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Comment by Upvoter33 | Hacker News Reader

Not sure why Fukuyama is taken too seriously - what are the things he's really been right about?

He dismisses rank-choice but mostly because it will take too long to get it everywhere. To me, it seems the best way to allow all sorts of candidates to run, and will likely reduce the chances of the wacko extreme candidates we're getting today.

Finally, he mentions Yang's new Forward Party, which imho likely won't do much good, but has the potential of causing another Ralph Nader-esque impact on a future election. Although we can't tell what would have happened with a Gore presidency, I'm almost sure we would not have invaded Iraq. Let's all hope the Forward Party dies a quick and painless death.

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He has a particularly weak reebuttal of Ranked Voting:

> Moreover, it is not guaranteed to facilitate viable third parties; this has not happened in Australia, for example, where it is the rule.

Australia has a Conservative colalition of two parties, Liberal and National with similar but unaligned goals, and a nominally Left (for some value of Left but not Copmmunist and not the trade union party it once was) Party in Labor.

That's three majors.

Australia also has (largely thanks to RC) a number of independants and small parties that also have a voice both the upper and lower houses (of the various States, and in the Federal Government).

The need to negotiate with small players to build numbers to pass desired policy is a major factor in avoiding the kind of extreme polarisation seen within the central north american region.

That's more due to the proportional representation method (STV) used by Australia's upper legislative body. The lower body uses single-seat IRV and for most of the past century has been strongly dominated by two parties. This isn't surprising because IRV (aka RCV) suffers from center squeeze, meaning that it tends to eliminate consensus candidates when there are three or more real contender candidates.

I don't think he was necessarily wrong with The End Of History, (un)-ironically historical events weren't on his side. What would have replaced "The War On Terror" if 9/11 doesn't happen? What does China look like if someone less hard-liner than Xi Jinping replaced Hu Jintao? What if Russia's second war in Chechnya lasted a hard 10 years and Putin is pushed out? We could make a huge list of counterfactuals like these.

That being said, the problem with Fukuyama is that for all intents and purposes, forecasting the future in terms of grand narratives is impossible to do accurately.

If you need history to happen differently to get to "the end of history", then you're not at the end of history.

China would likely also had a much different situation in Xinjiang if not for 9/11.

Rank Choice is a bad idea. Its unnecessarily complex and that complexity actually doesn't mean its better, its actually significantly worse then alternative methods.

Range (Score or Star) voting are significantly better.

https://www.equal.vote/star_vs_rcv

I don't think anyone can possibly take the guy seriously after he wrote _The End of History_. What an absolute joke of a hot take that was. Did he truly believe that just because the Soviet Union and its satellites had a governmental collapse that the entire planet was going to turn into a liberal democracy?

That's not the thesis of end of history, you are repeating bad headlines as a quick take.

I've read the book, albeit 15 years ago. That may not be the entire thesis, but it is the primary component of it. From Wikipedia[0]:

> Fukuyama argues that history should be viewed as an evolutionary process, and that the end of history, in this sense, means that liberal democracy is the final form of government for all nations. According to Fukuyama, since the French Revolution, liberal democracy has repeatedly proven to be a fundamentally better system (ethically, politically, economically) than any of the alternatives, and so there can be no progression from it to an alternative system. Fukuyama claims not that events will stop occurring in the future, but rather that all that will happen in the future (even if totalitarianism returns) is that democracy will become more and more prevalent in the long term.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...

I didn't realize I replied to you in 2 different threads lol.

I'm going by his articulation on a recent podcast with Chris Hayes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY9yBZm_57w

He would say that its not that liberal democracy is some teleological final state. But more like a local optimum that we can't hill climb out of. There simply aren't different ideas about how to organize states "beyond" democracy.

I think the shift is subtle but important. It implies a lack of ideas as opposed to a "prediction" about the consequences of 1991.

Watching Andrew Yang post Forward Party pabulum and getting ratioed on Twitter is a guilty pleasure.

being right is not important or even a goal. look at rich people like soros that put money into their ideas so that they can say they were right.

having ideas and sharing them is of more value.

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