Ah, you're finally starting to understand ol' Francis. Democracy is a bad thing. It produces
weaklings.
yrs, andreas www.andreas.com
I subscribed to Francis Fukuyama's new journal, The American Interest, and just received my first copy. I've read some of the articles and they are very good. Unfortunately there were only teasers on the AI web site <http://www.the-american-interest.com/> www.the-american-interest.com until I got to "It Doesn't Stay in Vegas," in which the peripatetic Frenchman, Bernard-Henri Levi" is described as duking "it out with Frances Fukuyama over American virtues and vices, neoconservatives, religion, the future of American muscular internationalism, and the role of intellectuals in a free society." The AI website provides this as a "free article" - a very good choice: <http://www.the-american-interest.com/cms/bhl.cfm> http://www.the-american-interest.com/cms/bhl.cfm .
Here is an excerpt and Fukuyama at his best: "The End of History and the Last Man ended with ruminations about the possibility that modern democracy would yield "men without chests", wedded to ever-increasing peace and prosperity. During the Clinton years, in our preoccupation with the NASDAQ and Monica Lewinsky, that seemed a fair conclusion. But on further reflection, it has seemed to me that America was not remotely in danger of becoming the home of the Hegelian last man. Now that the United States has launched two wars in the new millennium, it seems like an even less apt concern. The last man actually lives in Europe.
"This, it seems to me, is the essential paradox you deal with in American Vertigo: Americans have this incredible energy, they've created a faux paradise in the desert at home and now they want to make deserts bloom in the Middle East. But they go about it in a clumsy and self-defeating way, and they have neither the imperial bloody-mindedness nor the steady judgment to see the project through. Maybe so. But if global leadership were left up to Europeans, they would either acquiesce in whatever exists, or they would make cynical deals to preserve their own narrow interests while talking about universal rights and justice."
Lawrence
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