Over the last couple of months, I've been reading Francis Fukuyama's two books on political order, The Origins of Political Order and Political Order and Political Decay. He wrote these books after his bombshell article on "The End of History?" in 1989 following the fall of the Soviet Union.

The point of "The End of History?" is that "liberal democracy" is the end point, the final destination of politics. And the two books on political order show how liberal democracy with its state, its rule of law, and its bureaucratic government programs, is the best of all possible worlds. And Fukuyama cannot imagine any other possible political regime in the future. Of course, Political Order and Political Decay was published in 2014:  before Trump, before woke, before all the frantic regime efforts to neuter Trump and his middle-class deplorables.

But now all the end-of-regime warning lights are flashing red: running out of money; demonizing the opposition; going pedal-to-the-metal on programs like climate change and systemic racism that keep the enthusiasm of regime loyalists at fever pitch but do nothing for the ordinary middle class.

Reading Fukuyama has been helpful to me because it helps me understand the mind of an elite believer in "liberal democracy." For him, a strong state, the rule of law, and the full range of government programs run by an efficient, educated bureaucracy is the best that humans can hope for: who could argue with that?

Obviously, nobody in the West would dare to argue: nice little job you got there…

But my whole life is dedicated to the proposition that Houston we have a problem, despite the fact that experts agree that a liberal democracy of, by, and for the experts is a Good Thing.

First of all, the strong state. I get, per Fukuyama, that the strong state won in the 1,800-year war in China that ended up in 221 BC with the Qin dynasty and the terra-cotta soldiers. But I fail to see how the strong states of Europe in 1914 were a Good Thing if they sent millions of their young men to die in the trenches for nothing.

Second, the rule of law. I believe that the Common Law is the best thing since sliced bread, disentangling the complexities of inheritances and bills of exchange for the benefit of humanity. But I doubt if using the Supreme Court to impose the moral conceits of the educated class on the peasants is a Good Thing.

Third, the bureaucracy. Maybe back in 2014 Fukuyama could convince himself that an educated bureaucracy was a Good Thing. But I think that by 2023 we can say that bureaucracy is a nightmare. It turned the nation upside down with COVID -- for what? -- and would brook no dissent to its expert-agreed "science." And now the Biden administration is weaponizing the bureaucracy to impose a climate and race agenda on an America that would rather not. This is the best we can imagine?

Perhaps the best way to look at things is not by proposing answers, but asking questions.

First of all, the state. If Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt is right and there is no politics without an enemy, then it would seem that we would want to minimize the scope of politics and thus the number of enemies. But how? Ambitious men will always compete to lead nations and pose as the savior of the people, and people -- as evidenced by COVID -- seem to be very easily persuaded to go along.

Second, the rule of law. In Bleak House Dickens made fun of the instinct of lawyers to pursue legal remedy until the clients ran out of money. Our liberal friends were all in favor of the courts legislating from the bench until a conservative Supreme Court started legislating against them. So how do we keep a legal system safe, inexpensive, and rare?

Third, bureaucracy. Obviously, contra the 19^th-century Progressives, a professional bureaucracy ends up just as corrupt as the old spoils system. And powerful actors get to place their operatives in the bureaucracy to advance their agenda, rather than the general interest. We know that science, per George Stigler, has taught us about "regulatory capture," but what could replace the great bureaucratic leviathans like government pensions, healthcare, welfare, and education? How would we even get started?

And the other questions. What is the current gender madness telling us, a world in which common-or-garden variety feminists are stigmatized as Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists? And what is the ramping up of the race issue, six decades after the Civil Rights era, telling us?

I think that all these questions are telling us that our ruling class has failed to transform society into a sunny green upland as guaranteed by its secular political faith, and now it really doesn't know what to do, other than send the Spanish Inquisition after the heretics and haters.

But what do "we" do about it?

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.