The end of Francis Fukuyama.

Years ago, I had a great idea for a book. It was going to be called The End of Francis Fukuyama. The meat of the book would be a self-consciously dry deconstruction of the professor's anthemic neo-liberal rant about the end of history and the final triumph of Western political values. There would be action in the book as well, where I?the advanced product of American liberal democracy?would first stalk the professor up and down the DC suburbs, i.e. sit in wait in an idling car outside faculty conferences at his Johns Hopkins office, occupy the adjoining hotel room in his Asian academic junkets, etc. Then, finally, I would march right into his house and actually kill him. The End of Francis Fukuyama.

The book would contain just one picture, a full-color deal facing the last page, showing me eating Cheerios out of his skull.

Ultimately I backed off the idea in fright. I was living in Russia at the time, and the obvious Dostoyevskian angles of the idea made me feel uncomfortable even joking about it. The possibility that the book would end up having a long second section detailing my prison conversion by Chuck Colson instantly soured even the briefest daydream. As penance I ended up dropping Fukuyama entirely and writing a failed script for a sitcom pilot called They're Revolting!, about a group of stinky anti-globalization revolutionaries who engage in hilarious hijinks as they concoct boneheaded plans for revolution from a studio made up to look like a Vermont commune.

Not long ago, I started thinking a lot about Fukuyama again?even before he resurfaced last week with an ominous new theory of neo-imperialism that, if History is any guide, will be legitimized in the mainstream sooner or later.

It has been 14 years, almost to the day, since Fukuyama?a former Reagan advisor and an influence on Paul Wolfowitz?published, to great fanfare, an article entitled "The End of History?" in the summer issue of The National Interest. The essay was a labyrinthine piece of theory that recalled Marx, Hegel, and Reaganite foreign policy simultaneously, and was joyously misinterpreted by people on all sides.

I was 19 and stoned when it came out and wouldn't have been capable of reading the first sentence. The basic premise, though, was fairly easy to understand: Mankind at the end of the Cold War had ascended to the mountaintop and completed his ideological evolution, with Western liberal democracy the victor. Our system was the "final form of human government." Fukuyama was careful to point out that this didn't mean that the world would be free of disaster, tumult or social problems, only that no higher form of government would supercede our own.

The philosopher was so sure about all of this that he was actually a little sad about history having ended, noting that "in the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history."

The problem I had with Fukuyama, when I grew old enough to read his book, wasn't that he was completely full of shit, which he is. It was that he was also right. Whether he was articulating something that was already brewing in the minds of most Americans, or whether he actually helped the process along with his asinine theory, we now live in a world that acts exactly like the world Fukuyama describes.

People around the world who are bewildered by the dumb confidence Americans have in their system as the be-all, end-all of human existence would find the answers to their questions in The End of History: a blueprint for a society that can safely stop trying to better itself.

That was my initial reaction to Fukuyama. Then, a few weeks ago, I thought about him again, while attempting to determine the reason why I wanted to pack all of the Democratic presidential candidates into a missile and shoot them into space.

What I ultimately came up with was this: Here we are, in a world that is completely and utterly insane?where giant fast-food companies spend fortunes researching the responses of three- and four-year-olds in order to exploit them, where billions of dollars are pissed away every day on shitty movies like Finding Nemo while schools are going down to the four-day week, and where the average New Yorker sees three or four thousand ads a day, most of which tell him he's fat and impotent and a Nissan is a better buy than his wife?and these candidates are up there tinkering, talking about a balanced budget and repealing tax cuts. There isn't a guy among them who even hints at anything like horror before our fatuous, commercial lives.

The Democrats, just like the vapid artists that Fukuyama correctly predicted would dominate our lives, don't want to be anything other than better caretakers for that museum of human history. They don't try to imagine a fundamentally better world, because they actually believe that there isn't one. They're buffoons straight out of Voltaire, running on a platform of "Our mild improvements to this best of all possible worlds."

Then last week Fukuyama published an article in various foreign newspapers (including The Korea Herald) entitled "America's Unwilling Imperialism." In it, he argues that the "activist thrust" of George Bush's foreign policy?which he sees as rooted in a desire to remake various Middle Eastern societies along Western democratic lines?is undermined by a failure to act with sufficient imperialist will. When Bush talks about staying in Iraq only as long as necessary and "not a day more," in other words, he's fatally limiting his options.

"This failure to be a committed imperialist power," he writes, "has already undermined its early efforts at nation building in Iraq, and threatens to stymie the whole activist thrust of recent U.S. foreign policy."

Fukuyama has always been troubled by those backward non-Western nations which he felt were "mired in history." Clearly with the arrival of Bush (and Condoleezza Rice, an old friend of his) he sees the opportunity to rectify their plight by force. If we work fast enough, we might in our lifetime experience the nirvana of a whole world sitting contentedly in a pool of blood at the finish line of history.