0:00

I'm Dan Kurtzvallen, and this is

0:02

the Foreign Affairs interview. What

0:06

a lot of people that

0:08

supported Harris were surprised by

0:10

was the power of economic

0:13

discontents to overwhelm anything like

0:15

support for global democracy. Donald

0:18

Trump's victory comes at a moment

0:20

of turbulence for global democracy. It's been

0:23

a year of almost universal backlash against

0:25

incumbent leaders by voters apparently eager

0:27

to express their anger with the status

0:29

quo, and also an era

0:31

when liberalism has been in retreat, if not

0:33

in crisis. Francis Fukuyama,

0:36

a political scientist now at Stanford

0:38

University, has done as much as

0:40

anyone to elucidate the currents shaping

0:43

and reshaping global politics. He

0:45

published The End of History more than three

0:47

decades ago, and in the years

0:49

since, he has written a series of

0:52

influential essays for foreign affairs and other

0:54

publications. I wanted to

0:56

speak to Fukuyama to understand what Trump's

0:58

return to the presidency might mean for

1:00

liberal democracy, and whether its future

1:02

in the United States and around the world is

1:04

truly at stake. Frank,

1:13

thanks so much for joining me as we start

1:15

to attempt to make sense of what Donald Trump's

1:17

return to the presidency means for global

1:19

democracy and also for America's role in the world

1:22

going forward. Well, that's

1:24

a big question that we're going to be thinking

1:27

about a lot in the next few weeks.

1:30

That's right. So let me start by going back to a

1:32

piece you wrote in Foreign Affairs a

1:34

few months ago called The Year of Elections Has

1:36

Been Good for Democracy. You were taking stock of

1:39

the first part of a year in which something

1:41

like half the global population was voting for new

1:43

leadership, and that was from the UK

1:46

and France to India and Indonesia and

1:48

Mexico and many others. You noted in

1:51

that piece that, quote, fears

1:53

that this year would reflect the global triumph

1:55

of a liberal populism have so far been

1:57

proved wrong. But you did note that the

1:59

big. populations

4:00

through elections, hopefully

4:02

free and fair elections, the liberal part

4:05

has to do with constraints on the

4:07

power of the state imposed

4:09

by checks and balances and a

4:11

constitution and fundamentally by a rule

4:13

of law that limits what

4:16

the state can do to its own citizens

4:18

as it tries to exercise power. And

4:21

in the case of these populists, the

4:24

real threat is not to democracy

4:26

because, you know, they are

4:28

for the most part legitimately elected, you

4:30

know, Erdogan in Turkey, Modi in India,

4:32

Donald Trump in the United States. What

4:35

they threaten in the first instance is much more

4:38

the liberal part of liberal democracy, that is to

4:40

say the rule of law. And

4:42

so they want to skirt the

4:44

kinds of checks that exist on

4:46

their power by packing courts,

4:49

by intimidating journalists, by trying

4:51

to revamp the bureaucracy so

4:54

that it will carry

4:56

out their wishes more fully. And

4:59

I think that this is something that

5:01

is true in every one of these

5:03

cases where an illiberal populist has been

5:05

elected. And I expect that's going

5:07

to happen in the United States. Now, does that

5:09

mean in this country that it's

5:12

the end of liberal democracy? I

5:14

rather doubt it. You know,

5:16

there's this big discussion of fascism

5:19

in the last couple of weeks

5:21

of the election campaign. And I

5:23

think that that was

5:25

the wrong framing for what we

5:27

should fear and expect, because you

5:30

weren't going to get a march

5:32

on Rome or brown-shirted people saluting

5:34

Donald Trump. What

5:36

I think it would look like is much

5:38

more like what happened in Hungary since Viktor

5:41

Orban came back to power in 2011, which

5:44

is a gradual erosion

5:46

of the liberal institutions in

5:49

Hungary as he put more

5:51

and more of them under his control. Now,

5:54

the United States is not Hungary.

5:56

It's a much bigger, more complex

5:58

society with many more checks. a

10:00

piece that you wrote in 2020 in foreign affairs called

10:02

The Pandemic and Political Order. That's

10:05

very dangerous. Reading my

10:07

old stuff is really dangerous. But this one I think

10:09

you're going to be happy to hear because you, this

10:11

was of course very early in the

10:13

process of grappling with what the pandemic would mean. We were right

10:15

in the middle of that first phase of it. You

10:18

did note that, and I'm quoting

10:20

you here, future historians will trace comparably

10:22

large effects to the current pandemic,

10:24

the challenges figuring them out ahead of time. But

10:26

you note that some of them were likely to

10:28

be the proliferation of conspiracy theories, the turn

10:31

against establishments. How much

10:33

of that is driving this global anger

10:35

at incumbents and turning against incumbents globally? Yeah,

10:38

I think that's huge. We

10:40

didn't realize it, I think, at the time as

10:43

we were living through the end of the pandemic,

10:46

but it had a big effect

10:48

in discrediting existing governments. And

10:51

a lot of that discrediting was unfair because a

10:53

lot of them were trying to do their best,

10:55

but the measures and the

10:57

way it affected ordinary people were really

10:59

quite large. I mean, shutting an entire

11:01

society down for months at a time,

11:03

in a way it's kind

11:06

of amazing if that doesn't have a big

11:08

effect. And I think that in

11:10

terms of the specific Trumpian

11:12

narrative about the government

11:14

being untrustworthy was

11:17

vastly reinforced by the pandemic. And

11:19

it reflected some real policy,

11:21

I would say, not malign

11:24

intentions, but mistakes. So

11:26

for example, in a lot of blue states in the

11:28

United States, and in other

11:31

countries abroad, they closed schools for too

11:33

long. That was oftentimes a result of

11:35

political pressure from teachers unions and this

11:37

sort of thing, but it really convinced

11:39

a lot of people that the

11:42

government was more attentive to

11:44

these interest groups than they were to

11:46

the welfare of children in

11:48

general. I just think

11:50

it made people very grouchy. On

11:53

the Democratic Party side, I

11:56

think the lockdown really accentuated

11:58

the... Big

12:00

progressive reaction after the killing of george

12:02

floyd in mid twenty twenty and all

12:04

of a sudden you know all of

12:06

this could come out in. A

12:09

lot of demonstrations violence and that

12:11

in turn sparks this big reaction.

12:14

On the right where people say also

12:16

that's what the democrats are really about

12:18

what's trashing city centers and that sort

12:20

of thing so i just think that

12:22

we're living with you know these consequences

12:24

and it's going to be very hard

12:26

to restore. Any basic

12:28

faith and trust in the

12:31

ordinary operations of government after

12:33

that experience. I

12:35

want to go back to one other thing you wrote this

12:37

one was before i think donald trump was even a prominent

12:40

figure on the scene at least on the political

12:42

scene and that's the book you did on political

12:44

order and political decay i think about

12:46

a decade ago this was published and you

12:48

know you know the inability of institutions to

12:51

adapt to changes and changes that are in

12:53

some cases accelerating. We would have

12:55

thought i think that that trump would have been

12:57

the kind of shock that would force

13:00

institutions to change and adapt it

13:02

seems like that that did not happen that did

13:04

not happen under trump it did not happen as

13:07

much as you would want in the by the administration

13:10

does that tell you that the system is so

13:12

kind of squirrata can fix that there's little

13:14

hope of real adaptation. How

13:16

do you kind of account for that status

13:19

and what would change it well look it's

13:21

not just trump i mean we've had two

13:23

other really big exogenous shocks so the first

13:25

was the financial crisis in two thousand eight

13:28

and the second was the pandemic. And

13:30

both of these are big things that

13:32

affect everybody in the society there

13:35

are the sorts of events that should trigger. You

13:38

know in the first place national unity and

13:40

then hopefully lead to a

13:42

consensus that there are structural things wrong

13:44

that need to be fixed

13:46

and instead. Every single one

13:48

of them deep in the existing polarization

13:51

and made it less likely that

13:53

we would actually confront some of these

13:55

problems because we can't agree

13:57

on the solutions and that we can just

13:59

over. We

26:00

talked about this at the time of the iraq

26:02

war in two thousand three but right

26:05

now russia china north korea and

26:07

iran are cooperating militarily

26:09

and at the same point are

26:11

alliances are fraying there's a question

26:13

about whether trump really wants to

26:16

support european countries that

26:19

he claims are paying their

26:21

dues and then in the far east

26:23

you've got the situation where both korea

26:25

and japan. Have in

26:27

a way leadership crises where they have

26:30

weak leaders of japan in particular

26:32

right now you know the ruling

26:34

party lost its majority and the

26:37

current prime minister although he was

26:39

recently reconfirmed he's not an abe

26:41

type that projects a lot of

26:43

self confidence. So i

26:45

think there's things to worry about

26:48

in terms of you know you

26:50

don't have to risk an all out assault on

26:52

taiwan you can have a naval blockade you can

26:54

step up economic pressure there's a lot of

26:57

things that china could do and they may

26:59

well be tempted to push on

27:01

that in the near term. You

27:03

wrote in two thousand twelve in foreign affairs

27:05

that the single most serious challenge of the

27:07

world today comes from china which

27:10

is combined authoritarian government with a

27:12

partially marketized economy. That

27:14

model doesn't look as good right now

27:18

that's not to say that we should kind of

27:20

declare the end of that system but it doesn't

27:22

look like it's delivering results in the way that

27:24

it did in two thousand twelve do you think

27:26

that will have a significant effect on these dynamics

27:29

given what she is continuing with economically

27:31

and every other way. Well

27:34

it could have an effect that we don't know what

27:37

the sign is whether it's positive or

27:39

negative if they really are going into

27:41

a period of prolonged stagnation that means

27:43

that. They have fewer resources

27:45

to use to build their military

27:47

they have to worry about

27:49

public opinion being really unhappy at declining

27:52

incomes and that sort of thing on

27:54

the other hand it may stimulate them to

27:56

act now because you know they may figure

27:58

that in ten years.