Francis Fukuyama's 1989 essay, "The End of History," is remembered as this triumphalist argument heralding the permanent victory of liberal democracy. After it, anything major that happened in the world, you would get these people saying, "Well, I guess history didn't really end, did it?" I remember this particularly after 9/11. This week, of course, is the 25th anniversary of 9/11.
But this was such a terrible misreading of Fukuyama's argument because if you actually read his essay, and particularly if you read the book that came out of that essay, he is saying something very different. The book was called "The End of History and the Last Man," and it was anything but triumphalist.
Liberal democracy might win, Fukuyama thought. It might become the way most states organize themselves, but it might win atop a cramped and partial vision of the human soul, one that believed in our ability to consume but had little room for our desire for recognition, for greatness, for daring. And no political system without room for those parts of ourselves would be stable for very long. You cannot build a good society atop a flawed vision of human nature.
My view is that very few books in politics are as insightful or as important for understanding where liberal democracy went wrong, why figures like Donald Trump keep rising, and why the opposition to them seems so wan and uninspiring so often. So this is a book that I think needs to be cleared of a sin they didn't really commit, because it has something to say to us.
Now, Fukuyama is a political scientist at Stanford University. He's written many books since that one, including a two-volume series on the nature of political orders, a critique of the neoconservative world that he was once part of, and a defense of liberalism from its attackers. But his new book is a memoir, "In the Realm of the Last Man." And so I wanted to begin with that idea of "The End of History and the Last Man." I wanted to begin by rediscovering the book that made Fukuyama famous, so we can hear what it has to say about the world we now live in.
Francis Fukuyama, welcome to the show.
Thanks very much for having me.
So, I want to begin the conversation in your most famous book, a book I'm a huge fan of, which is "The End of History and the Last Man." So, this is built on an essay that comes out in 1989. It's a few months before the Berlin Wall falls, a book comes out after the fall of the wall. You have this moment where liberal democracy really seems to be triumphing. The end of history has become this highly memed, in many ways simplified, concept. So what was it?
Well, this was not my phrase. It was a phrase of the German philosopher Hegel. And he meant history with a capital H. So we would use the word development or modernization today. But it's directional, it's progressive, things are getting better, human reason is prevailing in structuring societies. And the question of the end of history was not the end of events. It was to what objective does this historical process seem to be leading.
The Marxists took that same concept of history. They believed in history also. But they believed that the end was not a liberal society, it was a communist utopia, and that, you know, was their guiding star in their political movement. And my observation back in the late 1980s, when Gorbachev was in the Soviet Union, was that we weren't going to get there. We were going to stop at the penultimate stage, which was some version of liberal democracy and a capitalist economy. And for me, that was, you know, the practical end of history that had really emerged.
So this is more the way to think about the term the end of history, is the end of the process of figuring out how to politically organize... the goal or the objective of that process. Why did you think we were going to stop there?
Well, I didn't know that we were going to stop, but all of these big systematic competitors had all either self-destructed or had been rejected by the people that once followed them. And I think the challenge that I was trying to make was to ask people, yeah, can you locate something that's better than this outcome? Not necessarily that, you know, our society is perfect. It obviously is not. But is there an alternative form of political and social organization that you think will make people in the end happier and lead, you know, more fulfilled lives? And I, to this day, I've not seen anyone really posit.
Well, what the Marxist thought, and you talk about this in the book, is that a capitalist system has within it a contradiction that will inevitably lead to its undoing, which is you have this class conflict and you have a small number of people at the top who are exploiting the great mass of workers beneath them. And liberal democracy is lying when it says that it equally or even reasonably apportions freedom. That, you know, as a famous line goes, that the fact that the rich and the poor man are free to sleep under the bridge is not an equality of freedom. So why are you not convinced class is such a dangerous contradiction?
Well, it could be, especially with the rise of technology. But, you know, for much of the period after 1945, you didn't have pure capitalism. You had basically in most advanced countries a form of social democracy. And I think the democracy part of it was absolutely necessary because unless you provide certain social protections, unless you do a certain amount of redistribution, the inequality in the society is going to become intolerable.
And for most of that period, you actually had rising real incomes for working people. And so even though there was inequality, you had political stability because everybody could buy into it. Now, I never argued that this would be true for all time, and I think that the nature of technology is changing such that the degree of inequality has grown. I think globalization has also contributed to this, and unless you moderate those inequalities through political means, you're just not going to have stable democracy.
So, one of the things that I think is fascinating about the way you frame this in the book is you try to move the foundation for liberalism off of some of the philosophers we normally give it to, Hobbes and Locke, and onto Hegel. And one of the ways you do that is to say that Hobbes and Locke had this much more narrow vision of what a liberal society, or even just a just society, is trying to achieve, which is, you know, self-preservation. It is simply almost existing at a reasonable level of material well-being.
And you say Hegel understands the human soul better than that, and that the human soul wants more than that. It wants recognition. And the fundamental question for liberal societies, the one that will decide whether or not they are the end of history, is whether they are actually able to spread recognition around society equally enough, not just freedom, recognition, being seen, being valued enough to survive. So, so tell me a bit about that move, that it's actually recognition that is at the center of political life.
Well, this is an idea that goes all the way back to Plato. Socrates in the Republic asks, "Well, we have reason, we have desire, but isn't there a third part of the soul that he calls thumos, which can be translated as spiritedness or pride?" And it's a non-material drive that people have, that they want other people to acknowledge their humanity.
So I have these, I invented these two Greek words, isothumia and megalothumia. Isothumia is basically, you know, it's the foundation of a liberal society, that everybody by virtue of being born as a human being has a certain base level of dignity that has to be recognized by the rest of society. We recognize it in a liberal society by giving people rights. And that means that you are seen as a human being that has, you know, some share of the power of the community.
And that generates a huge amount of resentment if you feel that other people are being recognized in a way that you are not. And that really, I think, drives a lot of democratic politics. You know, just to give you one example, in the gay marriage movement, you could have solved the economic problem of gay couples by giving them, you know, inheritance rights and that sort of thing, the ability to pass on property to the children they raised, civil unions.
But that wasn't enough because gay people wanted to have acknowledgment that their unions had just as much dignity and just as much value as that between a man and a woman. And I think that was the fundamental drive that led to, you know, the legalization of gay marriage. So that's just an example.
But I think, you know, civil rights, Ralph Ellison wrote a novel back in the 1950s about, you know, the experience of African Americans that had moved from the South to the North. You didn't have official legally sanctioned segregation. What you had was the invisibility. That's where the Invisible Man in the title comes from, that white people in the North simply didn't see a black person as a fellow human being. And that was really what I think generated the deep, you know, resentment and distrust that existed in northern cities and in racial politics.
One of the really interesting sections of the book to me is where you talk about the ways in which material politics and a politics of recognition can blur into each other. That there are many places where people would have a level of material wealth that, say, in another country would be amazing, but in the country they're in, because it puts them further down the scale of recognition, it for them is a terrible injury. You have Adam Smith talking about this, that much of what people want from wealth is to be seen, it isn't simply to consume.
So, so tell me a bit about that side of it, because I think that also makes sense of some parts of our economic politics too, where you'll sometimes have somewhat self-satisfied liberals say, "Well, actually, if you look on a chart, you know, people have been getting richer and it's better than it was in the past and we have antibiotics now." But actually, if you understand that part of what people want from even the money they make is to be seen and recognized a certain way in society, that that actually contains within it a never-enoughness, a constant instability, because there is always a certain amount of inequality of recognition in society.
Well, to expand a little bit on that Adam Smith section that you referred to, he says, "The rich man glories in his wealth, and the poor man is unseen, is invisible to his fellow human beings." That's really the pain of poverty, is this invisibility to other people. And I think that still operates.
And I think if you think about our politics, a lot of it is about recognition rather than simply the distribution of material resources. A lot of populism today is driven by people who feel they're invisible. You know, that the world is run by educated elites and they don't listen to the concerns of people like them and they don't recognize them as being fully equal because they don't have the educations or the sophistication. And I think that that unequally distributed recognition is actually at the base of a lot of our problems.
I think something you see, you see it in some cases on the left. I think wokeness had a lot of this in it, but you see it in some cases on the populist right, which is, I don't have a word to make up for it, but a desire to invert status in a society. So, a belief that your white privilege or your wealth and your riches make you suspect and should be, you should be treated as suspect until you, say, prove yourself otherwise.
On the right, this can take forms of attacks on their chosen, you know, elites, journalists and cosmopolitans, and, you know, populism has a lot of this in it. The people who have been judged excellent or who have attained power, there's an effort to sort of alter the moral valence of that power in the way society sees them.
And I actually see the last couple of years as in some ways a fight between these. Some of the radicalization of the tech right comes from, you know, their feeling of, well, we did what you wanted, we made our money under capitalism and we built these great companies and now you hate us. And that pushed them into a very, very different and eventually quite scary politics.
No, that's absolutely right. I think that your judgment of the moral character of the people you don't like then blends with resentment at the fact that they are unjustly recognized, and that's really the source of many of the forms of backlash that we see in our society, both on the left and the right. You don't want to be seen as lesser than other people, and you get very resentful when you're treated that way. And the inversion, I think, is simply a demand that that stop, you know, that you be recognized at least as the equal.
So just because you've made a lot of money doesn't mean that you're a bad person. The real anger comes from people that feel that they're victimized, that they are marginalized, you know, as a result of their identities, and that, you know, is now something that's occurred to a lot of people that occupied previously privileged positions in the society.
So you define there the version in which recognition is equal. But you said you invented another word.
Yes, megalothumia. So that is the desire to be recognized as greater than other people. And I think that this is obviously a threat in a democracy because a liberal democracy is based on the premise that all people, all citizens, are essentially equal. But that's not enough for a certain group, a certain subset of human beings. They want to dominate. They want to be more than others. It takes oftentimes a very negative form of political domination. So you want to be a dictator or an autocrat.
But it's also necessary because you can't have any kind of human excellence if you didn't have the desire to be better than other people. You know, if you want to be a great pianist or, you know, a football star or, you know, a great artist, I think that's also driven by a certain kind of desire to be recognized, you know, as better than other people. So I think that you can't have a society of perfectly equal recognition, that has to be the basis for social cohesion. But you also can't have a dynamic society without people that want something more than that.
Now, I actually wrote about Donald Trump in the original book, "The End of History and the Last Man."
Yeah. And, you know, back then I thought, well, one of the virtues of living in a capitalist democracy is that this desire for unequal recognition can be satisfied just by becoming rich. And it's a way of bleeding off that energy. Little did I know that, you know, 30 years later that wouldn't be enough for Donald Trump and that he'd want political power as well as, you know, fortune.
So that brings us to the other side of the book, which gets talked about somewhat less. And maybe the way to get into this is simply to say, who is the last man?
So the last man is the creature that Friedrich Nietzsche, the other great German philosopher of the 19th century, identified as the product of the end of history. A person that was satisfied with the things that liberalism provides, basically peace and prosperity, but had no further aspirations, no desires for a better vision of the world, nothing that they would risk their lives on behalf of.
And for Nietzsche, it was really that extraordinary ambition that was really what made a human being a human being. And instead, in a liberal society, you got this very flat world where everybody has to tolerate everybody else and nobody wants to think of themselves as better.
So there's something interesting here. One of the constant critiques of at least a portion of the right towards liberalism, for that matter, towards socialism, is that it's fundamentally built on a lie. And that that lie is equality. And the form of equality that is a lie can take different versions, right? You can have people who see racial equality as a lie and they get obsessed with race and IQ and things of that nature. You can have people who see just individual equality as a lie.
Obviously, some people are either more morally good than others. Other people are more talented, more capable, they work harder. But that many on the right see it as a dangerous lie that a society could or should be equal. And that the particular danger of that lie is that it blunts ambition. It pulls down those who would strive for excellence.
And I certainly see in much of the sort of tech right reaction in the last couple of years, in some parts of the new right and how they look at society, a sort of sense that this happened. This is why so many on the right are rediscovering Nietzsche, like who is there in your title, you know, the sort of originator of the last man idea.
No, that's right. Well, first of all, let me just defend the idea of universal equality because I do think, you know, and ultimately if you look historically, it derives from a certain Christian interpretation that human beings are fundamentally equal. There's a passage in Galatians that says there's neither Jew nor Gentile, master nor slave, male nor female, but all are equal in Jesus Christ.
And, you know, that fundamental insight, I think, has a real meaning because there's a core, something in one of my books I labeled Factor X, that makes every single human being recognizably human. So I think that there is something really genuinely to be protected in this idea that every one of us has a certain moral core that is of great value and needs to be protected by the system.
But it's also true that it leads to a flattening of our societies because liberalism is necessarily pluralistic. It's a recognition of the fact that different people pursue different ends, that they have different visions of the good life. The reason you created liberalism in the first place in the 17th century was the wars of religion in which people killed themselves over, you know, minor theological differences.
And there was a lowering, deliberate lowering of the human horizon to mean survival. You know, the right to life is superior to the right to the good life. But this does take away something. People want to live the good life. They want to have higher aspirations. If you look at modern America, we don't ask that much of citizens. You know, you obey the law, you pay your taxes, and that's fine. You don't have to sacrifice. You don't have to take any grave risks on behalf of the society as a whole.
And I think that there is a part of the human psyche that actually wants that kind of life, you know, that feels flattened if they don't have the ability to, you know, to, as the Declaration says, risk their, you know, their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor for a cause. And that's why I think you get these jokers on January 6th dressed up in camo pretending that they are these patriots that are defending, nobly defending this way of life.
I think that, you know, you have that striving for that degree of sacrifice and it doesn't exist in our society and so you invent a cause.
So why in the original essay do you end on saying that the end of history will be a sad time?
Well, I think it would be sad precisely because of that lack of risk and of a vision of a noble future that, you know, you are willing to struggle on behalf of. I have another line in the original book that said that if you're living in a society that is peaceful and democratic because of struggles of an earlier generation that were successful, then you're going to struggle against peace and democracy because what you want to do is struggle for struggle's sake.
And I think it's that impulse that, you know, really drives a lot of extremist politics and disturbs the, you know, the potential stability of a liberal society. It's also a generational thing. You know, it's clear that the people that want most desperately to live in a liberal society are people that live in dictatorships. You know, there's genuine joy when communism fell in Eastern Europe, in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s.
You can see this in all the people that get on boats, you know, desperate to get out of a poor, corrupt, you know, destitute country and to get to America or to Europe. And so, you know, there is a real enthusiasm for liberalism on the part of people that don't have it. And I think that we do go in these generational cycles where, you know, once you have it, you take it for granted and increasingly you look for something further.
And so you're not living in a dictatorship any longer. So you think Brussels is the dictatorship that you have to struggle against. So there may be kind of a rise and fall in the support for liberalism. But in the end, it's, you know, going to be the most stable outcome that, you know, that a human society can achieve.
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You have a quote I often think about where you say, "We inhabitants of liberal democratic countries are by now so used to accounts of current events, the reduced motivation to economic causes, so thoroughly bourgeois in our own perceptions, that we are frequently surprised to discover how totally non-economic most political life is."
And I think that's a bridge to something worth talking about this week. This is the 25th anniversary of 9/11. I think the first time I remember a lot of people all of a sudden saying, "Well, I guess the end of history wasn't the end," was actually 9/11, an attack on America from people coming out of an ideology that was fundamentally non-economic, that was religious, it was very much concerned with recognition and humiliation, people willing to launch attacks in which they knew they themselves would die.
And, you know, one of the things that I think has come since then is that politics has been driven externally and internally by, I think, people whose motivations are much more about recognition. And liberalism, as you say, in the way this quote continues, does not even have a common vocabulary for talking about the prideful and assertive side of human nature that is responsible for driving most wars and political conflicts.
So, how do you think about that blind spot and the way maybe 9/11 forced the resumption of recognizing that side of politics?
Well, it certainly forced the recognition that there were other people around the world that were driven by very non-economic factors. You know, if you're willing to be a suicide bomber, you obviously feel that there is a completely non-material cause that you're, you know, that you're serving.
I don't think that it directly challenged liberalism in the way that people thought at the time. I think that radical Islamism is not a, it's not an ideology that's going to ever conquer the world, certainly not at this point. It only takes root in relatively poor, disorganized societies that are Muslim to begin with. So in that sense it was different from Marxism-Leninism that genuinely had a kind of universal appeal in many different societies.
And so I think that the direct threat that here was an alternative to liberalism that was very powerful was simply not true. And in fact, in the years since 9/11, it's kind of faded. What I think 9/11 triggered was actually the Western reaction or overreaction to both Afghanistan and to Iraq, that then set in motion a lot of other, you know, I think very dangerous trends.
Militarization of foreign policy, I think the beginnings of a surveillance state, you know, in the United States because of the fear of terrorism, and also because the wars never resulted in a good outcome in either Afghanistan or Iraq, great cynicism about American power and the use of American power that led directly to the emergence of people like Donald Trump.
So you were a neoconservative at that time. You signed some of the early letters arguing for the removal of Saddam Hussein, and then the Iraq War itself led you to break with neoconservatism broadly. Why?
Well, I don't have a problem with the use of force to get rid of a dictator. I mean, we did that in World War II with Germany and Japan, and that was a very positive outcome. What I had been spending much of the 1990s studying was actually the use of power in developing countries that were culturally quite different, in Central America, you know, in Southeast Asia, in other places.
And I was very skeptical whether the United States itself had the staying power to really transform a very different society. In my view, we tried to do this in the Philippines, in Nicaragua, in Vietnam, in many other places. And, you know, the American public gets tired after about four or five years and then they give up and the society's left worse off.
And I was very worried that the Bush administration would succeed in getting rid of Saddam Hussein, but then would be at a loss in how to actually create a stable country in its wake. And it was worse than I anticipated. They were even less prepared, you know, for that long-term effort when they did the invasion. And that was the real problem that I had with it.
One thing you talk about in the memoir that you've released is you describe that as kind of a reckoning with how much of your own thinking can be generated by who you're around, what social circles you're moving in. Just tell me about that sort of meta-realization.
Yeah. Well, you know, coming out of the Enlightenment, we have a certain view of human cognition that says, well, human beings take in empirical information, they process it, they draw inferences, and that's how they end up believing that certain things are true.
Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist, wrote a very interesting book about what he called motivated reasoning. He said that's actually not the way that human reason works, that we start with the conclusions that we want to believe in and we use our enormous cognitive abilities to marshal the evidence to support those views.
And I have to say that that Enlightenment view looks less and less true, you know, when you watch the politics of the present day. And it was true for me as well. You know, I moved in this neoconservative social circle. You know, I wrote a lot for Commentary magazine and, you know, other publications in that genre.
And my own sense of, you know, who I was was very much shaped by the approbation of, you know, people that were also in that movement. And that's what made it hard to break with them, because it means, you know, not just changing policies, but it means changing friendships. And that, you know, that's what happened.
One thing you saw right after 9/11 and in that period of run-up to war in Iraq, particularly, was a huge number of neoconservatives and other cultural commentators celebrating the return of a thumotic, passionate politics. This view that America had become decadent and soft, full of metrosexuals and management consultants. And here finally we had a struggle again, a clash of civilizations. You know, a reason we needed this manly Texas rancher as our president.
Looking back, some of the rhetoric on this has a real quality of the absurd. But one thing I think you also see is that the Iraq War, the highly aggressive reaction America had for a long time afterwards, it's done very lasting damage to our politics. I see Trump as a direct descendant of it, right?
And there is this constant belief, I think, on the part of some intellectuals that violent struggle is an ennobling thing for societies. And yet I look at, you know, certainly in more modern times, Vietnam and Iraq, and I see Israel right now. And I think the dangers of having your politics become profoundly oriented around violence, around reprisal, around struggle, around these kinds of more warlike virtues is also very, very present and visible.
So I'm curious what lessons you take, not just about the question of in what cases can America export democracy at the point of a gun, but what does it do to a polity when it sometimes gets the wish of people who think that we've grown soft and calculating, and all of a sudden we have this return to the virtues or the vices of war?
Yeah. You know, I actually talked about that in the last few chapters of "The End of History and the Last Man," that, you know, there were certain thinkers, including Hegel, that kind of felt that every now and then you had to have a war to recharge our batteries, so to speak, and to get us serious about things.
The trouble is that technology has moved on and that's just impossible. I mean, it's not just nuclear weapons, you know, you can't have a little war with nuclear weapons, but conventional weapons have become so destructive that the negative impact of any kind of conflict right now is so potentially devastating that that's simply not an alternative.
And so I think for a successful society that wants to bleed off that megalothumia, you need to find, you know, peaceful outlets for that kind of ambition.
I want to talk about the politicians who follow this, Obama and Trump. And maybe the place to start, because I think this is almost the more interesting question for liberalism, is Barack Obama. I'll begin broad, which is how in the broad story of America do you now see the Obama presidency?
Well, I think it was well-intentioned, but in a certain way it wasn't ambitious enough. And I think that's probably what a lot of his progressive critics think, you know, that he said very soothing things about, you know, kind of post-racial America. Just his very presence as president was an affirmation of that, but it didn't really change any of the underlying social and economic inequalities that were driving the racial divide in the United States.
And one of, you know, I think another perfectly just criticism was he was too bought into what we now call neoliberalism, with the kinds of economic advisers that he surrounded himself with, who kind of accepted this new form or the new evolution of capitalism that was producing oligarchs and very large wealth inequalities, which you could have addressed through antitrust, through, you know, different tax policy.
But under Obama, you saw this problem that I describe in a couple of my books as vetocracy, that we have a constitutional, a very complex constitutional system built around checks and balances. The essence of liberalism is the rule of law, that there should be rules that govern and limit executive power. But I think that the American government at that point had become so complex that it became really hard for anybody to do anything, either in a conservative direction, which frustrated Reagan, but also in a progressive direction.
You know, issues of climate change really require fairly strong, controversial decisions because you have clashing interests and, you know, somebody's got to resolve those. And so I think that the underlying institutional problems were really never addressed. You know, take the filibuster. It's completely non-constitutional limitation on the power of Congress. And, you know, you could have gotten rid of the filibuster, but even that relatively low hurdle, you know, was not even attempted in that period.
The other thing I think that I would criticize Obama for more was that in the absence of the ability of the government to take on frontally many of these challenges because it didn't have the power to do it, you had the flourishing of a certain kind of identity politics in civil society. And that, you know, was not, I don't think that was the core of his presidency, but it certainly, you know, took hold in that period.
I do think it took hold in that period, but I think it took hold for a reason not unrelated to what you're describing, which is one of the ways I think about what has gone wrong in liberalism, because I think quite a bit has. And I think liberalism right now, even though I'm a liberal, has a real exhausted feeling to it. Is my one line on this, is that first liberalism captured the institutions, and then the institutions captured liberalism.
And what I mean by that is that liberals in many cases built America's political institutions. They certainly, as liberals, and became like the reigning ideology of the universities, liberals became the people who staffed these institutions. And so then liberals became the people who owned their failures, who governed with the horizons of what these institutions could achieve, right?
And if you are the defenders of the system, that doesn't work. If you are, if your moral ambition is boundaried by what failing institutions can achieve, you're not going to have a very exciting political philosophy.
No, you're absolutely right about that. I think that at this point, you know, for me, it would be absolutely wrong to think that we need to go back to the pre-2016 world because that world was one in which the government was basically hobbled from doing anything ambitious.
I think, you know, what propelled Trump to power was the belief that it was too constraining, and so he simply wanted to become a dictator, violate, you know, all sorts of rules in order to get things done. But you need a little bit of that in order to do progressive things. You know, it takes 10 years to get the permitting done to do a transmission line to get power from the middle of the country where alternative energy is produced to the West Coast where it's consumed, and that's the product of, you know, this kind of proceduralism that was ushered in by people basically on the left.
So you're right that they created this institutional straitjacket, and I think one of the big challenges is how to go back to a stronger government that can actually do good things.
Well, this proceduralism is, I think, a very biting tension right now because on the one hand, much of the critique that liberals, even the left, has of Donald Trump is the evisceration of procedure, right? He wants to build a ballroom. He just bulldozes his East Wing.
And on the other hand, and that's true, I mean, he is eviscerating procedure. He is firing inspectors general. He is doing all kinds of things that properly you are not supposed to be able to do under our system of government. It is very, very hard, I think, to become very spun up about violations of procedure and not then accidentally wrap yourself as a defender of procedure. And so procedure is both the problem in the sense that it is being ignored, but also a little bit when you're in power, the problem in the sense it is being overly followed.
That doesn't leave you a very comfortable place to stand. I think if a Democrat is elected in 2028, they're going to have a big conundrum because they're going to want to do things, especially if it's a more progressive, left-leaning Democrat, and they're going to find themselves up against these same procedures that have hobbled, you know, Obama and Biden.
You know, Biden wanted to have high-speed internet in rural areas, and he was completely unable to produce that in the three years that, you know, after the passage of that act. So they're going to want more authority, and they're going to have to, in a way, look a little bit more like Trump.
I think that the trick is going to be to fundamentally stay within the law, but to modify the law in ways that grant, you know, essentially more power to the government to do things. And I think that's going to be a hard thing to sell because the immediate charge is...
Oh, you're just acting like Donald Trump. But in fact, you know, he was responding to a real problem, this real institutional problem in the way that American government was operating.
You wrote a book in 2021 that I think introduces an interesting tension into this, which is called "Liberalism and Its Discontents." And that book ends on a call — I wouldn't really call it a stirring call. I think it's hard to have a stirring call for this, for moderation as the answer for what is ailing liberalism, a sense of temperance.
Here I ask you, you know, what you think of the Obama presidency, and what you fundamentally say to me is it wasn't radical enough. I ask you about American institutions and procedures, and you say liberals are going to have to be more like Donald Trump. They got to get rid of the filibuster. I've been arguing for ending the filibuster for a long time. I can tell you with certainty people do not experience that as moderate. So I'm curious how you think about resolving these.
I guess, as you're right, that there is a contradiction there. You know, the same vices that characterize bad dictatorial governments will also come to characterize good progressive ones. You know, people have been complaining about the Supreme Court overturning Humphrey's Executor. This is this rule that allowed Congress to set terms under which a president could or could not fire an executive branch official in a multi-member, you know, commission. Roosevelt wanted to fire this guy, William Humphrey, that had been a commissioner for the FTC because he felt that guy was getting in the way of his New Deal agenda, progressive agenda. So the very same constraint on executive power that we're now criticizing, you know, a conservative Supreme Court for overturning was something that progressives wanted. I just think that that's kind of built into our politics, that the same set of institutions can either be good or bad depending on the goal that you set. So you have to, you know, have a good set of ends that you are trying to achieve, but you also need power.
Let's talk about the man who stepped into some of the failures here or some of the resentments here, which is Donald Trump. As you mentioned, Trump appears a couple of times in "The End of History and the Last Man." But when he emerges into politics, he emerges as something other than simply an icon of capitalist success. He emerges as somebody bringing a renewed nationalism, a renewed belief in borders, a belief in maybe more traditional hierarchies in America. And over time, he emerges in your telling as somebody who is either proposing or modeling a different form of government, a different regime, not just a different leader. You've described him as repatrimonializing the government. What does that mean?
So let's begin with another bit of psychology. It's not natural to favor a well-qualified stranger over your relatives or your friends. It's a very natural human desire to want to reward friends and family. So most states in human history were patrimonial, meaning that they basically were run for the benefit of the rulers. It was the ruler's household, the friends and family of the ruler that were given privileges and were able to enrich themselves. And the reason you went into politics was to enrich yourselves. And I think that every society that has managed to create modern state institutions that are impersonal has had this constant backsliding temptation because the rulers themselves would like their friends and family to, you know, to be favored. Just one simple historical example: the Ottomans had one of the weirdest ways of getting to a modern state. They literally captured young boys in the Balkans, brought them to Istanbul, and trained them to be administrators and generals, but they couldn't have families because they didn't want nepotism, right? And they couldn't resist the demand of the janissaries to have children and have families. So eventually a sultan gave in, and you're back in the whole nepotistic patrimonial world that the Ottomans had briefly managed to get beyond. We're doing that right now. You know, instead of professional diplomats handling our Middle East policy, you get Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, you know, two friends and family of Donald Trump, and you're paying the price for it because a modern state really does need kind of meritocratic, you know, impersonal people running the state apparatus.
Are you surprised how easy it was for Trump to begin to build or rebuild that structure in a system that seemed just choked with rules and procedures to keep that from happening?
Yeah, I'm totally astounded that the American people don't seem to really care that much. I mean, maybe in the fullness of time there'll be some accountability, but yeah, I would not have expected that the degree of corruption that exists in the current administration would have been tolerable to, you know, mainstream Republicans, for example. When Trump sort of roared back in the 2024 election, much more so than in 2016, he ran and assembled a coalition as a candidate of courage and thumos and passions. You know, this really took hold after the nearly successful assassination attempt with his bloodied fist in the air.
You saw a sort of rallying around him as an almost mythic man of history figure. I think a lot of that has drained out of the system now as he seems a little bit more ridiculous, dangerous, campy, you know, spending his time on the ballroom.
