TWENTY YEARS AFTER THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL:

Francis Fukuyama's “the end of history” is so deliciously counter-intuitive, it deserves some sort of award for advertising and copy-writing for whoever came up with it, whether Fukuyama himself or his editor, book designer or marketer.

If it means "the disappearance of any enduring, existential threat to liberal democracy and free-market capitalism" (since I have not read the book) it sounds like it is at the other end of the spectrum from Mao's response to Kissinger when the latter asked what he thought of the French Revolution: "It is too early to tell."

While I am not enough of a seer, or lack the intellectual strength, or hubris as you will, to play academic "what-if" parlor games, one thought did strike me when I was visiting China in 2003 at the height of Dubya-Rove rule in the US. And that is that China had the model for Rove's then dream for a permanent Republican Party majority for all eternity, was it?

The Chinese model is One Political Party and Unbridled Capitalist Economy with Kickbacks to Said Political Party. I don't know if it falls within the Fukuyaman human-society-in-amber-for-all-perpetuity model but it was working well, and there was little of Liberal Democracy that I noticed there. And the party was "Communist". Ah, irony.

It brings to mind Ralph Nader explaining to his father he was working to establish a Third Party, and the old codger shot back that he would be happy to see a Second. Ah, Dads.