The End of History and the Final Girl

Good luck, final girl, I hope you get what you deserve
No one’s gonna do your job for you
After all, that’s not how this thing works

—underscores, “Good Luck Final Girl”

To really hit the big time as an academic you need One Big Idea that everyone violently misunderstands. Just ask Judith Butler, who has laboured for nearly my entire lifetime to get people to understand what they actually meant by “gender performativity.” One of the other beneficiaries of such monkey’s-paw-wish success has been Francis Fukuyama, whose most famous work, The End of History and the Last Man, has to top the list of works that have been interpreted by title only.

Hyperpolitics is a more enigmatic title. Anton Jäger’s tantalizing, slender new book “revisits the illusions of ‘the end of history’ and dissects the strange energies that replaced them,” according to its inside flap. I powered through it in two sittings. For all its lofty prose, it’s a compulsively readable provocation about a subject near and dear to me: how our highly networked age has failed to change the world for the better. We are more connected, more informed, more agitated than ever; we can manifest across the globe in flash mobs for any cause you care to name. And yet the relations of ruling remain unchanged. We’re depressed. Despondent. Posting alone. What gives?

As Jäger would have it, a huge part of the answer lies in the fact that “history and politics are clearly [still] taking place” (HP, p. 5). We’ll come back to this. The rest of this propulsive text is devoted to explaining that we’re alone, atomised, confused. We stand amidst the ruins of what we once called civil society, the institutions of mass politics that once organised us and pointed us in a clear direction. Quoting a laundry-list of such organizations from the late Hungarian philosopher Gáspár Miklós Tamás, Jäger cites the loss of parties that controlled their own “savings banks…newspapers…workingmen’s clubs, libraries, choirs, brass bands…well-entrenched local governments, temperance societies” (p. 30).

In their place we have culture wars prosecuted in a “public sphere [that] spasmodically convulses without ever crystallising into public infrastructure.” That public sphere grows out of “the life-worlds of the online,” characterized by “deinstitutionalized, impermanent engagement, offering repertories of social expression that require little to no long-term obligation” (p. 10). “Influencers,” Jäger laments, “petition or protest with a tweet” (p. 11).

Throughout this deeply researched, learned essay collection, as Jäger charts the flaming chaos and bloody but stalled revolutions across the globe, the bleak denouement of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, he often pauses to remind us that history is not over. He even cites interlocutors, such as the French novelist Annie Ernaux (p. 11) or Jean Baudrillard (pp. 3, 78) with their own lamentations about how history has not, in fact, ended.

All in, Jäger references the idea of the End of History at least nine times, by my count. But unlike his copious and generous citation of many other writers in this text, including the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt (pp. 30–31), Jäger merely gestures at the existence of Fukuyama’s work, treating its repudiation as self-evident. It isn’t, of course.

Let me make an argument that will doubtlessly not endear me to either Jäger or Fukuyama: you cannot fully understand one man’s work without reading the other. Hyperpolitics is, at its best, late marginalia for The End of History and the Last Man. At its worst, Jäger, like Fukuyama, is a prisoner of his political pieties. But there is a synthesis, lurking in the shadows of the end of history: the Final Girl, beaten yet unbroken, who may yet defeat the Last Men.

Any retrospective on 1992’s The End of History and the Last Man must begin with an acknowledgement that a book written thirty years later is invariably going to feel more current. Hyperpolitics is stitched together from Jäger’s previously published essays and the English-language Verso edition is a translation of 2023’s Hyperpolitik: Extreme Politisierung ohne politische Folgen [Extreme Politicisation Without Political Consequences]. The version I have in my hands is also updated throughout with reference to very recent events; it even has an ironic epigraph from a Kalshi ad. It’s up-to-the-minute.

End of History, by contrast, doesn’t just feel dated; parts of it have aged quite badly. Fukuyama’s habit in 1992 of referring to an individual, hypothetical Black American as “a black” should’ve felt retrogressive even then. When he descends from the loftiness of grand history and philosophical theory to talk about the (then) present, his examples and concerns feel both anachronistic and small. For instance, he wrings his hands about the “self-segregation by blacks—evident on most American college campuses today—and an emphasis on the politics of group dignity rather than on individual achievement…as the main route to social advancement,” (EoH, p. 237). There are many, petty little 1980s-conservative-dad asides like this throughout the text.

Late in the book as Fukuyama anticipates future challenges to democratic liberty, he envisions an out-of-control left that proliferates new and expansive ideas of rights to such an extreme degree that we may be forced to ask “why should insects, bacteria, intestinal parasites, and HIV viruses not have rights equal to those of human beings?” (p. 298). Again, this was 1992. This sort of crashingly abstract what-iffery is something Fukuyama did well to grow out of.

But then we come to the end of this silly speculative chapter, where Fukuyama leads into the next by observing, “there is reason for thinking that the greater and ultimately more serious threat comes from the Right” (EoH, p. 299). It is here where we will learn what made Fukuyama, contrary to the memes, one of the most vindicated theorists of his generation and explore how even his 1980s conservative instincts didn’t stop him from writing with lightning.

Hyperpolitics flashes in reflection of that lightning. It’s a bracingly written tour of History’s End that eloquently struggles against that very End.

Jäger ably catalogues the triumph of a truly noxious individualism that has isolated us from one another and from the very idea of community, even when we are in a crowd of protesters supposedly working towards the same goal. Like Vincent Bevins in If We Burn (who approvingly blurbed Hyperpolitics), he observes that the masses of protests that dominated the 2010s were largely unable and unwilling to seize power.

Without the bracing of the “openly authoritarian ways” of mass political parties, the hyperpolitical age of the present is one where “debate erupts over one issue today, another tomorrow,” where “individuals no longer possess a heuristic capable of unifying and imposing coherence on their various viewpoints” (HP, p. 33). 

There is, Jäger says, a Weberian “ideal type” of mass political party that organizes ideas as readily as it does people; as we observed above, the party could be ubiquitous in a community, publishing the newspaper you read at a workingmen’s club where you might hear a speech from a local councillor, cadre, activist, or someone else who’d tell you the party line, the slogan of the hour, the site of the next community meeting, festival, or protest. The mass political party was a flatpack society, with everything you needed within to build something—designed by someone else, of course.

That has fallen away. Indeed, Jäger says, no one “in the opinion-saturated terrain of social media could plausibly derive a coherent stance on COVID restrictions, gas heating, and gender-neutral language from a single, unified position” (HP, pp. 33–34). This is down to both the nature of the internet—and social media being an instant-gratification engine that encourages hyper-individualistic thinking and emotional onanism—and to the greed-is-good consumerism endemic to capitalism, particularly the post-1989 variety that has, without the danger of communism keeping it in check, run amok like a species with no natural predators.

And yet, as that list of events and issues Jäger marshalled makes clear, history did not, in fact end in 1989. So, what was Fukuyama on about anyway?

There’s a certain irony to a committed Marxist not grappling with the central thesis of The End of History and the Last Man, given that it’s something of an encomium to the power of dialectical materialism. It is from G. W. F. Hegel that Fukuyama grabs the idea of History, defined here as a millennia-long process of producing a political system that best satisfies human wants and needs—in particular, the desire to be recognised as a human being with dignity, which has been the piston engine behind every peasant revolt, revolution, and civil rights movement. Where Marx adapted Hegel’s vision to suggest that true communism would represent the end of history, Fukuyama suggests that the then-recent collapse of the Soviet Union and communism across the globe showed that Marx was wrong.

But Hegel, crucially, wasn’t. History did not end with communism, but instead with liberal democracy. Hegel in particular was taken with the idea of human equality that had just reached his patch in the wake of Napoleon’s victory at the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt in 1806. After all, for all the despotic depredations of the French Emperor, he was still spreading the idea that human beings were fundamentally equal, and the idea that merit, not accidents of birth, should determine one’s place in the greater whole. The stifling, stagnant Society of Orders was being swept away by the man on horseback, and Hegel saw the operation of Reason in History in the bloody cataclysm of the Napoleonic Wars.

Interpreting Hegel through the charming mid-century Russo-French philosopher and Eurocrat Alexandre Kojève, Fukuyama saw the same truth in the carnage of the 20th century’s great struggles between liberalism, communism, fascism, and imperialism. The idea of human equality was spreading across the globe; everything left to come would be a struggle to implement this idea and refine it. That particular struggle was not going to be easy. Quite a lot happened after 1806, after all, the year that Kojève cheekily said history had truly ended.

Looked at this way, Fukuyama’s argument is significantly less radical than it first appears. He’s essentially arguing that if one defines history as the dialectic that produces better and better ideas for a political system, then we essentially already have its end: the best idea, liberal democracy. The next struggle is to make that idea work for all, and to defend it from inevitable challenges.

Fukuyama was far from naïve on this point. Even his silly chapter about nonexistent rights-for-bacteria leftists was an attempt to speculate about future threats to liberal democracy. But it was his predictions about the right that proved prophetic.

The emptiness of consumerism would lead to boredom among the most prosperous, rendering them the most dangerous. The true End of History had not quite come, but Fukuyama regarded its nearness with concern; it was an end not only to struggle, but to the production of all that might be beautiful. No more “poems, theories of metaphysics [or] Faberge eggs” and instead greater quantities of “machine tools, freeways, Toyota Camrys, and prefabricated houses” (EoH, p. 309). The End of History was not truly here yet, but the proliferation of “things neither beautiful nor useful,” like “mountains of litigation produced by lawyers every year,” proved to Fukuyama that it was nigh.

Jäger gives us his own timeline. The 1990s were an age of ‘post-politics,’ the long celebration after the fall of the Wall where people partied and politicians retreated into mere managerialism. Then came 2008 and the financial crash; the beginning of antipolitics. Jäger defines antipolitics in the way that some Eastern European dissidents defined it during the Cold War. The Hungarian intellectual György Konrád, who coined the term in a a seminal 1984 essay, Antipolitika, wrote:

Anti-politics is the politicisation of people who do not want to become politicians or take a share of power. …anti-politics is a counter-power that cannot come to power and does not want to. Anti-politics already possesses power because of its sheer moral and cultural weight. (Konrád, quoted in HP, p. 58; emphasis mine).

Antipolitics was, in some ways, a sensible reaction to the communist regimes of the Eastern Bloc whose ideology intruded on every aspect of life (something Fukuyama also documents in End of History). To be antipolitical was to demand that politics retreat from the pleasures of private life. For Jäger, however, by the 2010s this idea had proliferated around the globe as a rejection of all political institutions and elites, whose austerity politics and technocratic managerialism had led to the promise of prosperity being broken for Millennials. But like Konrád’s comrades, the protesters who rose against these injustices did not want to come to power.

Hyperpolitics amplified the politicisation of this vast, disaffected group; from 2020 onwards, they indulged in a “preponderance of social media ‘wars of movement’ over institution-building ‘wars of position,’ with the primary forms of political engagement as fleeting as market transactions” (HP, p. xvi). There were no leaders, no hierarchy, no meaningful order save the spontaneous swarming familiar to anyone who is too online.

In its perversity, the new antipolitics is not the rejection of politics’ intrusion into the personal, but its enthronement; what was once arrogated to the state, to political parties and institutions, has now been soaked into the lives of the antipolitical masses. Everything is political, and we can argue about it all day on X: The Everything App.

This, then, is the terrain of the End of the End of History.

Except the end of history never really ended.

Jäger is, in many ways, summarising and synthesising the work of other authors and scholars. His periodisation—and particularly his application of the term antipolitics to the 2010s—owes a very significant debt to the 2022 book The End of the End of History by Alex Hochuli, George Hoare, and Philip Cunliffe, hosts of the Aufhebunga Bunga podcast. The name of the podcast is a portmanteau of Silvio Berlusconi’s infamous bunga bunga parties and Hegel’s untranslatable neologism Aufhebung, which describes a contradictory process of rejection and maintenance in a social system. An old idea may seem to die, but its DNA is transferred to a healthier host and some part of it survives its own death.

It is from that podcasting trio’s book, which shows they clearly have read Fukuyama, that Jäger takes much inspiration. In particular, Hochuli, Hoare, and Cunliffe argue that Fukuyama was wrong about the big thing I haven’t talked much about yet: the idea that capitalism would triumph. But, of course, in this they agree with noted scholar Francis Fukuyama, who says he’s been “pushed to the left” by the same financial crisis they cite as the violent birth of mass antipolitics, and describes himself as something of a “social democrat” who thinks “socialism ought to come back.”

Clearly Uncle Frank is learning. But then again, this isn’t entirely out of line with what he was arguing all along. Capitalism, he argued, was probably here to stay in some form, but there was ample work to be done to ensure greater equality—in 1992, he frequently cited homelessness as a major challenge for the future. Masses of people would need to be given affordable homes and liberal democracy had to rise to the challenge. Once again, this proved prophetic.

One can agree or disagree with this, but at no point was Fukuyama arguing that political struggle was over, only a struggle over viable competing alternatives. Communism and fascism promised totalising systems built on fundamentally different assumptions and mobilisations than liberal democracy; both have fallen to the wayside, even in this age of neo-fascist resurgence.

Which brings us to Jäger’s take on whether we’re actually experiencing fascism now, neo- or otherwise. Essentially, he argues that it’s not fascism unless it comes from the Bavarian region of Germany in the 1920s, otherwise it’s simply sparkling Bonapartism. This is one of several tediously pedantic observations Jäger makes stemming from a doctrinaire Marxism that checkmates him out of his own argument. He’d be on stronger ground claiming Fukuyama’s failure if, in fact, he said fascism had come back as a viable challenge to liberal democracy.

In Jäger’s mind, fascism can only be a ruling-class immune response to an imminent leftist revolutionary breakthrough—conditions that, he says, did obtain in the European interwar years, but whose absence in the 2020s he has devoted Hyperpolitics to explaining. In any case, Trump isn’t fascist, and we can spend several pages kicking around the silly American resistlibs who’ve argued otherwise.

But. Let us not be too churlish here. Jäger is (unoriginally) on to something with the comparison to Napoleon III. Trump is certainly the kind of “grotesque mediocrity” Marx immortalised in one of his more famous essays. Unlike the fascists of the 1930s, who built an alternative—however riven by bloody contradictions—Trump thrashes against the fetters of liberal democracy and finds only fleeting success in destroying something while offering either only the same thing in its place (swapping CUSMA for NAFTA) or a smoking ruin where nothing can grow (consider his current policy towards Canada or his Iran war).

The opposition to Trump, despite some grandiose leftist gestures, meets its greatest success on liberal democratic terrain. Where the DSA works best, it works as an engine for getting progressives and democratic socialists elected as Democrats—not engaged as a cadre of revolutionary communists. Contra the fever dreams of our center-right pundits, Zohran Mamdani is not training up a legion of Zoomer Red Guards.

This is, in fact, all very Fukuyaman: the struggles of the future will be fought over the shape of liberal democracy. The battle will be fought not between liberal democracy and a fully-formed alternative with its own institutions and militant cadres, but between liberal democracy and a screaming void.

I am quite comfortable declaring Trump a fascist; he and his enablers are nostalgics for the mass politics of the 20th-century extreme right, just as Jäger is a nostalgic for the mass politics of the old socialists and communists. But neither has any real vision for how to recreate something like it in the 21st century. What Trump and his people offer are AI-generated memes sloppily depicting something like a Herrenvolk Amerika that brings Stephen Miller the closest thing to joy he’s ever experienced. But memes are not institutions, nor are they even political programs. When the Trump regime tries to bring its memes to the Offline world, they manifest simply as violence and death. 

In a truly Fukuyaman turn, Trump’s acolytes cast his  obsession with the 2020 election he lost as the key to the salvation of democracy—promising a final triumph over the phantasm of voter fraud—rather than its needful demise. They know that they need the authority liberal democracy offers, because we all, still, on some level, believe in it. It is the only remaining legitimate source of sovereignty in the U.S., despite the Bonapartist spasms of the Trump administration. The fascism is real, yet unable to climax, destroying lives and communities without destroying democracy and replacing it with something else. It is, in some sense, cargo cult fascism; Trump has the gestures, the vile rhetoric, the banners with his face glowering from the Department of Justice, the vainglory, but no ability to actually arrogate real authority and sovereignty to himself. He just seems to hope that the gestures will somehow summon the ermine mantle of Emperorhood to his shoulders.

But we haven’t forgotten liberal democracy, and even now, people are fighting and dying to maintain it. Their dignity demands no less.

The End of History and the Last Man is, without doubt, Fukuyama’s most influential work; you don’t get violently misinterpreted unless your idea got wide airplay to begin with. But at the height of the antipolitical decade, Fukuyama wrote his true magnum opus: the Political Order duology: The Origins of Political Order (2011) and Political Order and Political Decay (2014). Each is a shockingly readable brick that seeks to replicate the grand history of the 19th century scholars Fukuyama so admires.

One can criticise him for his overreliance on the likes of Hegel, and, indeed, flaws emerge from that overreliance. Dialecticism is a scatterplot that gets fuzzy around the edges, and those rounding errors matter. But there is something comforting in a scholar who thinks such projects can and should still be done.

I won’t venture even a full summary of these vast works (together nearly 1,000 pages) here, but instead pull one of the most important threads from Fukuyama’s thesis: human beings, by nature, want to aid those we’re closest to—family, friends, loved ones—ahead of strangers. Drawing on an ample literature, he calls political systems organized on this basis “patrimonialism.” Patrimonial states treat the state itself as the personal property of the ruler, used to dispense favors to favored friends and thereby maintain the ruler’s own power. Modern states—political order, one might say—emerge when we develop states that suppress those tendencies, that promote people based on merit rather than kinship ties, and thus allow for an economy of scale to develop where the whole of society can share in at least some of the collective good: Resources Security. Dignity.

Political decay comes about when patrimonialism creeps back into the political process. It is what links the collapse of the Han Dynasty in the third century, the ancien regime of France, the slow death of the Ottoman Empire—and, one is tempted to add, the Trump-infused corruption that defines America’s present.

Here is where Jäger can be read as a productive commentary on Fukuyama: Hyperpolitics describes what this looks like from the other end. Fukuyama theorises that re-patrimonialization turns the state into a fish rotting from the head down; what begins with elite corruption seeps into the whole of society as people lose faith in the state and begin pursuing pure self-interest. Jäger describes that loss of faith more fully, fleshing out the sorry state of digitised self-seeking that defines the 21^st century’s third decade.

To get properly Hegelian about it, Fukuyama and Jäger are thesis and antithesis; the synthesis is what’s especially juicy.

What Jäger is pointing to is the fact that social media is the 21^st century’s re-patrimonialization particle accelerator. “Rather than concrete results,” he writes of recent social movements, “what [they all] share is the ability to reproduce frenetic activity, relayed by an increasingly digital public sphere. Hyperpolitics bursts forth periodically only to recede, less a corrective to postpolitics than yet another manifestation” (HP, p. 77).

This social media temporality is a theme in Jäger’s writing here. He compares contemporary mobilisation to a “neutron bomb” where “a moment ago, thousands of people were protesting in a square—now they have vanished, with the assailed power infrastructure intact,” (HP, p. 81). What he’s describing is the fact that re-patriomonialization has seeped into the woodwork of mass society. It’s infected us, and Twitter and Facebook were the vectors.

Astute readers of Fukuyama might argue that the core idea of patrimonialism was that it was about material gain for rulers, who operated the state on behalf of their friends and families. In latter-day “neopatrimonialism,” he writes, we see “political leaders adopt the outward forms of modern states—with bureaucracies, legal systems, elections, and the like—and yet in reality rule for private gain” (POPD, p. 26). It certainly sounds very familiar. But Fukuyama repeatedly notes that re-patrimonialization seeps into everyday society, too. If the leaders are corrupt, why have faith in the state or the system? Just look out for Number One.

Jäger argues that antipolitics comes from people rejecting the political order entirely. But they are also increasingly politicized, engaging in political activity aplenty, often at personal cost. They’re certainly not looting the treasury or, say, cheating on their taxes or collecting petty bribes (actions Fukuyama says are examples of citizenry with no faith in their state). What’s so patrimonial about that? 

The synthesis here is that in our social media-saturated age, we are often just as willing to substitute lucre for emotional satisfaction or social capital. To feel good, to feel righteous, to have the good opinion of one’s peers, may be just as alluring as classic capital—and, at any rate, there are rich monetary awards waiting for a lucky few who make money from their virality. As any number of state lotteries say, you can’t win if you don’t play.

Social media, with its limitless capacity for inducing solipsistic self-soothing, made it easier than ever for us to pursue our personal vision of the good. Easier than ever to simultaneously ‘turn on, tune in, drop out,’ and somehow remain self-consciously political, courtesy of the doomscroll. When things got bad enough to mobilise us onto the streets, we brought social media with us—quite literally in our pockets, but also in our minds, rigorously demanding our own vision of moral righteousness to the exclusion of any collective vision that might make a real political force out of our convictions.

In short, social media made it easier than ever for us to break away from larger collectives and pursue our own ruthless self-interest, cleaving to our narrow affinity groups made up of our kin, or our fairweather online friends who think exactly as we do. Jäger describes this all quite ably, and it’s nothing less than Fukuyaman re-patrimonialization, where we lose faith in the state and fall in love with our own emotions at the expense of real politics—which are necessarily larger than ourselves.

If we can’t loot real capital, then there’s at least some social capital to be gained. And without faith in the state or anything resembling it, why bother trying to take power anyway? Even Jäger, for his laments, pantomimes this resigned futility throughout his book. The frequent invocations of “revolution” or “revolutionary” have no object. Liberal democracy cannot be replaced, but it also can’t be participated in. Wynn’s Law remains undefeated. 

As to the mass-political parties of old that Jäger loves so much, Fukuyama’s Political Order duology dealt with them too. They were artefacts of an earlier phase of democracy, one that had to be surpassed. In the U.S. you probably learned of this kind of politics as “the spoils system.” The fancier political science term for the phenomenon is clientelism, a political party that buys its votes from its ‘client’ constituencies in exchange for ‘patronage,’ meaning contracts, jobs, and other material benefits.

Indeed, that’s the kind of thing that Jäger is praising throughout Hyperpolitics. He even approvingly cites the case of Belgian and Dutch clientelistic parties that ran their own hospitals (HP, p. 31). We have enough problems with the Catholic Church running hospitals; could you imagine a political party with the same charge?

But for all the nostalgic praise, Jäger finally comes to the conclusion that going back to clientelism would be a bit much.

“Drawing atomised individuals back into parties and unions may seem nostalgic, authoritarian, or simply unrealistic. Rightly so, perhaps.” This is on page 85 of a 94-page book. He goes on to immediately liken the prospect of recreating old mass-political parties to reconstructing the woolly mammoth from DNA samples: “a scientifically interesting but practically pointless exercise,” which, if one is feeling cheeky, feels like an apt way of characterizing his entire analysis of mass politics in the foregoing chapters. But it is, at least, useful as a sketch of our decline to this point of hyper-individualism. 

So, what do we do about it? Jäger’s answer is, essentially, to shrug and say we should wait for more favourable conditions to emerge, in order to maybe create Mass-Politics 2: Electric Boogaloo (HP, p. 93).

But, once again, Jäger has provided us with thesis and antithesis, and it’s up to me to provide the synthesis he omits.

We are in the realm of the Last Man, Fukuyama argues. The figure who stands at the end of history, the desolate figure with nothing left to fight for who gives in to consumerism and self-satisfaction. Here he now draws on Nietzsche, whose Zarathustra says of them, “For thus you speak: ‘Real are we entirely, and without belief or superstition.’ Thus you stick out your chests—but alas they are hollow!” These ‘men without chests’ are the Last Men, devoid of conviction, indolent, and thirsting for empty calories of pleasure.

Such men, Fukuyama memorably warned, could be dangerous. For their political reactivation would, inevitably, lead them to lash out against liberal democracy—it was the System they could destroy in order to feel something, in order to recreate the sepia-tinted grandeur of past revolutions and mass movements.

Once again, in 1992, Fukuyama was prophetic. He writes:

Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because [it] was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterised by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy. (EoH, p. 330)

It is this final chapter of The End of History that is truly vindicated. One may object that we are far from a fully liberal democratic world, and that even in the bosom of liberal democracy there are masses of people who are struggling and even destitute. But to look at neo-fascism’s strongest soldiers, they are not the forgotten men but the Last Men who have prospered best in the post-1989 world. It is not janitors, but car dealership owners and CEOs who are most on board with MAGA; January 6^th insurrectionists flew to Washington, D.C. in private jets and stayed in nice hotels. Need we talk about Elon Musk?

These are the cargo cultists of mass democracy that we are saddled with. They cannot actually create anything new, nor build true institutions, but they seek the thrill of struggle because having two F-350s in the triple garage of their exurban McMansion simply isn’t enough.

The Final Girl is a trope figure in horror movies. Named by scholar Carol J. Clover in a 1987 article, the term refers to the woman who survives to confront and sometimes even defeat the monster. Either way, she lives to see the end of the movie. It’s just incumbent on her to exert herself one last time to finally bring us to the climax. If the monster seems to be dead twenty minutes before the movie is over, rest assured the Final Girl’s going to kill it when it comes back five minutes before the credits actually roll.

It feels fitting to reflect on pop culture at the end of a review of Hyperpolitics. Jäger begins the book with a pitying reflection on the club scene of the late 1980s, clucking at how the partiers danced to music inspired by the sounds of factories in Detroit and Manchester since shuttered under the weight of the Reagan-Thatcher consensus. Wolfgang Tillmann’s photo Love (Hands in Hair), significantly taken in 1989, depicts an anonymous young woman’s ecstasy at a nightclub, and it adorns the cover of Hyperpolitics—a wistful act of mockery. The camera, Jäger says, “records a deliberate exercise in collective amnesia: an attempt to exorcise the ideological specters of the last century.” The revellers “seek to dance away industry, politics, and history itself” (HP, pp. 1–2).

I’ll offer a different interpretation of the woman being slandered, 37 years on: she has the potential to be the Final Girl.

Such a redemptive perspective is more than appropriate given the near total absence of gender and patriarchy in Jäger’s work, and, to a certain extent in Fukuyama’s too, save for how each man occasionally mentions the advent of women’s rights movements as an aside. Such movements, such developments, however, are not distractions from the grand arc of history—they comprise it, for liberalism would have no hope at all without them. The Final Girl is the agent of our times, the one who appears in the face of this age’s particularly nihilistic threats, who haunts the dreams of today’s cargo-cult fascists and enablers. She is the pussy-hat wearer, the dreaded HR lady, the shrieking feminist, the childless cat-lady, the thot who mass-produces incels. Don't take my word for it: the fascists are proudly telling us who their enemies are and who they are trying to kill. 

Fukuyama, so concerned with how democracy provides “recognition” of various interest groups’ dignity, treats women as just another of the mushrooming groups whose demands appear at the End of History; if not silly, then just interchangeable with all the others. Indeed, his last lingering conservative-dad obsession is with the supposed ills of identity politics. And Jäger merely gestures to the existence of patriarchal authority now and again, neglecting the role misogyny has played in the backlash against democracy—past and present.

Fukuyama, properly understood, was not saying that events would cease after 1989, nor that there would be no further world-historical struggle. What he argued was that liberal democracy had become the only real game in town. Therefore, future battles would necessarily be fought in its defence—and that we would struggle against people who fought liberal democracy for no reason other than an atavistic desire to fight against something. Often, those foes of liberal democracy are fighting the spectre that still haunts our world: feminism. 

Those of us defending the freedoms that allow us to dance the night away, to share in the fruits of free expression and prosperity, are then charged with a particularly invigorating cause: to fight those zombies of dead ideologies.

Like the Final Girl, we did not set out to fight. The battle was thrust upon us. That fight has scarred, perhaps even killed some of our friends. We didn’t want this—we set out to simply live the lives we were promised—but all of a sudden, the walking dead set upon us. So, we pick up whatever we can and fight ’til dawn, to see the light of a new day, remembering those we lost, treasuring our freedom that much more, giving that much more meaning to those nights where we can simply be ourselves. It is no sin to actually use one’s freedom, after all, whatever overbaked meaning a scolding cultural critic may divine from such deeds.

For all the miseries of our age, for all that the world burns and convulses with our myriad man-made evils, we have nonetheless lucked into a formula that was fought for by millions of our ancestors. Liberal democracy, the civic goddess of the nightclub, has blessed us with the knowledge that we are all equal in our dignity and that we should all be counted and recognised. It remains the solution to our problems, and whatever setbacks we face, it will always erupt once again because our yearning to live cannot be stopped. 

To do a little overdetermined cultural criticism of my own, we’re in a moment where we’re moving away from the irony-poisoned culture that so dominated Twitter’s heyday and the “antipolitical” decade of the 2010s. We are, slowly, killing the part of us that cringes. The part that was ashamed of sincere belief, that first pre-requisite of seizing power. You can see it in the music of Underscores, whose dark sincerity introduced this essay, and which evolved past her hyperpop coreligionists still stuck in the form of shitposty acts like 100 Gecs. The ground is shifting because the Final Girl is waking up to the Last Men and we are going to do more than mark time: we are going to survive the night.

We do not have to yield to the car dealership owners who have made their midlife crises a geostrategic problem for the entire world.

We can yet end this madness. Bloodied, frightened, unwilling, but also unbowed. We can pick up a knife and live to see dawn again.

It is remarkable how so many of the leftist diagnoses of our age get the details right while offering next to no hope. So, perhaps it’s worth remembering that a lot of horror movies actually, against all odds, have happy endings. In the realm of the Last Men, we must strive to be Final Girls.

Featured image is "Horror film stars' face molds displayed at The Hollywood Museum," CC BY 2.0 Courtney "Coco" Mault 2012. Edited.