you know, the people who claim to detect the ever-onward progressive thrust of history will look bad in the end, i believe. the idea goes back at least to vico (it's perfectly clear in hegel, marx, american pragmatists etc), but fukuyama is about as clear a version as it gets: history = the onward march of "liberal ideals." here he argues that "democracy and capitalism have no competitors." well, there are totalitarian regimes of all sorts grooving right along all over the globe. but what kills this particular version is that the democracies themselves become ever-more totalitarian; or we might say what kills history-as-the-story-of-freedom is that the state always grows and never shrinks, even or especially in liberal democracies. so when you have the u.s. - no doubt the avatar or progressive history for these poor happy philosophers - torturing people, engaged in foreign conquest, undertaking massive total surveillance etc: is their supposed victory (itself a temporary aberration) a victory of democracy? the very conditions under which it emerges victorious constitute a destruction of the values they supposedly incarnate in the historical process. i think probably the future will always really lie with mugabe-style kleptocracy; then again, that's refreshing in its directness. history is the triumphal march of bureaucracy, at best kind of well-meaning, at worst genocidal.