If at first you're proven a liar, keep lying until people start believing the lie

A good example of why Francis Fukuyama should be regarded as nothing more than a crackpot political scientist, from his essay reviewing the centennial of Max Weber's treatise on the Protestant work ethic:

One might even take a broader view of what constitutes religion and charismatic authority. The past century was marked by what the German theorist Carl Schmitt labeled ''political-theological'' movements, like Nazism and Marxism-Leninism, that were based on passionate commitments to ultimately irrational beliefs. Marxism claimed to be scientific, but its real-world adherents followed leaders like Lenin, Stalin or Mao with the kind of blind commitment to authority that is psychologically indistinguishable from religious passion. (During the Cultural Revolution in China, a person had to be careful about what he did with old newspapers; if a paper contained a picture of Mao and one sat on the holy image or used the newspaper to wrap a fish, one was in danger of being named a counterrevolutionary.)

Notice how he glosses over Nazism and the German Protestant authoritarian traditions that helped give rise to it.

Notice also how in one breath he contends the adherents of Marxism followed leaders with "blind commitment to authority" and in the very next sentence contradicts himself by pointing to the kinds of coercion that commanded such obedience.

What, then, would you expect from someone who, following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, wrote a triumphalist work proclaiming the victory of liberal democracy and market capitalism as "the end of history"?

Naturally, when he gave a talk last year titled "The End of History 15 Years Later," he didn't update his thesis to, you know, take into account all the history that has happened in the intervening 15 years that suggests Fukuyama is far from the mark.