The Philosophy of the Rupture

In the summer of 1989, a State Department official named Francis Fukuyama published an essay in The National Interest with a question mark in its title: "The End of History?" Three years later, he removed the question mark. The End of History and the Last Man argued that liberal democracy had emerged from the Cold War as the final form of human government, not because it was perfect, but because it had no serious ideological competitors. History, understood as the struggle between rival systems for organizing society, was over.

The thesis was immediately controversial and has been declared dead many times since. September 11th killed it. The 2008 financial crisis killed it. Brexit and Trump's first election killed it. Each time, defenders noted that Fukuyama never claimed liberal democracy would spread everywhere immediately, only that no alternative ideology commanded serious allegiance. Islamism was a regional phenomenon. Chinese authoritarianism was modernization without liberalization, a transitional form. Russia was a gas station with nukes. Liberal democracy remained the only game in town for any society that wanted both prosperity and legitimacy.

Thirty-seven years after the original essay, I'm not sure the thesis can survive what's happening now.

In January 2026, Jonathan Rauch, a careful thinker who had long resisted the term, published "Yes, It's Fascism" in The Atlantic. His argument was not that Trump resembles fascists in some respects, but that the resemblance has become comprehensive: the leader cult, the paramilitary police, the territorial aggression, the politicized law enforcement, the blood-and-soil nationalism, the glorification of violence, the explicit rejection of constitutional limits. "Fascism is not a territory with clearly marked boundaries but a constellation of characteristics," Rauch writes. "When you view the stars together, the constellation plainly appears."

The same week, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney addressed the World Economic Forum in Davos. His speech, titled "Principled and Pragmatic: Canada's Path," was widely interpreted as a response to American aggression: the tariffs, the annexation threats, the treatment of allies as vassals. But Carney's framing was broader. "We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition," he said. The rules-based international order that Fukuyama thought would spread and deepen has instead collapsed. Great powers now weaponize economic interdependence. "The old order is not coming back. We should not mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy."

These are not isolated observations about American politics or Canadian foreign policy. They are descriptions of the same phenomenon from different vantage points: the domestic and the international faces of liberalism's failure to hold.

The Struggle for Recognition

To understand what's breaking, you have to understand what Fukuyama thought he'd found.

His argument wasn't really about economics or institutions. It was about psychology, specifically, about a part of the soul that Plato called thymos. Usually translated as "spiritedness" or "pride," thymos is the seat of dignity, honor, and the craving for recognition. Fukuyama, drawing on Alexandre Kojève's reading of Hegel, argued that human history is fundamentally driven by the struggle for recognition: the need to have one's worth acknowledged by others.

Pre-modern societies resolved this struggle through hierarchy. The master was recognized as superior; the slave was not recognized at all. But this arrangement was unstable. The master's recognition came from someone he didn't respect (the slave), and so was worthless. The slave, lacking recognition entirely, had nothing to lose. Eventually, the contradiction produced revolution.

Liberal democracy, Fukuyama argued, was the solution. It offered universal and equal recognition through citizenship. Everyone is acknowledged as possessing inherent dignity. No one is a slave. The struggle for recognition that had driven centuries of war and revolution was finally resolved, not through the victory of one class over another, but through a system that recognized everyone equally.

"The modern liberal democratic world is free of contradictions, and therefore we have reached the end of history because life in the universal and homogenous state is completely satisfying to its citizens."

— Alexandre Kojève

But Fukuyama identified a problem with this solution. Thymos has two forms:

Isothymia: the desire to be recognized as equal to others.

Megalothymia: the desire to be recognized as superior to others.

Liberal democracy satisfies isothymia magnificently. Equal citizenship, equal rights, equal dignity before the law. But what about megalothymia? What happens to the human drive for distinction, for excellence, for being recognized as greater than the common run?

Fukuyama hoped that liberal societies could channel megalothymia into harmless outlets: business competition, sports, artistic achievement. The entrepreneur could feel superior without enslaving anyone. The athlete could dominate without conquering territory. These were safe ways to express the drive for distinction within a framework of equal citizenship.

But he wasn't certain it would work. The final section of his book wrestles with Nietzsche's accusation that democracy produces "last men," mediocre, comfort-seeking creatures who have abandoned all aspiration to greatness. The last man "has his little pleasure for the day and his little pleasure for the night: but he has a regard for health." He is satisfied, in a bovine way, but he is no longer fully human. He has sacrificed the striving that makes life meaningful for the security that makes it comfortable.

"Liberal democracy needs megalothymia and will never survive on the basis of universal and equal recognition alone."

— Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man

Fukuyama feared that the boredom and emptiness of life at history's end might provoke a revolt, a resurgence of megalothymia that would reject liberal equality in favor of older, darker satisfactions.

The Return of Thymos

Read Jonathan Rauch's catalogue of fascist characteristics, and you find thymos everywhere.

Leader aggrandizement: Trump's personality cult, his gilding of the Oval Office, his renaming of institutions after himself, his statement that his own mind and morality are the only limits on his power. This is megalothymia in its purest form, the demand to be recognized not as an equal citizen but as uniquely great.

Blood-and-soil nationalism: The insistence that America is not merely a political community but a Volk, bound by blood, culture, and destiny. Vance's call to prioritize "heritage Americans," Trump's preference for white Christian immigrants, the scrubbing of slavery from national parks. This is recognition based on ancestry rather than citizenship, a direct rejection of liberal universalism.

Glorification of violence: The praise for the January 6th mob, the recruitment ads glamorizing ICE raids, the videos of agents dragging people from cars. Violence is not merely instrumental here; it is expressive. It is how thymos announces itself, demands attention, refuses to be ignored.

Might is right: Stephen Miller's statement to Jake Tapper deserves to be quoted in full:

"We live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time."

— Stephen Miller, CNN interview

This is an explicit rejection of everything Fukuyama thought had been settled. Miller is not describing the world as it regrettably is; he is describing the world as it properly should be. The strong deserve recognition because they are strong. The weak do not. This is pre-historical morality, the morality of masters and slaves, reasserted in the 21st century by the most powerful aide to the American president.

Rauch connects this to Carl Schmitt, the German jurist whose ideas legitimized Nazism. Schmitt rejected the Madisonian view of politics as negotiation among factions. Politics, for Schmitt, is war: a confrontation between existential enemies, only one of whom can survive. Michael Anton's "Flight 93 election" essay, with its "charge the cockpit or you die" framing, is Schmittian to its core. So is Miller's eulogy for Charlie Kirk: "We are the storm. And our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our passion... You are nothing. You are wickedness."

This is not conservatism. Conservatism, in the Anglo-American tradition, prizes stability, continuity, and incremental change guided by reason. What Rauch describes is revolutionary, a deliberate destruction of liberal norms in pursuit of a new order built on domination rather than equal recognition.

The word for this, Rauch concludes, is fascism. Not because Trump precisely replicates Mussolini or Hitler, but because he is "building something new on old principles." American fascism in the 21st century looks like this: territorial aggression dressed in resource nationalism, police-state tactics justified by immigration enforcement, leader worship enabled by social media, blood-and-soil ideology wrapped in Christian nationalism.

Fukuyama predicted that something like this might happen. He just hoped it wouldn't.

The International Rupture

Mark Carney's Davos speech addresses the same collapse from the other side of the border.

Carney frames his argument through Václav Havel's essay "The Power of the Powerless," which describes how communist regimes perpetuated themselves through rituals of compliance. A greengrocer places a sign in his window: "Workers of the world, unite!" He doesn't believe in it. No one believes in it. But everyone displays the sign, and so the system continues. The ritual substitutes for genuine conviction.

Carney suggests that the rules-based international order functioned similarly. Nations "placed the sign in the window," invoking international law, multilateral institutions, the liberal trading system, while knowing the arrangement was "partially false." The strongest powers exempted themselves when convenient. Rules were enforced inconsistently based on who was involved. Everyone participated in the pretense because the alternative seemed worse.

"The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."

— Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War

This line appears in both Carney's speech and Rauch's essay, attributed to Thucydides. Its resonance is not coincidental. Thucydides described the pre-liberal world, the world before the struggle for recognition was resolved through equal citizenship. Carney and Rauch are both noting that this pre-liberal logic has returned. The rituals of compliance that sustained the post-Cold War order have stopped working. The sign is coming out of the window.

Carney's response is not to mourn the old order but to build something new. He calls for "variable geometry coalitions," different alliances for different issues, based on shared values rather than universal institutions. Middle powers, he argues, must stop negotiating bilaterally with hegemons: "This is not sovereignty. It is the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination." Instead, they should combine to create a third path.

This is isothymia as foreign policy. Middle powers demanding recognition as equals, refusing the master-slave dynamic that great-power politics would impose. Canada's trade deals with China, the EU, Qatar, India, all represent a search for mutual recognition outside the framework of American hegemony.

The philosophical point is subtle but important. Fukuyama imagined the end of history as a global condition: liberal democracy spreading outward from its Western core until it encompassed humanity. Carney is suggesting that America has exited that condition while expecting everyone else to remain inside it. The United States, under Trump, has reverted to pre-historical great-power behavior: territorial expansion, might-makes-right, treating allies as subjects, while demanding that allies maintain their post-historical posture of rule-following cooperation.

This is unsustainable. If the hegemon abandons the rules, the rules collapse. And then everyone must decide what comes next.

The Inverted Totalitarianism Connection

In my previous writing on Emil Michael and the militarization of Silicon Valley, I drew on Sheldon Wolin's concept of "inverted totalitarianism." Classical totalitarianism, exemplified by Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini, features the state seizing control of economic life. Inverted totalitarianism reverses the direction: economic power captures the state. Corporate executives don't abolish democracy; they hollow it out from within. The forms persist while the substance migrates to boardrooms.

Wolin died in 2015, before any of this happened, but his framework helps explain what Rauch and Carney are describing.

Classical fascism was megalothymia of the state, the nation as the supreme value, demanding recognition through conquest and domination. Inverted totalitarianism is megalothymia of capital, the corporation as the supreme value, demanding recognition through profit and growth. Both represent failures of liberal democracy to channel thymos into safe outlets. Both produce domination rather than equal recognition.

The Trump phenomenon is a hybrid. It combines classical fascist elements (the leader cult, the territorial aggression, the blood-and-soil nationalism) with inverted totalitarian elements (the capture of government by business interests, the fusion of Silicon Valley and the Pentagon, the $200 billion lending facilities for defense contractors). The result is something new: fascism enabled by corporate infrastructure, funded by venture capital, running on AI.

This is why Carney's speech and Rauch's essay describe the same rupture. Domestically, the liberal democratic settlement that Fukuyama celebrated is collapsing into fascism. Internationally, the rules-based order that extended liberal principles to relations among states is collapsing into great-power competition. Both represent the return of megalothymia, the return of masters and slaves, of strong and weak, of those who dominate and those who submit.

Fukuyama's end of history was always premised on liberal democracy's ability to satisfy thymos, all of it, both isothymia and megalothymia. What we're learning is that this satisfaction was never as complete as it appeared. The ritual compliance Carney describes, the "performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination," was always papering over a thymic deficit. People went along because the alternative seemed worse, not because they were genuinely fulfilled.

Now the alternative no longer seems worse, and the paper is tearing.

Was It Ever Stable?

The deeper question is whether Fukuyama's endpoint was ever actually stable, or whether it contained the seeds of its own dissolution from the beginning.

Kojève, Fukuyama's philosophical source, was pessimistic about life at the end of history. Without the struggle for recognition to give life meaning, humans would become "satisfied" in a way that was more animal than human. They would enjoy their pleasures, tend their health, accumulate their comforts, and cease to be fully human in any meaningful sense. Kojève compared this to dogs lying in the afternoon sun: content, but not really alive in the way that matters.

Nietzsche called this figure the "last man" and considered him contemptible. The last man has "his little pleasure for the day and his little pleasure for the night, but he has a regard for health." He blinks when asked about greatness. He finds the very concept unintelligible.

Fukuyama took this criticism seriously. The final chapters of his book wrestle with whether liberal democracy can provide a life worth living, whether equal recognition is enough, or whether humans need the struggle for superiority to feel fully alive. He concluded, tentatively, that liberal democracy was the best available option despite its spiritual costs. But he never claimed those costs were zero.

What if the costs were actually unbearable? What if the liberal democratic settlement, for all its material success, produced a thymic deficit that could only grow over time? What if the "last man" condition was not a stable equilibrium but an unstable one, a pressure cooker building toward explosion?

This would explain why fascism has returned not in some marginal, developing country but in the heart of the liberal order itself. The United States was supposed to be the model, the proof of concept, the shining city on a hill. If history ended anywhere, it ended there. And yet it is precisely there that megalothymia has erupted most violently. The leader cult, the blood-and-soil nationalism, the glorification of violence, these are appearing not despite American prosperity and freedom but perhaps because of them.

The last man, it turns out, was not content to blink forever.

What Comes After the End?

Carney's answer is practical: variable geometry coalitions, value-based realism, middle powers combining for mutual recognition rather than submitting to hegemonic domination. This is isothymia among nations, a Hegelian solution applied to international relations. It may work. Canada's trade deals with China and the EU suggest that alternatives to American dependency are possible.

But Carney's answer doesn't address the domestic question. What do societies do when their own populations contain a significant faction committed to megalothymia, to domination, to leader worship, to the destruction of equal recognition? Rauch notes that America remains a hybrid state: "a fascist leader and a liberal Constitution." The courts, the states, and the media remain independent. Trump cannot rewrite the Constitution.

But this independence is contested daily. The paramilitary ICE, the politicized Justice Department, the attacks on press freedom, the musing about canceling elections, these are not aberrations but systematic erosions. Rauch warns that "the second insurrection will be far better organized than the first." The constitutional safeguards that have held so far may not hold forever.

The decentralized technology movement, the world I spend most of my time in, offers a different kind of answer. If the liberal state cannot be trusted to protect equal recognition, perhaps recognition can be built into technical infrastructure instead. Permissionless systems, encrypted communications, decentralized networks: these are attempts to encode isothymia into protocols rather than relying on institutions.

"We are approaching a forking point for mankind; down one road is the centralization of power and resources, in large regulated industries... Down the other road is the potential for sharing these resources through open protocols, via technological foundations, which enable global participation and ownership."

— Bittensor Whitepaper

This framing maps directly onto the thymos problem. Centralization is megalothymia: power and resources concentrated in the hands of the few who demand recognition as superior. Decentralization is isothymia: resources shared through protocols that recognize everyone as an equal participant. The fork in the road is not just about technology or economics. It is about what kind of recognition we will build our systems to provide.

I don't know if this is adequate. The cypherpunks built encrypted communication, and it helped, but it didn't prevent the surveillance state. Bitcoin provided an exit from the banking system, but it didn't prevent financial capture of politics. Decentralized AI might distribute intelligence, but it cannot prevent centralized labs from building weapons systems. The alternatives exist, but they remain marginal against institutional power.

What I know is that the question has become urgent. Fukuyama thought history had ended in a stable equilibrium. It hadn't. The struggle for recognition continues, and it is being fought right now, in the gap between Rauch's domestic fascism and Carney's international rupture. The liberal democratic settlement that was supposed to resolve that struggle has proven inadequate. Megalothymia has returned, and it is tearing through institutions that were built on the assumption it was safely contained.

The rupture is not a transition to something better or worse. It is an opening, a moment when the question of what comes next is genuinely undetermined. The old order is not coming back. Carney is right about that. Nostalgia is not a strategy. But neither is despair, and neither is pretending the rupture isn't happening.

The question before us is what kind of recognition we will build in the fracture. Will it be the mutual recognition of equals, extended to more people through better systems? Or will it be the hierarchical recognition of masters and slaves, enforced through violence and domination?

History has resumed. The answer is not yet written.

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Related Reading:

• The Silicon Valley Warlord: How inverted totalitarianism is militarizing AI
• AI and the War Machine: The centralized labs' betrayal of universal benefit
• After Carney's Win: Canada's rejection of Trumpism at the ballot box

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Sources:

• Jonathan Rauch, "Yes, It's Fascism," The Atlantic, January 2026
• Mark Carney, "Principled and Pragmatic: Canada's Path," World Economic Forum, January 20, 2026
• Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (1992)
• Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1946)
• Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated (2008)

Note: Francis Fukuyama maintains an active presence on X (formerly Twitter) at @FukuyamaFrancis. His recent commentary continues to demonstrate the power of his thinking, engaging directly with contemporary political developments and maintaining the intellectual rigor that made The End of History so influential.