The fact that so many American historians still believe in Fukuyama's "end of history" nonsense is beyond me.

Do they? Not even Fukuyama himself believes in his old thesis anymore. Reading some of Fukuyama's more recent work when I was 17, especially his Origins of Political Order, was actually my entry into alternative views on politics and sociology. For example, it was from Fukuyama that I was first exposed, as a teenager, to the idea that liberal individualism is fake and gay and that all early modern Western theorists including Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau were fundamentally wrong.