Where, After All, Will History Come to the End?（历史究竟会在哪里终结？）
— A Review of Identity Progressivism and Its Limits （《身份进步主义及其局限》）
By Ma Siwei（马四维）
On June 17, during a public conversation at the Bushnell Theater in Hartford, Connecticut, former President Barack Obama (巴拉克·奥巴马) warned that the United States is “dangerously close to normalizing behavior characteristic of authoritarian regimes,” likening this democratic backsliding to the reversals seen in Hungary and other nations. He cautioned that “what is happening right now does not square with our idea of American democracy; it looks far more like an autocracy.” Obama excoriated the “lies” and conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 presidential election, underscoring that “only one person won the election in 2020—and it’s not the one who keeps complaining. That is a fact.” He rebuked members of the Republican Party who knowingly perpetuate those falsehoods, calling their conduct “dangerous,” because “when public life loses a consensus on basic facts, democratic institutions become perilously fragile.” Although Obama never uttered the name Donald Trump (唐纳德·特朗普), the thrust of his remarks was unmistakably directed at the sitting president. In essence, Obama argued that the president and his supporters—by denying electoral reality, corroding institutional norms, and personalizing power—have left the federal government’s commitment to liberal democracy “increasingly thin,” pushing the country toward an authoritarian precipice that urgently requires resistance from every sector of society.
Thirty years ago, Francis Fukuyama （弗朗西斯·福山） announced in The End of History （《历史的终结》） that liberal democracy would be mankind’s political terminus. The claim now reads like mordant irony. “History” did not pause at the period of constitutional democracy; it doubled back along the jagged exclamation points of authoritarianism. In recent years Fukuyama himself has conceded that nationalism, identity politics, and power-hungry strongmen are remolding the global order—even dragging the United States into institutional decline. Nowhere is this spiral clearer than in the twin power centers of Beijing and Washington, where citizens confront what wags call “the Sole Sovereign” and “the MAGA Monarch”: Xi Jinping （习近平）, whose personal rule tightened after the Twentieth Party Congress, and Donald Trump, returning to the White House in 2025 vowing to “remake” the federal government.
The Party Congress not only opened a third term for Xi; it proclaimed a wholesale “re-possession” of state, society, and ideology. From charter amendments and leadership purges to a work report that fused Marxism-Leninism with national rejuvenation, the narrative curled back to the crossroads of revolutionary rhetoric and leader worship. Under an all-encompassing “holistic view of security,” individual rights, civic self-organization, and local resilience are swallowed by the rubric of “national security,” leaving checks and balances to fade.
Across the Atlantic, Washington is nursing its own auto-immune disorder. Project 2025 （2025计划）, steered by Trump’s allies, would vastly enlarge presidential command. One executive order could resurrect the “Schedule F” classification, demoting tens of thousands of civil servants to at-will status in the name of loyalty. Coupled with long-cultivated judicial and electoral-college advantages, America’s tripartite system is showing fissures—embryos of a home-grown personalist regime.
Macro data from think tanks corroborate the convergence. V-Dem’s 2025 report counts eighty-eight nations styling themselves democracies, against ninety-one labeling—or being labeled—authoritarian; nearly three-quarters of humanity now lives under some form of despotism, and, for the first time, the United States appears on V-Dem’s “democratic backsliding” watch list. Freedom House likewise notes that elected leaders worldwide are extending terms, kneecapping courts, and muzzling the press—symptoms of a broad democratic recession. In short, a beleaguered “republicanism” is sparring with an ascendant “imperial impulse.”
Identity Progressivism and Its Limits offers a microscopic lens on this tide. In the age of social media, identity progressivism recasts public debate through a “weak versus strong” binary and an outsourced morality. It promises empowerment yet often devolves into moral tribunals and digital mobbing, slicing society into opposing blocs before wielding absolutist “red lines” to cancel dissent. The logic rhymes with authoritarian politics: once identity becomes a voucher for righteous violence, individual agency and universal reason are squeezed from the square, collective passions become fuel for mobilization, and genuine questions of class, institutions, and liberty drown in moral clamor. The author shrewdly observes that the cultural hegemony of identity progressivism is isomorphic with the nationalism of great-power narratives; both mask power with moral hauteur, sapping the liberal reliance on public reason and personal responsibility. As this drift spreads across left and right, the compromises, procedures, and mutual recognition that sustain a republic wither.
Seen thus, neither Beijing’s “Sole Sovereign” nor Washington’s “MAGA Monarch” is a freakish outlier. They are crystallizations of a post-Cold-War political ecology buffeted by technological acceleration, fragmented information, and social stratification. Traditional parties can no longer absorb anxiety, authoritative discourse cannot forge consensus, and so personalized leadership and emotive identity politics rush to fill the void. The Chinese path compresses social space with state capitalism and nationalism; the American path unravels separation of powers through identity fissures and procedural loopholes. Both translate “dispute” into a moral binary of loyalty or betrayal.
Will history truly end here? If “ending” means relinquishing the common-sense premises of constitutional democracy and embracing a jungle ethic of “rule by the strong, submission by the weak,” the world is sliding toward a low-entropy, high-pressure track. Yet the book’s author, after skewering identity progressivism, still calls for liberalism to engage with organized forces such as religion and feminism—evidence that institutional self-rescue depends on renewing the cultural soil of public virtue and pluralist negotiation. For China, that entails reviving rule-of-law constraints and local autonomy; for the United States, re-anchoring the principle of checks and balances and restraining executive seepage into legislative and judicial domains; for the globe, a transnational democratic alliance must practice mutual defense of values and mechanisms rather than relapse into nationalist isolation.
“History” confers no terminus unearned; endings are usually self-inflicted. Should citizens surrender reason and entrust security, prosperity, and morality wholesale to a single leader or identity, the finale will arrive quietly. Should society retain the capacity to scrutinize power, honor procedure, and tolerate dissent, the finale will remain a mere interlude, not destiny’s last chapter. Where, after all, will history end? The answer may hinge on our ability, amid tightening power and splintering identities, to rediscover that liberal river—slow, perhaps, but never lost.
(Identity Progressivism and Its Limits, Boden House, June 2025)