reformation; they viewed even religious liberty as a necessary consequence of what they took to be true religion. When John Winthrop called Massachusetts Bay a “city upon a hill,” he had in mind that Americans should be exemplars of ancestral Christianity to a church grown slack in its teachings. Their ethos would be “the same as before, but with more enlargement towards others.”

If the first Americans thought of themselves as proceeding from a Year Zero, it was the Year Zero AD.

More broadly, the New Order of the Ages they hoped to inaugurate was a ripening, not a rejection, of all that went before. It’s right there in the Virgil: “The sign of Virgo now returns, and Saturn’s reign returns.” Meyer, too, in his more careful moments, recognized that “the American tradition…is pre-liberal and pre-conservative. It predates the French Revolution.” Alfred, Lord Tennyson got it about right when he told his fellow Britons that the American revolutionaries had “Retaught the lesson thou hadst taught / And in thy spirit with thee fought.” The liberties asserted by the Declaration and safeguarded by the Constitution were supposed to be the same ones imperfectly codified in Magna Carta and the common law. Even Rome was to be refurbished: if Virgil saw the dawn of imperial glory coming at the cost of republican freedoms, Thomas Jefferson could hope that America would boast an “Empire of Liberty,” held peaceably together by trade rather than conquest. Of course, this is the part that has proven a little dicey.

Now, in our 250th year, Americans are haunted by fears that our empire of liberty has morphed, is morphing, or will morph into a good old-fashioned empire of guns and soldiers. These fears have been intensified not just by Joe Biden’s ugly withdrawal from George W. Bush’s grueling occupation of Afghanistan, but now too by Donald Trump’s adventure, alongside Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel, into Iran. One thing history tends to do, besides advance, is change the face of nations. Not many people seem to expect that the change will improve us. There is even the possibility, well articulated recently by John B. Judis, that Trump might be the kind of Hegelian figure who crashes through the barrier between eras with disastrous consequences. “Trump has pushed us into a new stage of history,” writes Judis. “But it is a stage in which, because of his overreach, America may find itself diminished and disempowered.” If that’s right, empire might turn out to be too much to hope for.

There is another possibility, no less shocking to contemplate but somewhat less bleak for partisans of the founding. America is approaching its 250th anniversary. That’s about half as long as Rome’s republic endured. Halfway through its own 500 years of republican government, Rome was not yet transforming into an empire but was just beginning to come of age as a global power, facing up to its entanglements with neighbors and headed for conflicts that would strain, but ultimately consolidate, its civilizational self-confidence. If something like that is what we’re up against—not an imminent imperial age but a dangerous new period in our republican history—then another American century or so is still among the possibilities on the table.

Whatever happens, it’s unlikely that things will proceed on the terms of Francis Fukuyama’s free-floating and faithless “Enlightenment,” which was always something of a fiction and is fast becoming a relic. Tepid internationalism seems unlikely to fire anyone’s blood. Nor is Trumpism obviously the way of the future so much as the harbinger of it: Trump inaugurated, but will not be around to direct, the stage we’re entering into. Whoever succeeds him will have to draw water from deeper wells. Americans will need to recover a sense of their country as an era-defining project, forward-looking but steeped in ancient traditions of faith and law—not just a Western nation, but the Western nation par excellence. Much depends on whether we can learn to see ourselves that way again.