I thought that headline might grab your attention.

Francis Fukuyama, in an interview with Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, said something that reminded me of an idea that I was pondering about a year ago but never followed up on.

RFE/RL: Professor Fukuyama, some of your critics say that your ideas about the primacy of liberal democracy created a climate suitable for the self-assured behavior of the U.S. government in world affairs. Do you feel responsible to any extent for this?

Fukuyama: Well, no. I think that the Bush administration, to the extent that they thought they were using my ideas, really misunderstood them…. They were really Leninists because they believe that they would use power to advance democracy. And I have always been more of a Marxist, in the sense that I believe that democracy comes about as a result of a long-term process of modernization that’s driven by forces within each society but that you can’t speed up that process from the outside. And so to the extent that they thought that ‘s what I was arguing, I think they misunderstood what I was saying.

The question may sound strange — most of the people who visit this website veer to the right. We hate communism and everything that it stands for. The word makes most of us shudder. You’d think Marx and Lenin would be nowhere near earshot, but in fact the opposite is true. Many members of the Bush administration — the so-called neo-cons — are former Marxists turned right; people such as Condoleezza Rice who are spearheading the democratization agenda. The reason is because Marxist and Leninist theory lays the groundwork for today’s theories regarding democratic revolution and transition.

Fukuyama’s writings about liberal democracy, premature as they were given today’s rise of alternative ideologies, are deeply rooted in Marxism. “The End of History,” as one of his most famous works is known, was not intended to mean a literal end of major events and clashes. What he meant, in the more Marxist sense, was that the world was progressing from tribal-fuedal-authoritarian societies and was ultimately settling on liberal democracy. Such an occurrence was actually predicted by Marx and was the supposed prelude to communism.

The social conflict that creates liberal democracy comes when various aspects of civil society, from trade unions to the middle class to the news media, are able to team up with the masses against the entrenched authoritarian elite, creating a new system on which to base their society.

The difference in the Marxist and Leninist beliefs is that Marx believed that the progress of “history” is a natural and inevitable occurrence. It cannot be rushed. What Lenin made obvious, however, is that he believed the opposite. Power could be projected in order to accelerate the path to communism internationally. The problem with this approach is that it left Russia with another hyper-powerful nanny state; the exact opposite of what communism is supposed to be. Spreading democracy through active power may not be the right solution then, but how can we explain Japan, Germany, and South Korea? The same natural powers that move history over time are perhaps actually the same the Lenin speaks of, only progress is a side effect of their own self-interest.

The key then to this question of democracy-spreading is whether you believe that liberal democracy must be homegrown over time without any foreign influence, or if democracy can indeed be “imposed” — as was the case with Japan/Germany — or even simply promoted through strong foreign policy. The question of communism is really mute. If you are for the former, you’re thinking in terms of Marxism, and if the latter, maybe you’re a Leninist.

I’ve always been a little mix of the two. I think democracy is a natural end-result of development and modernization. I used many of the factors theorized by Marx in my prediction of Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution several days before Karami’s government resigned. I use them in analyzing the potential for revolution in other countries as well, such as Azerbaijan and Belarus. Yet I also believe that democracy can of course be spread through influence. Capitalism and political openness are entering the former Soviet Union and even some countries of the Middle East. Kuwaiti women have the right to vote and Gulf states are actually holding elections. Much of this is because of U.S. foreign policy pushing for such measures, convincing these governments that democracy is an inevitability and that they must get with the program.

It might sound strange for us to think of democratization in terms of Marxism, a strain of thought that we actually use very often but is usually taken to the extreme for the purposes of domination and oppression. But in terms of democracy and foreign policy, hypothetically, would you consider yourself a Marxist or a Leninist? Or something else?