Spencer Cox Shares Quote to Explain Cause of Protests

Utah Governor Spencer Cox (R) shared a quote from Francis Fukuyama’s famous book “The End of History” on Thursday as a means of explaining what he sees as partly responsible for the protests on college campuses in recent weeks.

Cox wrote on X, “Can’t stop thinking about this Francis Fukuyama paragraph from The End of History,” and then shared the following passage:

But supposing that the world has become “filled up,” so to speak, with liberal democracies, such that there exist no tyranny and oppression worthy of the name against which to struggle? Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier gen- eration, 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 characterized by peaceful

and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.

Fukuyama, a renowned political scientist, wrote “The End of History” in 1992 at the end of the Cold War and argued that Western liberal democracy was on track to become the final form of government for mankind.

The New Republic’s Greg Sargent replied to Cox, adding, “FWIW, I interviewed @FukuyamaFrancis about exactly this idea and he expanded on how it applies in our current context in a fascinating way.” Sargent then shared parts of his March 2022 interview with Fukuyama:

Sargent: I’d like to talk about another idea in “The End of History,” that the victory of Western liberalism would create a kind of “boredom” with a world in which great questions are resolved, and a “nostalgia” for a world in which you had to pick a side in a grand battle of ideas.I wonder whether we’re seeing something like this in the extraordinary outpouring of support for Ukraine across the West: There’s a mass embrace of this opportunity to stand tall again on one side of an ideological struggle.Fukuyama: I think that’s right. There’s a lot of pent-up idealism. The spirit of 1989 went to sleep, and now it’s being reawakened. I do think people like the idea of struggling for a just cause, and they really haven’t had anything other than consumerism and mindless middle-class pursuits in the

last 30 years.By the way, I think a lot of that right-wing populism is driven by that same boredom.It means that every liberal society therefore has a weaker sense of community than one based on a single religion or single ethno-nationalist tradition. Liberalism by design doesn’t give people this tightly bound sense of brotherhood or sisterhood with their fellow citizens.