Cowperson, I like your post a lot. However, it is beset with one central contradiction, which I don't see an easy way out of: you're willing to presume that there is such a thing as "human nature"--some basic quality or set of desires that all humans possess. But you claim that Marx's error was not recognizing that human desires are different from what he imagined.
That can't work. For one thing, presuming that liberal democracy is consistent with "human nature" is a fundamentally ethnocentric assumption. It presumes that the fact that most people on earth don't live in a liberal democracy is simply because
they are not as advanced as we are. That's subscribing to Fukuyama's teleological thinking wholesale--assuming that history has one course--and
we are its representative, regardless of empirical evidence to the contrary.
If you think about it--
this was precisely Marx's error. Marx assumed that people had universal needs, and that a system that failed to supply those needs was fundamentally unstable. As it turns out, the stability of a system only depends on the collective's ability to account for and assimilate individual action, which means that it is enough for a system to promise that
one day it may fulfil your material needs, which is exactly what lib-democracy does.
If you substitute "material needs" for "fundamental freedom" you've turned Marx into Fukuyama. And the test for the two thinkers is the same: they make basic predictions about reality, and when those predictions turn out to be wrong, the theory falls apart.
So let's evaluate Fukuyama's claim that 1989 represents the end of history and the ascendance of a golden age of American-style liberal democracy. Has liberal democracy expanded faster than other types of polity in the post cold-war era?
Clearly not. In fact, just as they did in 1989, liberal democracies contain a tiny fraction of the world's population. There are many authoritarian polities that like to masquerade as democracies (Iran, for one), but I fail to see how the world has "settled on liberal democracy" as the dominant world system. Given the evidence, such a claim is nonsensical. And in any case, they were in the first place motivated by the Reagan administration's curious, arrogant, apocalyptic and millenarian way of thinking about the Cold War. In other words--for Fukuyama to imagine that the end of the Cold War would bring about the age of liberal democracy was just naive magical thinking designed to raise the stakes of the ideological divide between the Americans and the Soviets. Those of us who study history will remember that it was this same magical thinking that gave birth to the new face of American Exceptionalism: the neocon movement and the "Project for a New American Century," ostensibly the practical application of Fukuyama's theory of "realistic Wilsonianism" with the end of bringing about American ideological dominance around the globe.
Interestingly, Fukuyama himself has recanted on many of these neo-con ideas that he helped to create in the 90s. In 2006 he had this to say about neoconservatism in the 21st century:
Quote:
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[we neoconservatives]…believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.
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Heck, if even the author of these ideas thinks that they have now degenerated into a parody of Marxism, who am I to disagree?