Among the prizes at stake in the endless war of politics is history itself. The battle for power is always a battle to determine who gets remembered, how they will be recalled, where and in what forms their memories will be preserved. In this battle, there is no room for neutral parties: every history and counter-history must fight and scrap and claw and spread and lodge itself in the world, lest it be forgotten or forcibly erased. All history, in this sense, is the history of empire—a bid for control of that greatest expanse of territory, the past.

There is a quasi-religious overtone to all of this—everything in the past has been moving toward a telos, a predestined end.

One could argue that the greatest support for Fukuyama’s argument is the fact that, even if the globalized marriage of market capitalism and liberal democracy does not constitute an ideal social order in regard to humanity’s collective fulfillment, prosperity, peace, or happiness, it still seems to mark the decisive end to our development by way of outright domination. This is the subtext to the innocuous-sounding, jargony point that the particular “state of consciousness that permits the growth of liberalism seems to stabilize in the way one would expect at the end of history.” Translation: the neoliberal order will “stabilize” its own dominance by continually incentivizing, rewarding, and securing the dominance of those who believe that it truly is the culmination of human development. Their faith in the “end of history” is validated by the enduring fact of neoliberalism—the world itself stands as a monument to their historical vision.

And yet, every day, all around us, the very meaning of history is eroding and dissipating. On the barren shores at the end of history, even the victors wander like historical amnesiacs. From within the worldwide windowless enclosure of the neoliberal order, the circuits of historical memory are frying, history itself has begun to break apart, and the end of the end may be in sight.