Excerpt: “The End of the End of History”

“History ended in 1989. In 2008, the economic order was shaken. The political reckoning arrived in 2016. By 2020, the End of History was over.”

Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from the introduction to The End of the End of History, which was published in June by Zero Books.

Bat soup. Xenophobic insinuations. Toppled statues. Hazmat suits. Bizarre weather events. Wildfire riots. Improvised police states. Mass quarantine.

The strange end times we find ourselves in are more like a B-Movie apocalypse than the orderly sequence of “events” found in history books. But the weirdness of contemporary life is not only a product of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis. If we look at the doomy memes about 2021, we see they are functionally identical to ones from 2020, 2019—or 2016 for that matter. Indeed, remember when all those Boomer celebrities started dying in the same year as that failed Turkish coup, random Jihadist terror across Europe, the Zika outbreak, Trump’s victory, and the Brexit vote? Those days when everyone dug up that Lenin quotation about decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen?

This was the End of the End of History. It was announced in 2016. 2020 made it definitive.

We stand at a pivotal moment. Amid the chaos, states of emergency, and extraordinary state responses, we are undergoing an epochal political shift. The richest and most powerful states in the West are fumbling their way out of neoliberalism. Such regime change had almost been forgotten as a possibility—unless it was applied at the end of a gun in distant lands.