ROGER KIMBALL: The Rotten Edifice Revealed.

Kyeyune thinks that the “epoch of the liberal technocrat is now over,” that the “bell has well and truly tolled for mankind’s belief in their ability to do anything else than enrich themselves and ruin things for everyone else.” Maybe so. Yes, inertia is a powerful force. The institutions we’ve been living with are likely to persist, more or less hollowed out, for some time. And what might replace that technocratic dream is a question that admits of markedly different answers, many unpalatable. (How many speak English? A troubling question, that.)

Francis Fukuyama was, I believe, about as wrong as it is possible for a pop political philosopher to be when he predicted the “end of history” and the efflorescence of liberal democracy everywhere and forever.

Of course, Fukuyama is a Hegelian, which at least partly explains his silliness. What is happening now in Afghanistan, and in America because of Afghanistan, is another in a long line of counterexamples to Fukuyama’s thesis. It may, however, turn out to be a more fundamental challenge than anyone could have foreseen even a few weeks ago. For that, we have the bumbling, mentally incontinent Joe Biden to thank, he and his clown car of self-absorbed spiritually adipose bureaucrats who prance about in a cloud of self-importance, shedding disaster like dandruff.

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