Francis Fukuyama’s famous wager was not that events would stop, but that Western liberal democracy had emerged as the endpoint of humanity’s ideological evolution and the final form of human government. That thesis always carried a whiff of triumphalist fatigue: the Cold War had ended, the Soviet alternative had collapsed, and the managerial nation-state of the Atlantic world presented itself as history’s mature form. But the defeat of one monstrous rival never proved that no better political order remained to be discovered. It proved only that Marxist-Leninist dictatorship was a dead end