Reading Comprehension with Francis Fukuyama

You remember Francis Fukuyama—the public intellectual whose pre-9/11 breakout work, The End of History, argued that a liberal democratic Valhalla was nigh, and who has since been busy fudging his thesis, since, as it turns out, a liberal democratic Valhalla is not nigh. Even though Mr. Fukuyama’s work was little but Hegelian nonsense, it landed him a comfy job at Johns Hopkins University. Not bad for someone whose chief claim to fame is being wrong.

More recently, Mr. Fukuyama composed a work called America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy. In said tome, Mr. Fukuyama marks his definitive break from neoconservatism and highlights his more wishy-washy and nebulous approach to Islamist terrorism.

As you may well know, dear reader, Mr. Fukuyama’s book landed him in a bit of hot water, because in it he claimed that he attended a speech by Charles Krauthammer to the American Enterprise Institute in which Mr. Krauthammer lavishly praised the success of the war in Iraq. As it turns out, Mr. Krauthammer did no such thing—and an on-line copy of his remarks makes this crystal clear.

We mention all this, dear reader, because we have recently been plowing our way through America at the Crossroads. And though we find it an interesting book—which offers a nice retort to conspiracy theorists opposed to neoconservatism—it seems to contain another example of Mr. Fukuyama’s curious misreading of Mr. Krauthammer’s work.

Below we have quoted a passage from Mr. Krauthammer’s article “In Defense of Democratic Realism,” which Mr. Fukuyama quotes on pages 70 and 71 of his book. To this we have affixed Mr. Fukuyama’s comments on said passage, which we think you’ll find more than a mite troublesome.

First, here’s the Krauthammer passage:

Disdaining the appeal of radical Islam is the conceit also of secularists. Radical Islam is not just as fanatical and unappeasable in its anti-Americanism, anti-Westernism and anti-modernism as anything we have ever known. It has the distinct advantage of being grounded in a venerable religion of over one billion adherents that not only provides a ready supply of recruits—trained and readied in mosques and madrassas far more effective, autonomous and ubiquitous than any Hitler Youth or Komsomol camps—but is able to draw on a long and deep tradition of zeal, messianic expectation and a cult of martyrdom. Hitler and Stalin had to invent these out of whole cloth. Mussolini’s version was a parody. Islamic radicalism flies under a flag with far more historical depth and enduring appeal than the ersatz religions of the swastika and hammer-and-sickle that proved so historically thin and insubstantial.

Okay, here are Mr. Fukuyama’s remarks on this passage, which we have interspersed with our own running commentary:

Krauthammer, in other words, argues that the political threat comes from a version of the religion Islam, that is thoroughly unappeasable and anti-Western, and that is deeply and broadly rooted among the world’s more than one billion Muslims.

Already Fukuyama is dead wrong. Mr. Krauthammer did not argue that radical Islamism is “deeply and broadly rooted among the world’s more than one billion Muslims.” Rather, he asserted that radical Islamism is grounded in the Muslim faith, and this provides it with numerous potential adherents. The notion that all Muslims are radical Islamists is Mr. Fukuyama’s unfair gloss.

Each of these assertions is debatable and together vastly overstate the threat that the United States faces in the post-September 11 world. We are not fighting the religion Islam or its adherents but a radical ideology that appeals to a distinct minority of Muslims.

Nothing Mr. Krauthammer argued gainsays the idea that the US is “not fighting the religion Islam or its adherents but a radical ideology that appeals to a distinct minority of Muslims.” Mr. Fukuyama is now setting Mr. Krauthammer up as a straw man, refuting words Mr. Krauthammer never said.

That ideology owes a great deal to Western ideas in addition to Islam, and it appeals to the same alienated individuals who in earlier generations would have gravitated to communism or fascism.

Again, Mr. Fukuyama offers an argument supposedly antithetical to Mr. Krauthammer’s remarks—but it actually agrees with the spirit of what Mr. Krauthammer wrote. After all, Mr. Krauthammer never asserted that radical Islamism has no Western intellectual influences, since that would be a foolish argument.

Rather, Mr. Krauthammer stressed the Muslim roots of radical Islamism, and argued that these roots—which are not necessarily the only roots—make it more attractive to followers than communism and fascism. The notion that these ideologies have the same sort of appeal—as Mr. Fukuyama notes—only strengthens Mr. Krauthammer’s argument.

This sort of unfair parsing would be troublesome from the pen of an undergraduate essayist. From a distinguished professor, they are loathsome.

If this is the sort of fluff Francis Fukuyama offers, we think the neoconservatives should applaud his departure from their ranks. Who needs such flabby arguments?