Francis Fukuyama on Trump, the End of History, and Changing His Mind

Francis Fukuyama is accustomed to being misquoted by history — and occasionally, it seems, by Star Trek. In his new memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man, the 73-year-old political scientist revisits the thesis that made him internationally famous and, by his own account, became something of a millstone: the argument, first set out in a 15-page essay published in the National Interest in the summer of 1989, that liberal democracy represented the endpoint of mankind's ideological development. The book, he tells the Guardian, was written partly to set the record straight — "to finally get down in a very clear way what I was intending and the ways I was wrong, and the ways I believe I'm still right".

The source of the confusion, as Fukuyama sees it, is a 37-year-old misunderstanding. The phrase "end of history", borrowed from the philosopher Alexandre Kojève's reading of Hegel, was taken to mean that all conflict was over, liberal democracy had triumphed everywhere, and the world was about to be remade in the American image. That, he insists, was not the argument. What he was actually proposing was that no better guiding principle than liberal democracy had yet emerged — not that it had been fully achieved, nor that events had ceased. He notes that even the final paragraph of the original essay declared, presciently, that "the end of history will be a very sad time", foreseeing a world of material comfort but diminished struggle, populated by what Nietzsche called the "Last Man".

That concept remains the memoir's animating idea. Drawing on Socrates' notion of thymos — the part of the soul that craves recognition and esteem — Fukuyama argues that liberal societies, however adept at delivering stability and relative prosperity, leave a profound hunger unmet. The mass of people attending Donald Trump's rallies, he says, "feel that the liberal elites have not been respecting them", and Trump's political ascent is partly explained by his instinctive recognition of that grievance. "He doesn't use big words. He tells stupid stories that they think are very funny, and educated people are appalled by," Fukuyama observes.

On Trump's deeper psychology — and specifically his longstanding attraction to authoritarian regimes — the sitting US president poses what Fukuyama calls "one of the great psychological questions that future historians are going to have to answer". He traces that attraction back decades: Trump's visit to Moscow in the 1980s, his full-page newspaper advertisements attacking Nato during the cold war. The explanation Fukuyama settles on is bleak: "It somehow has to do with his lack of any kind of moral compass beyond his own self-interest. He basically worries about whether he can make money, and if you can make money in a tyranny, that's fine with him."

The memoir is equally candid about Fukuyama's own intellectual reversals. A former official in the Reagan and Bush administrations, and onetime member of the neoconservative circle that helped prepare the intellectual ground for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he renounced his support for that war in February 2004. He admits that part of what delayed his break was not ideological conviction but personal loyalty: he did not wish to lose friendships he had valued. His subsequent studies of societies across the world led him to regard a capable state not as an obstacle but as a prerequisite for functioning societies — a shift captured, with some self-deprecating wit, by a chapter he titles Learning to Love Bureaucrats.

Fukuyama still believes the fundamental question he posed in 1989 remains unresolved in his critics' favour. The Chinese authoritarian model, he concedes, is a more serious rival to liberal democracy than Iranian-style theocracy, capable of making decisions more efficiently. But whether it is also sustainable, and whether it could be exported, remains in his view an open question. Should China prove decisively more successful than the United States over the next generation, he says he would be "perfectly happy to concede" that his fundamental premise was wrong.

For now, he identifies social media and the internet as the principal engines of political disorientation — creating, he argues, a vast disconnect between material reality and what people experience online. He points to young men in the so-called manosphere as an illustration of the phenomenon he warned of at the close of his original 1989 essay: fed a falsely bleak picture of the world and yearning for a cause worth dying for. Whether such restlessness will, as he once speculated, be enough to "get history started once again", remains among the questions his memoir leaves deliberately open.