we never lost the battle of ideas:
What was failing and collapsing when history was declared over was something very specific in 1989, when Francis Fukyama made that famous declarationNaomi Klein speech at the American Sociological Association /DemocracyNow! 15.Aug.07
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when he actually said -- and it seems so strange to read it now -- in his famous 1989 speech, that the significance of that moment was not that we were reaching an end of ideology, as some were suggesting, or a convergence between capitalism and socialism, as Gorbachev was suggesting, it was not that ideology had ended, but that history as such had ended. He argued that deregulated markets in the economic sphere combined with liberal democracy in the political sphere represented the endpoint of mankind's ideological evolution and the final form of human government.
Now, what was interesting and never quite stated in this formulation was that you basically had two streams: you had democracy, which you can use to vote for your leaders, and then you had a single economic model. Now, the catch was that you couldn't use your vote, you couldn't use your democracy to reshape your economy, because all of the economic decisions had already been decided. There was only -- it was the final endpoint of ideological evolution. So you could have democracy, but you couldn't use it to change the basics of life, you couldn’t use it to change the economy. This moment was held up as a celebration of victory for democracy, but that idea, that democracy cannot affect the economy, is and remains the single most anti-democratic idea of our time.
