Demolition Man & The End of History

Culture War: The Movie

In 1992 Francis Fukuyama’s book The End of History and The Last Man was published. A book of political philosophy that made the case that the relative peace and prosperity in the majority white, English-speaking world indicated an end of mankind’s social and ideological evolution. We had attained a level of social and ideological perfection that would, thereafter, only require trimming at the edges, a sort of democratic maintenance that would allow this prosperity to continue and only improve. Within a decade this belief was proved so hilariously, tragically, clangorously wrong that to look back on it now is frankly embarrassing for a student of Harvard, Yale and Cornell Universities, but at the time this belief that there could be no progression beyond liberal democracy was widely the consensus view. So much so, in fact, that the current raft of politicians and celebrities who are so desperate for things to “go back to normal” are referring to a return to this particular era, when the ills of society, the plight of war torn nations and the exploitation of many were more easily ignored and everything was ‘nice’ and people didn’t argue about anything worse than abstract concepts like ‘tolerance’.

But what is interesting is that, if you look a little closer at the era, it is apparent this wasn’t the total consensus and…