Tim Burke: What happened to belief in progress?

Timothy Burke, The News: The Broken Promises of Containment, Eight by Seven, March 23, 2022. From the essay:

...containment worked: the Soviet Union fell apart. But by the 1980s, the US and much of Western Europe had stopped being high on their own supply, e.g., stopped actually believing themselves in the core propositional ideals that containment’s most optimistic architects really did think were attributes of modern Western liberal democracies. The Cold War always had a horrific stench of hypocrisy around it, but most mainstream liberals and conservatives at its height could still reasonably assert that liberal democratic societies were better foundations for human flourishing than the East Bloc’s regimes and that progress towards liberal democratic ideals was still possible and even likely in the US and Europe. European empires were ending, the civil rights movement was leading the way towards internal reform followed by feminism and other social movements, social democracies were taming the excesses of capitalism.

In the 1980s, however, Reagan and Thatcher turned their backs on that vision of progress, and then “Third Way” liberal-progressive parties in the US, UK, Spain and elsewhere followed in that direction in the 1990s. As we enter the second decade of the 21st Century, the consequences of that abandonment are brutally clear. Nobody believes in progress any longer, no political leadership has a vision of a future where human beings are freer, happier and more secure than they are today. The best we get from most political parties and leaders is a vision of holding on to what we’ve got with a few modest incremental improvements around the edges. The entire global economy is strangling under the weight of runaway inequality and shadowy wealth accumulation that is beyond the ability of any nation to regulate or control. Democratic governance is threatened at every level, from school boards to national leadership. The entire planet just performed a resounding pratfall in the face of a global pandemic and almost no government is willing to honestly and thoroughly commit to the scale of response needed to face climate change.

Containment’s architects never really dreamed that the West would need to do anything if somehow their strategic plan paid off. The bad guys would crumble, the unfree nations would become free. Mission accomplished. The staggering complacency of their thought is perhaps most compactly expressed in Francis Fukuyama’s spectacularly terrible 1992 book The End of History, which gets mocked largely for the ineptitude of its predictive imagination but should instead be condemned for its provision of aid and comfort to the bipartisan complacency that seized most liberal democracies at the end of the Cold War. Fukuyama laid it out: there is nothing left that you need to do. Liberal democracy is the final form of human political life, nothing can arise to challenge it, and it is sufficient unto itself as it stands.

This was completely wrong, and we’ve all paid the price for it. For containment to have worked, the moment it succeeded in bringing down the great enemy of the Cold War it needed to free the West to do everything left that needed doing, to reallocate the grotesque and squalid costs of containment to the unfinished business of making liberal democratic societies fulfill their promises. Those costs weren’t just in making weapons and sustaining armies, they were in the proxy wars, the supported dictators, the covert actions, the we-can’t-fix-this-now-because excuses.

There's more at the link. 

Contrast with the somewhat different views of Jason Crawford, which I've excerpted here.