It's tough to blame him.  In its own way it seemed kind of inevitable.Francis Fukuyama was little known to the outside world in 1989, but his star was rising within the American State Department.  And his timing was perfect when he published The End of History and the Last Man six months prior to the Soviet Union's stunning collapse in real time.  His premise was that all the political alternatives to progressive liberalism were gone.  Fascism?  Lying in ruins after the Second World War.  Communism?  It was clearly falling under the weight of its own bureaucracy, economic mismanagement and military failure following its Afghanistan defeat.Liberalism now stood astride history as the ultimate form of governance and economy and seemed well on its way to becoming the default choice for organizing modern societies.  After all, hadn't the great liberal institutions shown their merit?  The free market, consumerism and representative democracy were flowing everywhere, seemingly unstoppable – not out of coercion but by an increasing acceptance by even former authoritarian governments, including dictatorships.  “Common marketization” of one of Fukuyama's buzz phrases and he had the sense that the world was reaching an historic equilibrium.Most experienced experts disagreed with Fukuyama's analysis, but it didn't matter: the book became a sensation and fed into an age of globalization and the importance of economies over everything else.Yet those experts had a point.  Human nature, in its many forms, cultures, prejudices and histories, would hardly be compliant towards Western thought and domination.I read the book with keen interest when it emerged but grew somewhat doubtful when Fukuyama concluded that with the end of history's quest, and with all its great problems largely overcome (including environmental disaster), that we might miss the “courage, imagination and idealism” that displayed themselves in previous times.  It all seemed somewhat manufactured, too idealistic, too uniform.Indeed, it was.  It was a great read and seemed to confirm the trend that the world was headed in the 1990s.  But, again, there was that problem of human nature.  Can systems themselves bring humanity together?  Fukuyama kept to the noble belief that we all share common interests and aspirations and in this he might well have been correct.  It is the method utilized to bring that global harmonization together that turned out to be the problem.  To systematize an economy by turning everyone into rampant consumers doesn't necessarily bode well if it's based on a mushrooming sense of greed over sustainability and induces social inequities as well.  To believe that providing everyone the right to vote will bring about anything other than competing visions, frequently led by misguided leaders, in nations that had never experienced such political freedoms previously, could be seen as naïve.An so it has turned out.  Three decades later we are witnessing capitalism running unfettered and democracy running out of room.  It turns out that human nature has many years to go before it can be at peace with itself, having tamed the worst of its instincts.Instead of reaching its destination, it appears as though we are encountering the bending of our history, heading in new directions, warping our politics and leaving us uncertain of humanity's future.  We had just assumed that other nations wanted what we had developed, but it turns they were angry for not acquiring it sooner, while we basked in our affluence and wealth.  Surely nations with more tribal instincts would see the sense of it and accept our liberalism as the best that could be developed.We never got there.  Instead, deep rooted enmities are flourishing and tribalism itself has found new momentum in countries like Canada, America, Britain, France and Germany – a development unimaginable to most in the 1990s.  The West and its financial and political institutions thought it had won and had accepted the expansions of democracy in nations previously ungovernable by anything other than force, when in reality humanity's great problems were hidden in a Trojan horse of what we thought was a sign of victory.It wasn't.  Those historic forces – hatred, anti-Semitism, protectionism, barbarism, political dystopia – were ready to sneak back into our Western life and commence their work of tearing us apart and led by leader dedicated to that purpose.Perhaps we went too fast, accelerating history in ways that would normally take centuries.  But age-old customs, animosities and power structures don't just wave the white flag; they adapt, regroup and emerge once more in ways we aren't prepared for.  And the worst of it is that we are part of that narrative.  Good jobs, a clean environment, manageable debt, a sense of belonging, the desire to grow in wisdom, not just wealth – these are increasingly lost in our Western world because we forgot to govern ourselves.History has bent, not finished, and we are bent out of shape as a result.  It will the very “courage, imagination and idealism” that Fukuyama feared we had left behind to begin the process of rebuilding.  We have yet to see that movement emerge in our public and private lives.Glen Pearson was a career professional firefighter and is a former Member of Parliament from southwestern Ontario.  He and his wife adopted three children from South Sudan and reside in London, Ontario.  He has been the co-director of the London Food Bank for 32 years.  He writes regularly for the London Free Press and also shares his views on a blog entitled “The Parallel Parliament“.   Follow him on twitter @GlenPearson.