BONUS: Melber & Fukuyama on billionaires, U.S. decline & if public trust is ‘cooked’

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0:33Pin verification adds an extra step to make sure your ride is your ride. Before the trip begins, your app gives you a unique pin. Just tell it to your driver, and they'll enter it in their app before the ride can start. Hey, what's your pin? Mm-hmm. 2538. That way, you know you're in the right car taking the right trip, and your driver knows you're the right passenger. Make sure your ride is your ride with pin verification from Uber. One more way Uber is putting safety at every turn. Learn more on the Uber app. When big things happen, there's usually a rush to find causes or explanations. The fall of communism spawned years of debate over who in the West might get credit for that and how to explain what was the greatest geopolitical shift of at least 50 years.

1:14The COVID pandemic stoked urgent questions about its natural or lab causes. And again, for many, who to blame? Politicos know elections are obsessively explained. Was Biden's 2020 win a rejection of Trump or just recoiling from that same pandemic? Was Trump's 2024 win a MAGA embrace or more of a revolt over that era's high prices? Well, nowadays, there are more sources offering explanations more quickly than ever before. From the news media to podcasts to people posting theories online, there is, of course, no monopoly on truth. But if we're talking about claims regarding why things are happening, well, they can be tested against facts over time.

2:02And a lot of quick takes can be proven incomplete or wrong. Some splashy claims or big ideas in print ultimately flame out, while other carefully researched books sometimes prove correct. To get specific, here are four history books that have advanced knowledge and stood the test of time, which can be instructive as we now try to make sense of volatile conditions. Now, one of these books you see on the screen is by the acclaimed professor Francis Fukuyama, known for several influential nonfiction books, including Liberalism and Its Discontents, and Trust, a now 30-year-old exploration of that idea of trust in modern society and economics and issues that certainly apply to the United States' sense of distrust right now.

2:48He also wrote the acclaimed and controversial book, The End of History and the Last Man, translated into over 20 languages influential around the globe, required reading in many courses about the Cold War. Fukuyama is an intellectual force who has probed politics, culture and economics, also known for a crisp, pretty dispassionate approach to making sense of history as well as challenging orthodoxy. Human history can be understood in a certain sense as a form of recognition. Contemporary nationalism is not driven by any kind of economic motive. It's driven by the nationalist desire that his nation, his group, his ethnic group, whatever, be recognized as a nation among others.

3:32Fukuyama's ideas continue to drive debate. In fact, I could show you recent headlines that are still discussing things he has explored, written and proposed decades back. These are all in our current era. He got his Ph.D. at Harvard, worked on strategy at the U.S. government's RAND Corporation, did policy at the State Department, and now serves as a Stanford professor and fellow and director of Stanford's International Policy Master's program and joins us for his debut on the beat. Welcome. Thank you very much for having me. I have a lot less hair than that first picture you put up, but I'm still here.

4:07Yeah, well, that seems to happen over time. We gave the extra introduction because while all people should be equal in Western liberal tradition, as you've written about, all takes and ideas are not. And we're in an era right now where there's a lot of different stuff swirling around. And so I wanted to set aside time to have this conversation with you. Let's start with the current and then I plan to delve deeper into the history. But you're still at it. Recently, you were looking at the Musk controversies in a broader global context. And you wrote that there's nothing new about oligarchs threatening democracy.

4:45In fact, you called it a basic thing. They exert, quote, undue influence, promote corruption. And you argue it's clear that we have a homegrown American oligarch in Elon Musk. What do you mean by that? And what can be gleaned from challenges like this in other places around the world? Well, I actually think that the first oligarch in this tradition was Silvio Berlusconi, who became the prime minister of Italy. He was a rich business magnate. He acquired a media empire. He used that media empire to get himself elected prime minister. And then he used his political power to protect his business empire.

5:28And it seems to me that that's exactly the pattern that Elon Musk has followed. He acquired Twitter, which didn't seem like a great business proposition, but that's not why he wanted it. He wanted it because it would give him a lot of political influence. And sure enough, he becomes Donald Trump's sidekick. And now he's in this great position to take care of his business interests in Starlink and Tesla. And so, you know, he's followed in the footsteps of not just Berlusconi, but a whole bunch of oligarchs, especially in the former communist world that have trod the same path. You mentioned why he wanted Twitter now X.

6:09And that cuts against what classical economists or other analysts would say. Oh, rational actors make money. The legal dimension. dimension. People say you have a fiduciary duty to get the profits. You're identifying something that cuts against all of that. Can you explain? Well, first of all, since he owns Twitter outright, he doesn't actually have to report to a board or shareholders. But I think that, you know, when you reach that level of wealth, you're actually, if you get another$100 billion, It doesn't matter. What you really want is recognition and power. And I think that that was his calculation in acquiring Twitter is that this gives him an instant audience.

6:55What is it, up to 200 million followers now who hang on every word of his? And I think the satisfaction that he gets from that kind of influence has got to be a lot greater than just acquiring yet another few tens of billions of dollars. You're an analyst, not an activist. But are there lessons to be gleaned for countering what you call that Italian Berlusconi style political project, which sometimes can be corruptive? Well, you know, I was always in favor of more vigorous enforcement of antitrust laws. We kind of, after the 1980s, backed away from trying to break up big corporations, although I think we're now in a different situation.

7:40I don't see how it's possible to really push back politically against someone like Musk because he's so rich, he's got so much political influence that taking him down, I think, would be really pretty impossible. And I think that maybe the solution is not to let people get that rich in the first place, but how you do that in our capitalist society, I don't really have an answer to. Do you think that that then speaks to his sort of potential permanence or endurance in the second Trump term, that other people, advisors may come and go, but he's sort of different in that way then and harder for Trump to remove?

8:24Definitely. I mean, first of all, he's much more valuable to Trump than any of his, you know, Steve Bannon or any of the other advisors that Trump has had. But even if Trump decided to break with him, it would be hard to have him just fade into obscurity. I think he's got a political career. Actually, Trump, I think, worried about this himself. He gave a talk once where he said, well, Musk can't be president because he wasn't born in the United States, which is a little bit of a guarantee against a regicide here. But, you know, I don't think he's going to go away even after Trump leaves the scene because he has too much of a following and too much political influence.

9:07And not everyone has said that. I mean, you're an expert on some of these dynamics around the world. You're saying that once in to the U.S. body politic with a tech and money foothold, a beachhead, if you will, and control over the current Republican Party, you're saying, you know, administrations can change. the GOP is not going to just get rid of him. No, that's absolutely right. And it's really hard to see, you know, he's throwing money behind, you know, the threat of primary challenges against any senator or congressman that crosses him. And I can think of very few people, private individuals that could wield that kind of power.

9:50Wow, that's really striking coming from you. And that's sort of the current event. I want to go all the way back. You published this book, Trust, about 30 years ago, yeah? That's right. Yeah, that seems like a much more innocent era in retrospect. Yeah, you say innocent, and it's interesting. I have some passages, and so we'll start as we do with the text. That's what, you know, Antonin Scalia would want. Let's start with the original text of your book. But nerdy references aside, you refer to what was then the first information tech revolution, which looks very quaint compared to X and what we just discussed, but at the time was talk of a, quote, information superhighway and a desktop in every house.

10:35And the idea was that would challenge authority. And the tech world said that was a good thing. And you wrote, the information age's most enthusiastic apostles celebrate the breakdown of hierarchy and authority, but they neglect one critical factor, trust, and the shared ethical norms that underlie it. communities depend on mutual trust and will not arise spontaneously without it. Does that apply as a fissure in today's tech standoff? Oh, absolutely. I think that the single thing that has really changed in that 30, 35-year period is the breakdown of trust, and it has several different dimensions.

11:17I mean, Americans never trusted government, but I think that the degree of distrust that is animating Doge and the efforts to dismantle the federal bureaucracy are just a kind of pathological extension of this classical anti-state aspect of American culture. But, you know, the more difficult thing is the trust between citizens. We were always had political differences, but as everybody's noted, the polarization between red and blue, Republicans and Democrats, has grown steadily since the 1990s. And this has led us to a world in which, you know, in a way, especially on the right, nobody takes seriously the stated motives of anybody.

12:05There's always a deeper, darker conspiracy that's actually motivating people to do what they do. Attacks are not attacks against policies and positions. They are attacks against the character and the motives of people that you don't like. And I think that that means that the country as a whole simply cannot act in a coherent way as a nation because we are this divided. Yeah, you say that, and it's really interesting because your scholarship on this was pushing back against the idea of, I guess, what I would call a traditionalist business or economic model that says sort of, Well, you know, you have a contract and you have a system when, in fact, what you were pointing out and you compare different countries and society traditions that how trust fits into that, which makes intuitive sense when you think about what it's like when you walk into the town hall in a small town where everyone in the room knows a few other people in the room.

13:05That's very different than Madison Square Garden, where you literally might not know anyone other than the New Yorker you walk in with. And you can run that test in many ways. But you talk about the perils of lower trust societies. And you'll explain in more detail. But as I read that book, you weren't at the time suggesting that the United States and some of these other prosperous Western countries were at the low end of that comparison. Now you're saying that's where we're headed. And here's how you describe low-trust societies in general. They are a system that, quote, must fence in and isolate their workers with bureaucratic rules.

13:45People find their workplaces more satisfying if they're treated like adults who can be trusted to contribute to their community, rather than like small cogs in a large industrial machine. How does that apply to declining trust in the U.S.? Well, I have always regarded trust as a kind of lubricant. We have a formal structure of hierarchies, corporations, organizations, the government itself, and you can get people to cooperate using those formal rules. But if people trust one another, if they have something that I labeled social capital, which is the ability to work spontaneously with other people, everything goes better.

14:27You don't have to have lawyers. You don't have to have lengthy contracts. you can take somebody's word on a handshake you can do a business deal and it makes things go a lot faster. Obviously in politics if you know in a liberal democracy we assume that people don't agree with one another but if they actually share a common belief in the fundamental values and institutions within which they're operating then they can resolve those conflicts you know I mean that's the whole reason you have a political system. You don't want to have to pick up an AK-47 in order to settle a conflict. You can actually debate the thing in the legislature and in the courts and come to a resolution.

15:12And I think that that's really the thing that has slipped away from us. I used to, in fact, in that book, I described the United States as a high-trust society. Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French observer of American democracy, said that Americans really trust one another. They form associations much more readily than in his native France. And unfortunately, you know, it's true on one level. I mean, people do join organizations, they get online and they cling to one another. But between groups, the level of trust has deteriorated enormously. And so what you don't have is a larger framework by which, you know, Americans can understand and communicate with one another.

16:00Right. And I think what's enduring about the work is that the lens persists, even as countries' situations may jostle. The fact that by this lens, we've fallen into low trust for some of the reasons you mentioned, including which populist movements are appealing to not a skepticism, but a type of cynicism is on point. Now, it's interesting to me because I've been thinking about all these things and I could tell viewers, you know, I was first reading you like millions of other undergrads in college and comparing you to Huntington and another scholarship, trying to make sense of these shifts. Chris Hayes is our colleague here.

16:35You know Chris is on MSNBC. You might have seen him. He, like you, writes books and does work on the news. But he had this book, The Twilight of the Elites, that runs across some of the same ground and looking at trust. And we recently caught up with him about that. And as he was talking, I just thought this is like he's going full Fukuyama because he was talking about how we're now in this negative experiment, this problem of democracy against the low trust. So I actually want to play for you in some extended form what he said. America is running an experiment in running a low trust democracy.

17:19And that's a dangerous and difficult thing to do. trust is kind of the glue that holds democratic self-governance together. We have to trust each other at a certain amount. There's a certain degree that you have to trust institutions and the leadership in them. And we've seen this country become a low-trust country. We've seen politics, in a really interesting way, polarize around trust. Professor? He's absolutely right. I think that, you know, what's really defined modern American conservatism is distrust. It is really a belief in various conspiracy theories that, you know, if you take the red pill, you realize that nothing is what it seems to be.

18:01That, you know, the established institutions, whether they're corporations, the government, the other party, are actually not ostensibly what they say they are. There's an elite pulling strings behind everyone's backs. And I think that the worst thing in a way, it extends to just what we believe about reality, where facts are not sufficient to convince people that they're wrong or that they need to change their views on something because they'll say, well, that's just fake news and I don't trust the sources of information that you are using. and I've got my own and I'll follow that. And so, you know, you don't really have a common basis for any kind of community or, you know, ability to deliberate under those low trust conditions.

18:54How unusual is that as compared to other recent democratic democracy societies? Well, you know, there are many societies that are highly polarized today. South Korea is a case of another democracy that is really divided against itself. I described a situation that's very prevalent in southern Italy or in Latin America, where people only trust others in their immediate families and everybody on the outside is a kind of enemy. And so there are different forms of distrust. I think that the kind we are experiencing now, however, is a little bit different because it's not deeply cultural. Americans used to trust each other.

19:40I would say 50 years ago, the levels of overall trust were much higher. This current situation seems to be driven a lot by technology. You know, you quoted that something I had written earlier. When the Internet was first privatized in the 1990s, I and many other people thought this would be great for democracy because basically information is power. Everybody had access to information, and that would spread power out. It's done that, but it's also had this very unanticipated consequence of walling people off because all of a sudden we had alternative sources of information that could then erode the credibility of the sources that we took as a society in common to be trustworthy.

20:28And so now everybody's got their, you know, anyone with a large enough following on the Internet is believable because they've got enough likes. And, you know, that's the whole economy of influencers. And that's something I think genuinely new in modern democracies. And it really is the result of this technological revolution that's happened over the last 20 years. Does that mean that in the course of your work, you've become more of a technological determinist? Well, it's not determinism. Technology creates the conditions that people then interact with. And so, for example, most European countries are not as polarized as we are.

21:11They've got the same technology. They have the Internet. They've got social media. But they're not in this crazy situation of disbelieving everything that their opponents say. So the technology facilitates this breakdown of trust, but I don't think that it really explains the depth of some of the divisions. Yeah, that's interesting because you're drawing our attention to what we can learn. Americans sometimes are very much in our own parochial space, but there are real-time comparisons to how it's playing out elsewhere. The other thing that I've seen, and as a journalist who talks to people across the spectrum, both parties, I feel indexed, or you might say over-indexed in what the different folks are saying.

21:58And one thing I hear a lot is there are reasons, there is a basis, a foundation for this skepticism or cynicism. And you've seen that the pandemic was this, at times, horrific real-world experiment where people said, but wait a minute, we've been lied to before. And you say, oh, trust the government. Well, which which decade in which group has been has been hurt by trusting the government? I wanted to get at least one lyric into this interview. So are you ready? OK, you write about trust. Jay Z speaking about how he had to armor himself growing up, said trust. That's a word you seldom hear from us.

22:38We don't rest. We sleep one eye up. and he's not saying he likes being distrusting. He's saying he grew up in an environment where you could barely close your eyes to the dangers around. And so one thing I noticed that collapsed and I want your breakdown of it and if you can give us a way out. One of the things that I saw sort of collapse in a transpartisan or bipartisan way during pandemic was different groups saying, you're telling us that's the facts or you're telling us the government doctor said that. But on the left, these marginalized communities were historically hurt. And we could list off the examples.

23:14There are many. And on the right, there's, of course, a very strong and long-running libertarian streak. You referred to some of that earlier. Some of it, again, American history at large. And so you had folks saying not that they had the evidence for a given conspiracy theory about COVID, but rather they had the history and lived experience of skepticism or more is valid. What do you say to that? And how do you, as someone you're an empiricist, how do you acknowledge the reality of that, that lived reality, while also offering a strong counter argument to being cynical against everything equally as if that's a protective mechanism?

23:54Because that's not going to, in a pandemic, that's not going to keep your family safe. Well, I think it's a matter of having some sense of proportion. No, so you're right that distrust in government was driven by real things. By the way, it's not simply something that conservatives have promoted. If you think about a lot of the progressive causes going all the way back to the 60s, Ralph Nader, unsafe at any speed. A lot of people on the left were saying the government has been captured by big business. The auto industry is in cahoots with the regulators. The polluters are allowing terrible levels of pollution because they've captured the government.

24:40And so there's a left-wing version of this as well. All of this has a basis in fact. We did make mistakes during the pandemic in terms of evaluating the efficacy of masks or the lab leak theory and so forth. I guess the thing that's missing is an awareness that sometimes those mistakes can be made and the government can screw up, but that on the whole, it is performing a really critical function. And if you don't have a certain basic level of trust in what it's saying, what are you going to replace it with? Are you going to replace it with any notion that you simply pull off of the Internet because some influencer said it?

25:30And so I think that we have to go back to try to reestablish the credibility of certain institutions. I'll tell you one thing I'm worried about right now. People, by and large, trust economic statistics, GDP growth rates, unemployment rates. These are produced by something called the Bureau of Labor Statistics. which is a federal agency run by a whole bunch of eggheads. They're all statisticians. And it's been regarded as an apolitical office. One of the things that's happened is that the current administration is trying to replace all of the heads. They're protected by what's called for-cause removal.

26:14So you can't just fire them because it's a new administration, because they are regarded as sources of credible nonpartisan information. And if you start politicizing those kinds of functions, you know, NOAA, the weather that produces all the weather forecasts and hurricane forecasts and warnings about heat waves, we're going to be in even deeper trouble than we are now. And this has happened in other countries. In the 2000s, you had a populist regime, a left-wing populist regime in Argentina that was stoking very high levels of inflation. And what was their solution? Well, they canned the head of the statistics agency and made the statistics agency report better numbers that made them look better.

27:03And you don't want this to happen because there are some still credible sources of information in this society. But it's something that we've got to hold on to and bolster rather than disparage. Right. And I think our viewers and listeners are very aware of how many efforts there are on the career civil service front and the facts front. or the Gulf of Mexico, all of that. I want to turn now to what you memorably called the end of history. This is a short answer, and then we'll go along again. Would you use the exact same term if you could do it over? Yeah, I've been asked that question quite a few times in my career.

27:46Yes, the answer is yes. All right, so let me bring people up to speed. It's hard today, I think, to fully absorb what a profound shift it was to have the Cold War, which was lived as an existential threat to humanity across both sides of the divide for decades, rather abruptly come to an end. So because we have TV, you have scholarship and words and research, but we have the archives. So I just want to briefly remind everyone of that moment. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Tens of thousands of people crossing into West Berlin, pouring through the Berlin Wall which opened today. Such an astonishing moment in history.

28:38We stand at the threshold of a brand new era. That confrontation is now over. The nuclear threat, while far from gone, is receding. Eastern Europe is free. The Soviet Union itself is no more. This is an area of your most known and controversial scholarship. Can't think of a bigger human topic for that era. Starting there, what happened and what was your argument about why it happened and where we were headed through the decline and the end of that Cold War? Well, the word history did not refer to just the occurrence of events one after another. I was using history with a capital H, the idea that there is a progressive narrative that you can elaborate about the development of human institutions over long periods of time.