FUKUYAMA UPDATE: Charles Paul Freund notes the multiple Fukuyama-Fiskings in the Blogosphere, and then adds one of his own. Excerpt:

Fukuyama’s continuing argument with libertarians is a rhetorical disaster because it springs from ignorance and invites contempt. Compare this current argument, for example, to the one he marshaled in defending his major intellectual achievement, the famous 1989 essay, “The End of History.” What made the earlier work so impressive was that he built his argument — which was about the resolution of a major chapter in the history of ideas, not about whether anything would ever happen again — entirely within the worldview he was critiquing. What infuriated his opponents on the left was that he effectively used their own ideas to demonstrate the intellectual obsolescence of their position. It was one of the great displays of rhetorical gymnastics in recent years, and Fukuyama deserved the fame that resulted.

Now he wants to argue that libertarians too are obsolete, and he seems to think he is using their own ideas against them. But arguing that support for biotech research is retrograde, and that individual sovereignty is a defense of slavery, doesn’t demonstrate that libertarians are passe; it reveals that Fukuyama is embarrassingly ignorant about the ideas he is dismissing. This time his opponents are not seething in frustrated anger; they are staring in cold contempt, a contempt that Fukuyama has invited and is richly earning with each public volley.

That sounds about right.