The Rise and Fall of the U.S. Government by John J. Dilulio Jr. | The Washington Monthly

The Rise and Fall of the U.S. Government by John J. Dilulio Jr. | The Washington Monthly: Now, in the second installment of this two-volume treatise, Political Order and Political Decay, Fukuyama picks up where the French Revolution left off and proceeds to the present. While he stresses that liberal democracy is not “humanly universal,” he still believes that there is “a clear directionality to the process of political development” that favors liberal democracy. But, in stark contrast to The End of History and his concern over hypothetical last men and their possible discontents, in his latest book he is worried about liberal democracies not sustaining themselves and not reliably delivering peace, prosperity, and personal security to their peoples. As he writes, if “there has been a single problem facing contemporary democracies, whether aspiring or well established, it has been centered in their failure to provide the substance of what people want from government: personal security, shared economic growth, and quality of basic public services like education, health, and infrastructure that are needed to achieve individual opportunity.”