2024 marked the 35th anniversary of the publication of Francis Fukuyama’s famous essay, “The End of History?” in The National Interest. Suffice to say, its thesis looks more wrong than ever.

It must be acknowledged that Fukuyama’s arguments were somewhat more complex and less optimistic than is commonly imagined, but regardless, the premise was that the ideological evolution of human governance is in the process of finding a resting point at liberal, internationalist democracy. But in reality, we are seeing that system fail all around us as ideological veneers are pulled down and resource and influence competition heats up. Far from history ending at a boring European Union-style resting place, it appears to have come back with a vengeance—Fukuyama’s confident post-Cold War assertions notwithstanding. The clear trend of 2024 is that “liberal internationalism,” which promised freedom and wealth but delivered the cruel and insolent tyranny of an incompetent Mandarin class, is in retreat across its territory.

Fukuyama’s premise was more or less nonsense in the first place, which is why it has been so widely mocked and maligned. However, it is undeniable that a period of American and West European dominance following the fall of the USSR saw a massive expansion of market-based and democratic countries, and in many areas this led to an increase in standards of living. One could find many counter-examples to the claim that this has been a peaceful era, but even when the United States broke all international laws to overthrow Iraq, a stated purpose was to move “democracy” forward.

Something that is poorly understood is that in any “Pax” era there is plenty of conflict on the frontier, and it is only the people already under the empires who are domestically at peace. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell describes a roughly quadrilateral area of Africa and Asia where conflicts are allowed to happen, which corresponds surprisingly closely to how this played out in the post-World War II system. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the shock was not that there was a war, it was that there was a war where war was not allowed to happen. This ended the post-war peace, as I wrote at the time, though it has taken until 2024 for many to see that Russia is likely to “get away with it” instead of being turned back in disgrace.

The End of History was also supposed to see the world getting less brutal, in large part due to the existence of the United Nations and other international bodies. Occasionally this has allowed the world to pluck a warlord out of Africa or the Balkans, but Israel has shown brutality unprecedented in the modern era in its destruction of Gaza and nothing has stopped them. We have watched what is supposedly the only “liberal democracy” in the Middle East commit genocide while under the protection of the powers who claim to be promoting international law. They all thought it was great when Vladimir Putin had an arrest warrant put out for him by the International Criminal Court, but then expressed outrage when Israeli leaders were treated the same. It’s been made clear that all of these institutions are toothless and hypocritical, though that wasn’t hard to figure out in the first place. Israel has profited from its brutality and ends the year in a position to commit even more crimes, after finding success by disconnecting itself from any restraints of honor or law.

Meanwhile, elections, the top sacrament of the End of History religion, have persistently moved countries away from technocratic liberal internationalist rule, most of all in the European Union, the ultimate End of History project. While the growth of “non-mainstream” parties, especially those that oppose mass immigration, has been ongoing for years, the EU parliamentary elections in June shocked the ruling class, perhaps waking them up from a slumber. French President Emmanuel Macron even took the unusual step of calling national parliamentary elections, where a center kind of held, but he was left unable to govern. Germany’s dreadful “Traffic Light Coalition,” named for the colors of the three parties, has also collapsed, though we are yet to see what will replace it. Worse still, Romania’s elections were outright canceled when a disfavored candidate was primed to win, while Georgia has suspended its moves towards the EU after the internationalists threw an ongoing fit because they do not like Georgia’s election results. The top takeaway from all of this has been that even the mainstream parties are now trying to curb mass immigration while simultaneously admitting it is themselves, not the voters, who get to make all of the decisions. On top of all of this, Donald Trump won decisively in the US elections, and for his faults, he is clearly seen as being something different from liberal internationalism.

We can’t know what 2025 will hold, but the events of 2024 have made it clear that both people and states are not going to be satisfied to sit back and be told how to live by a cabal of losers with advanced degrees who want to lecture them about “democratic norms.” Many are rightfully scared of World War III, and maybe things will go that direction. Alternately, maybe the domestic situation will become so untenable for this ruling class that they are not even in a position to lead us into such a conflict. That politicians are accepting that the public won’t accept permanent mass immigration is a strong sign that they’ve seen the fault in a primary belief of their liberal internationalism; that humans are functionally interchangeable so long as they are taught “democratic” values. These people continue to place all of their confidence in the success of a narrative that resistance to their rule is a Putinist plot, but it seems unlikely to take them much farther.

Hopefully, we are seeing the end of the End of History era, a welcome change, regardless of what chaos it may bring.