Writing in 1989, Francis Fukuyama argued that the world was reaching “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” His thesis has remained controversial ever since, often criticised as triumphalist and even as an extension of orientalism, but it is its confidence about Western democracy that reads most strangely today. If liberal democracy is the final form of human government, its current practice gives little cause for triumph. In an age of TikTok and the viral feed, politicians on both sides of the spectrum increasingly campaign through
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