26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’

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29:22Frank, you are a great exponent of, if I'm going to be pretentious for a moment on our podcast, of a Hegel and a Hegelian idea that you've got a thesis and an antithesis and a synthesis. And initially in the late 80s, early 90s, it seemed as though the final synthesis was going to be the form of liberal democracy that was emerging in the 90s. Is it possible to rethink this and perhaps see that what was happening in the 90s was, as it were, the thesis and the populism as the antithesis and that we're looking for some future synthesis of these two moving forward? And if so, what would it be? Yeah, well, that Hegelian process is really not that different from classic Whig history, you know, in Britain that, you know, recognizes ups and downs, but the synthesis ultimately is going to be a higher, you know, form of liberal values.

30:14You know, look, I don't take a position on that. I think that there are reasons to think that in the long run, liberal political systems are going to be more durable because they're better at dealing with diversity than authoritarian ones. They don't have those decision making, you know, problems that I mentioned in authoritarian countries. But, you know, I think that rather than one model winning out over liberal democracy, what you could have is just a lot of countries, you know, maintaining some form of, you know, either not very good democracy or not very good authoritarianism. And, you know, there is no ultimate convergence.

30:53And Frank, AI and biotechnology, give us your thoughts on how that's going to inflect the next 10 or 20 years. Well, I hesitate to say anything about AI. I've seen so much pontificating on this subject in the last few months. And I think that I'm not going to add to that except to say that, you know, compared to something like blockchain or some of these other things that have come along, I think the generative AI is a much bigger deal. And you can see that affecting society in much bigger ways. It could be competitive to existing workers and ways of doing business. It could be actually complementary.

31:33So it'll increase productivity and efficiency. But I think anyone that claims to know which of these is going to happen, you shouldn't listen to them because who could have predicted the impact of electricity when Thomas Edison turned on the first light bulb? I mean, now biotech, I actually wrote a whole book about this in the early 2000s, because I think that in the end, it has a much bigger capacity to shape society than digital technology. So I was wrong about the digital part. But, you know, I think biotech still is very powerful as a means of controlling other people. If you can get into germline engineering, you know, the pharmacological interventions that we've been able to make with people permit some part of society to control another part of society in ways that people dreamed about in previous eras, but, you know, they didn't have the capacity to actually make good on.

32:28So I do think that that's coming down the road. Now, Frank, I don't do an interview when I'm being interviewed rather than interviewing as we are now. I don't do an interview of longer than five minutes without the interview. I did one this morning with a Belgian newspaper without the interviewer saying at some point, now, I really must ask you about your role in the lead up to the Iraq war. And then I go into autopilot. And so I feel your equivalent, Rory mentioned it in the introduction, is your book and this phrase, the end of history. And Rory mentioned Hegel, and I believe the phrase was originally his.

33:05Yes. So what did you, first of all, what did you mean? Secondly, has it surprised you the extent to which you have become so attached to this one phrase? And what has that whole process kind of taught you both about yourself and about the world? Well, okay. So just to turn the autopilot on. So what was the end of history? You know, history with a capital H, you would probably describe in other terms as modernization or development today. And the question is, is there a progressive evolution of societies over very long periods of time that leads to certain forms of institutions? And my answer to that back then and today is yes, that I do think that there is a coherent process of modernization.

33:58And I think people that don't believe that should go live in Guatemala or Myanmar or some other very poor, chaotic country that doesn't have the advantages and opportunities that Britain or the United States or Canada and many other countries offer. So that's the basic meaning of history. And then the end of history is where does that process look like it's headed? And for many decades, the Marxists said it's headed towards communism. There will be a higher form of civilization that will displace what they called bourgeois democracy tied to capitalism. And my argument was I don't see that higher stage.

34:40I don't see a preferable form of government. And I think right now, the only rival, right, that seems plausible is China, which is definitely authoritarian. It's quasi-capitalist, but they've certainly been very good at providing stability and growth. But is that actually going to displace, you know, the democratic model? I have my doubts about that, but I'm open to, you know, the possibility. And Frank, can I come in just to reinforce Alistair's question? And Alistair, of course, often makes jokes at his own expense that his obituary is going to have the word Tony Blair in the title and probably Iraq in the first line.

35:18And you achieved extraordinary fame in your late 30s. I guess you were sort of 37, 38 when the first article, The End of History, came out. And it's still something that literally I can stand up in almost any audience in the world, mention you in this book, and everybody's heard of it. What does it mean for someone's life to be as it were, defined in your late 30s. And you're now talking to us when you're 70. What's the psychological experience of this? Well, look, I've learned to get over the frustrations that a long time ago, when I post something on social media or elsewhere, I almost never read the comments, because inevitably, somebody's going to say, Oh, Mr.

35:58End of History, you know, what about this? What about that? And, you know, it's been going on for more than 30 years. And so I, you know, who needs it? You know, I do think in terms of my subsequent career, it's been actually a great boon because, you know, it got me a good academic position I could write, you know, so I've written a total of 10 books now. I actually think that the two volume series I did on political order was really my effort to rewrite the end of history with much more knowledge about the world than I had when I was in my 30s. And, you know, I made some corrections. And I think that, you know, most people on Twitter have not worked their way through those thousand pages.

36:40But I think that, you know, in terms of the, you know, the more elite perceptions of what I stood for, that may count for more than the meme that's out there. But in terms of how you explained it and defined it and how you were defining it at the time, you've kind of not been proven wrong. I don't believe I have, because I think if you take a long-term view of historical progress, you do get these setbacks and recessions. I mean, you think about what happened in the 1930s. Collapse of democracy in Germany was a much bigger development than anything that's happened in the last 10 years, and then the world managed to recover.

37:22And even in the 60s and 70s, you had military coups all over the developing world, all over Latin America, and that got reversed. So I just think that you can't make these big judgments based on the experience of the last 10 years. Now, you travel a lot, just as Rory and I travel a lot. Is there a country in the world that you can point to and say that's a really healthy democracy? Well, I think there are a number of examples in Northern Europe, right? So I have this phrase getting to Denmark that I use in my political order books, not because I liked so much social democracy, but the low levels of corruption, kind of effective government, I think, that they've achieved are quite rare.

38:04And I think in that part of Europe, democracy is actually a lot healthier than it is in the United States, because you don't have the same degree of polarization. There still is a pretty healthy social consensus around the legitimacy of their own institutions. It's interesting, you know, Canada, I didn't realize this, but they got 40 million people there and they've got this plan actually to build their population as fast as they can through immigration. And they seem to be handling that, you know, quite well. I think I'm right in saying they've got the second biggest Ukrainian population outside of Ukraine.

38:38They've got the second largest, yeah, and Chinese. I mean, they've got everybody there and they seem to be handling it, you know, quite well. Frank, one of the things that is so chilling, I think, in our democracies is the sense of inequality and in particular, the conditions of the people at the very bottom of societies, maybe the bottom 10, 15 percent, and the sense of how precarious their lives are, how underwhelming so much of their experiences, how much they feel that notwithstanding this incredible growth over 70 years of the size of the economy, their lives are not dignified, fulfilling in the way that they would have expected.

39:19Is this not a kind of fundamental crack at the heart of our systems? Well, I think that the lack of respect is more a cultural phenomenon than an economic phenomenon. There's been this big debate ever since 2016 about whether the rise of populism is driven by just economic factors like inequality, people being left behind, or whether there's a more complex cultural source, which, you know, is related to the economic decline, but it's not identical. You know, this feeling that elites do not respect me. And that's been combined. You know, this is something that's become more and more evident to me.

39:59The essence of populism is this, basically, it's a belief that the world runs by conspiracies. You know, this is the red pill thing in the matrix that, you know, you've been taking the blue pill up to now where you thought that all these institutions were legitimate. But now that you've taken the red pill, you realize that there's actually this hidden world of elites that is manipulating the apparent reality that you're experiencing. And, you know, everything is false. And so I'm not sure that the situation, you know, of working class people in the rich world is so fragile and horrible compared to earlier periods that that by itself is what's driving this.

40:37But it's the combination of that experience with a cognitive environment that simply breeds and encourages in many ways distrust of any established authority. And I think that it's this kind of pervasive distrust. You know, we have this guy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is the son of, you know, the first Robert F. Kennedy, who is a crackpot, you know? I mean, he got his start, you know, complaining about vaccines, But basically, he says his father was killed by the CIA. And I mean, there isn't a conspiracy theory that he doesn't believe in and promote. And he's now, you know, he's polling at 20 % of Democratic voters, you know, and how do you explain that?

41:22I don't think that there's an economic explanation. Well, the question, I guess, is how we get towards an answer. So how, I don't know whether we're getting to Denmark, but in trying to think about what a manifesto is, I mean, Alistair and I are obviously very focused on Britain, but I think this would be true in any democracy. What is the manifesto that you can produce that can genuinely feel relevant towards the people at the bottom 10-20 % of society? How are we going to restore their faith in institutions, restore a sense of dignity so that people don't feel alienated, legitimately resentful, patronized, excluded, and barraged with social media images of elites apparently having luxurious lives completely.

42:10at odds with their own daily existence? Well, look, obviously, there's no simple answer to that. But I would say you need to do a couple of things. First of all, you need to address the inequality. And that just means more social protections and more redistribution. I mean, I actually think that, you know, the classic European social democracy was really what stabilized Europe in that two generation period after 1945. And because of the rise of neoliberalism in the 80s and 90s, We got away from that. And I think that pendulum needs to swing back. But the second thing is that governments have just gotten less good at delivering, whether it's welfare benefits or health care or infrastructure, a whole bunch of things.

42:55And they need to get better at that. And that's a slightly different issue than just voting money, because, as I said, we've bogged ourselves down in, you know, a kind of proceduralism that really prevents us from getting to outcomes. A lot of what drives people crazy is the fact that you implement a policy and then nothing happens for the next two years because, you know, there's something in the system that's gumming it up. So I think a combination of a, you know, a more active government with a more efficient and effective government is at least going to deal with some of the sources of that unhappiness.

43:33Now, we briefly mentioned Brexit, which I think is fair to say is an obsession of mine. and I think I'm quite pleased that you put it down as the least the least averaging of the four I'm not sure I agree but but I did note that you said that the Brexit referendum was one of the biggest mistakes any politician has ever made do you mean the calling of the referendum or the outcome of the referendum by the way I wouldn't say that now I would say the invasion of Ukraine was the biggest mistake any politician has made recently but no Brexit was up there yeah I mean Cameron obviously thought that he'd win the referendum and this was an easy way to lance that particular boil and that was a big miscalculation.

44:15You know, in the state of California, we hold referenda all the time. You know, should porn actors be forced to wear condoms on set? We had to vote on that, you know, here in California. How did you vote? Isn't that one Frank? Oh, I said absolutely. You want to keep everyone safe. So I think in general, you know, referenda are bad ways of making policy. And this was a gamble, you know, that that just went really, really bad. And now it's really hard to undo. You mentioned the fact that you now think Vladimir Putin has overtaken David Cameron. Just explain why you think that. Well, you know, he wanted to make Russia great again by basically reincorporating Ukraine and toppling its democratic government.

45:00And he is now, you know, a year and a half into an incredibly bloody destructive war. You just had this Prugosian uprising against him that's shattered this illusion that he was trying to make that he's in control of everything. And it's hard to imagine a result that is less in line with what he originally expected. He's kind of the father of the modern Ukrainian nation because they now understand that they're not Russia and they're determined to keep it that way. And where do you see this ending? I mean, Alistair and I tend to be a bit gloomy. We sort of imagine it like the Iran-Iraq war continuing for eight years, that it's difficult to see how either side really prevails.

45:41Are you more optimistic? Well, I have been all along. I do think that if we had been better at giving them certain kinds of, you know, weapons like F-16s and long range missiles, they wouldn't be in the situation. They'd be much more successful. I don't think it's too late to rectify that situation. It's not yet the case that we can simply write off the counteroffensive as having failed. So I think, you know, if there's a breakthrough in that military conflict sometime this year, then things will look very different. And I think it's possible that that'll happen. And Frank, if I can finish on a final question, and then I'll hand back to Alistair.

46:21One of the great pleasures of talking to you is your extraordinary confident wry ability to reflect on things all over the world, from democracy's emergence in Taiwan, to the Prugosian revolution, to the conspiracy theories of Robert Kennedy. There is something sort of refreshingly, I think, quite, am I wrong about this, sort of distinctively American about this sort of confident ability to hold force on 180 countries simultaneously and wrap it into a global vision. Is there something about the American intelligentsia or universities or think tank cultures or their relationship with government that creates this particular narrative style, which I don't think we have so much in Britain?

47:05It'd be difficult to find an equivalent of you in Britain. Well, I don't know. I think you were probably the closest, Roy.

47:14Yeah, I don't know the self-confident opinions. I don't know exactly where that comes from. Maybe that is American. I mean, you know, I feel that where the intellectual milieu I come from is, you know, comparative political scientists. I remember earlier in my career talking to someone like Juan Linz at Yale University, who was a great comparatives, or one of my mentors, Seymour Martin Lipset. And they had this, at the time, I thought was this amazing ability to talk about different countries, different regions, and very different situations, but to do it with a level of knowledge that was really, really impressive.

47:55And I always thought, boy, it would be great to be in that position. Now, you know, after 30 years of traveling to probably at least a dozen countries every year, I have actually been to a lot of places, you know. I can give you my opinions about the Solomon Islands because I've been there. They're pretty important right now. They are, yeah. And so, you know, I actually think it's that comparative framework that I kind of grew up in. And what comparative politics does is it actually tries to put any individual country in a larger framework than, you know, where you're seeing how things are different, but the same, you know, as other similarly situated countries.

48:38My final question, Frank, is this. Rory and I talked recently to another intellectual, Michael Ignatieff, who, of course, went on to go into politics. Two questions. One is whether you ever considered a political career. And the second is something we discussed with Michael was where are the new ideas coming from and why do there appear to be so few new ideas in terms of political thought? Well, the answer to the first is no, I never thought that. I was always very shy and I couldn't imagine doing what politicians need to do in order to run for office. And I still can't imagine that. I figured at some point in my life that the one thing I'm actually good at is writing books.

49:18and so I've now got a position where I can do that. I'm sorry, the second question you had was... Was really whether you agree with something that we were discussing with Michael Ignatieff, that there's a dearth of political ideas. Oh, dearth of ideas. Well, you know, the answer to that could be that we're actually at the end of history, you know, that we've kind of on a cyclical basis gone through, you know, all the major political forms that are possible and, you know, now we're returning to a stronger state, you know, more state intervention in the economy. We've been there before. It's not a new idea, but it actually may be one of the solutions to some of the problems that we're experiencing right now.

49:57Well, Frank, it's been lovely to talk to you. Okay, same here. Thank you so much for your patience and good humor. And it's been a real privilege to talk to you. Thank you very much. Okay, well, thanks for having me on. Thank you. All the best. Bye-bye.

50:13so um alistair listen i mean basically he's just like you he's been completely defined by a particular moment in his life i think i think he's more defined by his moment than i have by mine i could be completely wrong but there are some there's some similarities no totally yeah i raised that i mean it's like i thought of it this morning i was doing this interview with the belgian newspaper about the book. And she literally did this thing with, you know, obviously I have to ask you about Iraq. And it's like, I always think what a journalist says, obviously I have to ask you. It's one of those things that's just like a tick box that other journalists will be really pissed off if you don't.

50:53But I don't think it's imaginable that you could do a long interview with Frank Fukuyama without saying, or just tell us about the end of history thing. And it's interesting, at the swimming pool this morning, I mentioned to a few people I was interviewing Francis Fukuyama. A couple didn't know who I was talking about, but those that did, which was a majority, said, oh, yeah, the end of history guy. Well, it's amazing, isn't it? Because there's another guy that I knew at Harvard called Joe Nye who invented this phrase, soft power. Absolutely, yeah. And there is some kind of genius in getting the right words.

51:26It's not only the content of what they said, it's the phrase that's so clever. It's called people's princessology, Rory. People's princessology. Beautiful. Exactly. The people's princessology. Exactly. By the way, can I say as well, Roy, the other thing that was of fascinating, real interest in the swimming pool cue is the fact that you finally started to lift the veil on your time at Highgrave in such a dramatic way. Anyway. Moving on. Moving on. Moving on. Moving on. I'll be at Highgrove. So one of the things I think that's obviously so powerful about the phrase, the end of history, is it doesn't make any sense.

52:04I mean, it's incredibly memorable because it just doesn't compute. What do you mean, the end of history? We're continuing to live, we're continuing to die. And there are historic events that may change. But I thought he explained it quite well in terms of what he actually meant. Yeah, but I mean, I wish I could produce one of these phrases. I mean, it'd be the making of it. Oh, you will. Rory, you will. You will. You will. I mean, I've got a few under my belt, but you know. Well, people's princess. We've had the people's princess. I think, you know, new labor. New labor. New labor. That's very good.

52:37That was mine. That was acknowledged by the leader in his autobiography. Now, I find him very, well, he's obviously very clever, but I do think very thoughtful. And I agree with you with your final question about, I'd find it hard to be as optimistic as he seems to be living in America right now. His very first interaction with us was talking about how fabulous it was in California. And I'm thinking wherever I was in the United States at the moment, I feel, oh, my God, this place is just falling to bits. Well, I'm here and I'm actually, I mean, as you know, I'm in New York at the moment. And it's very strange.

53:13I mean, I've just, you know, I was in Washington Square this morning. And it's a combination of a lot of people with mental illnesses, a lot of homeless people, enormous amount of public drug use, and the Canadian wildfires, which are filling the whole air with invisible particles of soot. I mean, there is a kind of apocalyptic air to the whole thing at the moment, which is maybe influencing. I also think that it is a fundamental challenge to his idea. I mean, you know, obviously, we can all sympathize with the idea that democracy is a better form of government than others, and that there are reasons to think that as people become more educated and more prosperous, they're going to want more liberty, more say over their lives.

53:54But my goodness, the last 10 years has been a pretty terrifying reminder of the fact that this doesn't feel inevitable at all. Well, he said in that speech I mentioned in Oslo, which I watched this morning, he said that democracy, according to Freedom House, democracy has declined for 17 successive years, which is pretty, you know, and I do think we are facing that sort of conundrum of, well, what if dictatorships can't succeed and democracies can't succeed? And I don't think, you know, you're in America and you've just, you know, gone there from the Middle East. But honestly, Rory, Britain right now feels perilously close to being a failed state.

54:36It's like nothing works here. Absolutely nothing works. And, you know, it's just, I don't know. I wish I could be as optimistic as he is. Well, this point about efficacy, I think, is one that he mentioned, and it's one that you agree with, actually. This strange sense of powerlessness, and we're not getting things done that the public – you know, I remember thinking about this, that one of the most obvious things in British life is the idea of a line between Leeds and Manchester. if you really wanted to help these measures, you need to connect them with a fast train line. And even those politicians who are proposing it, it turns out it's going to be delivered in 2036 or 2040.

55:15Crossrail 2 first talked about in the 1970s. And you were reminding me that Heathrow, you know, the third runway. Third runway, 1998, first paper I saw on that. And he actually, he was getting ahead of himself there because I think he said, you still haven't got the fifth runway. Frank, we still haven't got the third runway. No, so it's, yeah, I'll go. I think I'm interested in this book he mentioned. I thought I'd read these books, but I didn't know about this one about biotech. Yeah, yeah. We should have maybe pushed him more on that. I mean, he's fascinating on it and quite scary on it. I mean, he was talking about so many other interesting things.

55:52I agree, we slightly missed a trick there, not pushing him on why he sees biotechnology as such a threat. But I think one aspect of it is the one that he mentioned, which is the way in which the people who control the biotechnology then have immense power over the people who are dependent on it to operate, but also a sense that he imagines it as fundamentally reshaping human nature. And if human nature was reshaped, then all these ideas about liberty, equality, democracy, which reflect assumptions about human nature, then come under threat. I also thought, I mean, I didn't quite put my finger on it, but I do think there is something very interesting about these sort of public intellectuals, these people who can speak with such fluency.

56:36And also the way that this rather shy professor was able to respond so confidently and deftly to you challenging him on which way he was going to vote about porn stars wearing condoms.

56:51yeah look he's got a very nice manner about him and i i think i think the problem with a lot of intellectuals is that they're not very good at distilling their thoughts and communicating them in a very clear and concise way and that's something that he's very very good at i thought that watching his speech in oslo i don't think he had an auto cue i think he was literally just standing up and talking he was walking around the stage and very very fluent and and obviously he thinks things through sufficient then you know what i what he was saying to us is this stuff that is a kind of it's a lifetime's work that he's distilled his own thinking about things but he's also prepared to change the other reason maybe why i don't know the thing the journey from neoconservatism to social democracy yeah yeah to liberal social democracy i thought it's quite interesting he was apparently a very very close friend of paul wolf that's like sort of you know almost like best mates amazing i knew wolfowitz quite well and he was a man he was a menace wasn't Well, I knew him very well.

57:47I used to see a lot of him and I'd have lunch with him in Washington. And I mean, very, very similar to Frank Fukuyama, again, is incredibly fluent, very intellectual, reads, is very earnest, very serious. And I became sort of strangely, although I disagreed profoundly with him and was slightly horrified by a lot of the things he was associated with, I also found myself becoming quite fond of him and quite sympathetic towards him. He was a big, big, big driver of neoconservatism. In a way, I think it was like, you know, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were the drivers. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Alistair, thank you.

58:27Thank you for doing that. Good. That was very good. And look forward to seeing you very soon. Absolutely. See you soon.

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