Francis Fukuyama has in that sense so far been proved right in his famous 1989 essay, “The End of History”: the long historical and ideological battle over what is the best and most sustainable political and social model has been won by liberalism and democracy. Nothing new has come along to rival it. What has not happened, however, in the ensuing quarter century is the full demise of the old alternatives, especially the non-ideological one of brute dictatorship. They, in all their forms, caused trouble for liberal societies before 1989 and still cause trouble today.
