COMM 337, 386: Fukuyama article / READING ASSIGNMENT

Here's a link to an article in this week's Newsweek by Francis Fukuyama titled "The Fall of America, Inc." I don't know exactly what we're going to do with it, but we're going to do something. It's by far the most informative single thing I've read about this month's financial crisis, and it fits in what we're doing in both classes. First, the link:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/162401/

As you read it, you'll see it doesn't lend itself to an easy paraphrase.

So instead of trying, I'll just say a little bit about Fukuyama. He's a political philosopher and economist, who teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. About the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 he wrote a book called "The End of History." In it he said "What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such ... That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

Fukuyama's view was very controversial, but it set the agenda for much of the economic and political culture of the 1990s. He was considered a neo-conservative and supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but soon broke with President Bush and by 2006 compared the neo-cons with Marxist-Leninists. "Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support," he said in an influential New York Times op-ed piece.

In the economic realm, Fukuyama saw globalization and free-market capitalism as triumphing over other economic systems in much the same way he saw liberal democracies ushering in an end of history.

In this week's Newsweek article, he questions that. And he offers an alternate theory of what's been happening with the global economy in recent decades.

I will hand out photocopies of the article tomorrow (Wednesday), and assign you to read it over the weekend. (This will give you something to read Friday when we don't have class.) We'll discuss it in class Monday, relating it to the developing crisis in world financial markets.

You'll notice I'm assigning it in both COMM 337 (advanced writing) and COMM 386 (media and government). A couple of things to think about as you read it.

If you're reading the article for COMM 337, evaluate it as an example of an extended opinion piece or persuasive writing. You'll notice right away he cites a lot of facts, but he doesn't pick up the phone, talk to people and quote them the way a journalist would. He's arguing a point. Be ready to discuss that point in class.

If you're reading it for COMM 386, think of it as Newsweek's attempt to run a prominent story explaining the credit crisis and giving the viewpoint of one of the nation's top economic experts on it.

If you're reading it for both classes, why not read it twice? I'm a big believer in reading stuff more than once, anyway.

In COMM 337, this reading assignment supersedes the first analytical paper I assigned to be due next week. I think that with the importance of what's happening in the markets now, we can afford to get away from the syllabus for a while. I think it's that important, and we still have plenty of time to get caught up.