From an interview of Francis Fukyama by Evan Goldstein:
Q. You have an unusual background for a political scientist. You majored in classics at Cornell, then did graduate work in comparative literature at Yale, where you studied with Paul de Man. Later you spent time in Paris sitting in on classes with Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. Any memories from this journey through deconstruction?
A. I decided it was total bullshit. They were espousing a kind of Nietzschean relativism that said there is no truth, there is no argument that’s superior to any other argument. Yet most of them were committed to a basically Marxist agenda. That seemed completely contradictory. If you really are a moral relativist, there is no reason why you shouldn’t affirm National Socialism or the racial superiority of Europeans, because nothing is more true than anything else. I thought it was a bankrupt way of proceeding and decided to shift gears and go into political science.
(Thanks to Howard Dickman for the link.)
Fukuyama’s bullshit is as useless as that which he has identified elsewhere. Identity politics does not stem from our need for recognition, but from overregulation preventing individual achievement. The only recognition we need is a few friends and coworkers with whom we can share values, understanding, and feedback. Regulations restrict individual pursuits in education, services, and production – stifling personal advancement. Stagnation is then blamed on the oppression of some arbitrarily imagined groups by other arbitrarily imagined groups. Collectivist thinking, such as cultural relativism, emerges to justify cultural, racial, gender, etc. behavior and regulations. Political authority creates identity politics by firsts stagnating individual opportunities and then creating special subsidies and privileges. The solution, as always, is negative individual rights and free markets. Then history has no end. The end certainly will not be today’s “liberal democracy,” which will likely collapse into fascism as things are going.