¿Han terminado las ideologías? De Bell a Fukuyama — El auge y la caída de una tesis de consenso

The 49W channel's episode titled 'Ideologlar Bitti Mi?' (Are Ideologies Over?) starts from Turkish domestic politics to pose an abstract but intensely practical question: have the grand narratives that shaped political life for a century — liberalism, socialism, conservatism, nationalism — truly died, or merely changed form? The channel, known from earlier series such as 'Did Russia Fall?' and the 'History of Ideologies in Turkey', adopts its familiar style: take a current debate and uncover the historical strata beneath it. The program's frame is clear: when has the thesis of ideology's end been voiced, under what conditions has it collapsed, and how should today's fractured polity approach the question?

The discussion launches from a familiar intuition: the modern electorate no longer buys the grand narratives. Party labels persist but their representational meaning has weakened. The program stresses that this sentiment is not uniquely Turkish but has become a global trend. At this point the historical backdrop enters, because the 'end of ideology' thesis actually reaches back to the height of the Cold War and has been falsified time and again, only to resurrect itself.

The first wave appeared in the 1950s and 60s in the United States and Western Europe. Daniel Bell's 1960 book 'The End of Ideology' became the manifesto of this debate. Bell argued that the grand humanist ideologies bequeathed by the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were exhausted; thanks to the welfare state and negotiated interest groups, revolutionary movements aiming to overthrow liberal democracy could no longer recruit the working class. Bell's own formulation was ironic: socialist in economics, liberal in politics, conservative

in culture. As noted in the relevant Wikipedia entry, this thesis carried the claim that 'the future political system would be governed by piecemeal technological adjustments to the extant system'. Seymour Martin Lipset in the same period wrote that 'the fundamental political problems of the industrial revolution have been solved': workers had attained industrial and political citizenship, conservatives had accepted the welfare state, and the democratic left recognised that growth in state power brought more dangers to freedom than solutions for economic problems.

The backdrop to this thesis was 1950s American triumphalism: the Soviet model had not yet collapsed, but Western economic growth and welfare security were undermining the soil in which revolutionary demands took root. Yet the thesis barely saw print before it was knocked down. The 1968 movements, Vietnam opposition, civil rights struggle, and feminist and environmental activism turned the world in which the 'end' had just been declared into a political firestorm. Retrospectives from the 1990s onward judge this first wave as the youthful sins of history, visited upon the thesis.

The second and far more famous wave arrived in 1989. As the Berlin Wall fell, Francis Fukuyama published his essay 'The End of History?' in The National Interest. Fukuyama's argument was simple: ideological evolution had reached its endpoint, liberal democracy had emerged as humanity's final form of government. Conflict would not cease, but no genuine alternative to liberal democracy remained. This thesis drew strength from Alexandre Kojève's reading of Hegel: humanity had found a system that satisfied not only material wants but also the desire for recognition.

Fukuyama's thesis enjoyed near-official-ideology status throughout the 1990s in the West. 'Third Way' politics was its product: Tony Blair's New Labour, Bill Clinton's Democratic Leadership Council, and Anthony Giddens's 'third way' theory proclaimed that left and right had no unbridgeable gulf, that the real issue was now efficient governance. Theoretically, as summarised in the Wikipedia entry on 'Post-Politics', the expected outcome was consensus, technocratic expertise, and the relegation of politics to administration: social questions would become technical matters, major political conflict would fade into the background.

Yet this thesis, too, proved to have a short shelf life. The 9/11 attacks brought radical Islam onto the stage, the 2008 global financial crisis undermined the economic soil that had nourished liberal consensus, and from the 2010s onward populist right surged in Europe and the United States. By 2025 the V-Dem Institute's annual report delivered this datum: of the 179 countries scored, 92 are authoritarian and only 87 are democratic, with 74% of the world population living under authoritarian rule. Liberal democracy has fallen to 29 countries and, for the first time in history, is the least common regime type. The Economist Intelligence Unit's 2025 Democracy Index, while announcing that 'the eight-year decline has stabilised', still demoted the United States to 34th place and into the 'flawed democracy' category — a fact the index itself did not celebrate.

So were ideologies truly over? Academic literature has been converging on an answer: no, they merely changed form. Political scientist Cas Mudde's 2004 definition, revisited in CEU's Review of Democracy, holds that populism is a 'thin-centred ideology' that frames politics as a Manichean struggle between 'the pure people' and 'the corrupt elite'. In other words, populism is not ideological emptiness but another ideology type: one that does not require professional theory, tells a moral story, and reads institutional checks and balances as anti-popular oligarchic devices to be swept aside. The 2024 European Parliament election results of populist right parties fit this typology: radical right, eroding centre norms from within, yet retaining democratic procedure — a 'strategic democracy' build.

The End of Ideology Thesis and Its Roots

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