After the End of History: Conversations with Francis Fukuyama

by Mathilde Fasting

With Trump it is different, and I think that this kind of disrespect for legal and constitutional institutions is really spreading to too many parts of the world. He likes to attack existing institutions. And I think this is a very dangerous tendency.

No wonder the pandemic response was a shambles!

Now, with the COVID-19 crisis, we’re moving rapidly in the other direction, toward stronger executive authority and more restrictions on individual freedom.

Larry Diamond calls a democratic recession.

We’ve seen a remarkable revival of protest after the killing of George Floyd in May 2020, not just in the United States but in many other parts of the world. These protests are driven by young people who have distinct political views.

I think the third threat is a particular kind of populism that has arisen in a lot of democracies and that basically uses democratic legitimacy to undermine liberal institutions.

Turning to Europe, it is easy to see political leaders who are siding with Trump: Viktor Orbán of Hungary, Nigel Farage of Britain, Marine Le Pen of France, and other right-wing populists as well as Recep Erdoğan in Turkey and Vladimir Putin in Russia. Poles and Hungarians are emphasizing their national identity and excluding people who don’t share the same historical and cultural background or ethnicity.

In 2020 we have been preoccupied with the COVID-19 crisis, and it has been a singular misfortune for the United States to have been led by Donald Trump in this period of national emergency.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

His lack of qualification to be a national leader has been on public display. For more than two months he denied that there was even a crisis and did nothing to prepare the country for the pandemic. As a result, we currently have the world’s highest number of COVID-19 deaths and are in one of the steepest recessions in living memory. Today America’s performance is lagging that of Europe by a huge amount, and Trump is pretending that the crisis is over.

“This will be over by easter”

The outcome of the election speaks to a deeper polarization in American society. The Democrats did not win an overwhelming victory against Trump and Trumpism. Probably the biggest weakness of our system right now is the fact that many Republicans think that the Democratic Party is a bigger threat to their way of life than Russia, which I find completely incomprehensible. Trump has convinced a big majority of the Republican Party to accept him. That’s probably the most disappointing thing. He was even acquitted by the Republican Party in the impeachment hearings, despite the fact that he was clearly guilty as charged. You have a lot of Republicans that should realize the kind of threat he poses to our institutions, but because of a kind of cynical calculation that he will get them things that they want, they’re willing to accept him.

Donald Trump has mobilized a very angry constituency. It’s never going to be more than about a third of the country. But they’re now quite angry and upset, and even after his presidency, they’re not going away as a voting bloc. It’s troubling for the future of the country because that’s one of the drivers of polarization. He has made this polarization much more visible.

I and many people like me are delighted that Biden won and have been celebrating. But more than 74 million Americans voted for Trump, and there was no Biden landslide as many had been hoping. At this moment Republicans are lining up to support Trump’s assertion that the election was stolen, even though there is not a shred of evidence that this is true. So we still have a problem.

To some extent, Trump has normalized a certain racist understanding of race relations in the United States. Look at his reaction to the George Floyd protests—calls to shoot demonstrators—and his defense of Confederate statues.

Even under Biden’s presidency, the United States will still be plagued by political polarization. There will be a good third of the country that will feel angry and resentful, and many have contested the legitimacy of the election, even violently. Biden will be handed a country suffering from disease and a severe economic recession, and the society as a whole will be subject to huge distributional conflicts as the government hands out assistance very broadly.

I don’t think it will be possible for American allies to regain the trust they once had in the American commitment, even under Biden’s presidency. They all know that there is still a big populist-isolationist bloc of voters out there and that the old bipartisan consensus on internationalism has broken down. The Republicans could come roaring back in 2022 or 2024. So it will be hard for the United States to resume its old role.

Undermine Biden’s foreign policy push?

This tendency is being greatly enhanced by the COVID-19 pandemic and the natural suspicion it raises of foreigners. No nation cooperates with other nations simply out of the goodness of its heart or because it’s meeting some kind of moral requirement. You do it out of self-interest. You realize if you don’t cooperate with other countries, you’re not going to solve global health, or control money laundering, or any of the kinds of problems that the international community faces. It is a question of whether you sacrifice short-term sovereignty for long-term benefits. What we’ve seen is, especially on the part of the United States, a narrowing of that sense of self-interest in the case of Donald Trump. It’s so transactional that, basically, if the United States doesn’t make money on a particular agreement, we’re simply not going to have any part of it.

The Chinese have figured out how to basically control their internet users so that they do not threaten the regime,

The PC revolution was democratic, spreading computing power to everybody. AI is the opposite. It concentrates the ability to use these technologies in large companies and large countries.

Yes, the Chinese have a very comprehensive system of censorship and social control over the use of the internet, and in fact China is now a surveillance state that is able to use the capabilities of modern technology to minutely control the behavior of all of its citizens. And obviously the kind of surveillance state that the Chinese are trying to create is also unprecedented.

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the incentives to use this kind of technology to monitor people’s contacts, and that is something that is likely to stay with us.

American distrust of the state is a little bit pathological, and it locks us into an equilibrium that we can’t get out of. You don’t trust the state, and therefore you don’t want to pay taxes. You don’t want to give the state authority, and therefore the state can’t deliver public health care. Then when the state doesn’t actually deliver goods and services, people say, “Well, see, the state is incompetent; I won’t pay taxes or give it more authority.” It’s a vicious circle that a lot of countries in Latin America have followed as well as the United States.

Confusing for an aussie.

Even the current COVID-19 crisis is proving not to be severe enough to bring about larger reforms; rather than ending polarization, the American response to the crisis has been undermined by our polarized response to it.

I don’t think China has a readily exportable model.

This trend will obviously be accelerated as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. A million Muslims were put in camps and are living under this extraordinary surveillance, and it is deeply disturbing. Very few other countries wanted to make a fuss about this, including many Muslim countries, for fear of angering China. The European Union now is completely blocked from saying anything negative about China because just one country like Hungary or Greece can say, “No we’re not going to offend China because we’ve got an infrastructure project at their funding,” and that’s it.

Money talks.

They appear to be using the COVID-19 epidemic as an excuse to tighten their control over Hong Kong.

Southern Shenzhen?

That possibility is a real one. Most people, including a lot of people in Taiwan, just don’t take that seriously, but it is a real possibility, and I have thought for some time that the prospect of actual military conflict in East Asia is much higher than the global business community thinks. China’s ambitions expand the more powerful they are, and we’ve already seen that in the South China Sea where they have militarized these islands.

In theory China’s political system has many weaknesses. You can see in this coronavirus case an attempt to control everything from the top. In a crisis like this, that attempt has terrible effects because people don’t want to be honest about what they see right in front of them.

Leaders were suppressing local professionals’ warnings about how bad it was, and then this first doctor died of the virus. On the other hand, the Chinese state has a lot of enforcement power and has been able to get to a point where the pandemic is under control, and it can reopen its economy. This comes at a huge cost in terms of people’s rights, and democratic countries like South Korea have been able to achieve even better results with less authoritarian means. Nonetheless, China’s performance in the COVID-19 crisis looks pretty disciplined compared to the shambolic US response.

Many people in China were shocked at how badly a number of democratic countries

handled the COVID-19 crisis, including Italy, Spain, and the United States. This has tamped down the early domestic criticisms of China’s own response.

The European Union can’t criticize China, for example, because Hungary has a Chinese road project that they don’t want to jeopardize. Now the Commission itself can’t do anything about this. It’s got a fairly limited field of activity, and what this requires is a kind of restructuring of power within the European Union, for instance, that the parliament has been getting more power over time. It is the most legitimate body within the European Union, and in the long run if you don’t have that kind of a democratizing shift toward more legitimate parts of the European Union, it’s going to be hard for that organization to exercise its powers properly.

The question of the functioning of the state has become more acute after the COVID-19 pandemic. You wrote quite early after the outbreak an article called “The Thing That Determines a Country’s Resistance to the Coronavirus.” What determines it? The best-performing states in this crisis are those that have, first, good state capacity, meaning the public health infrastructure, people, and facilities to deal with mass sickness, and, second, widespread trust in the country’s leadership. That trust is built partly on state capacity but also on the citizens’ sense that the leadership is honest and seeking some kind of greater public interest. Trust is something more than legitimacy; a government can be legitimate but not trusted. Trust really has to do with competence and purpose.

The United States today is not criticizing but, rather, is often praising authoritarian leaders like Orbán or Fattah el-Sisi, who have been readily violating liberal principles.

Now, under conditions of the pandemic, we are too preoccupied with our own survival to pay attention to erosions of democracy in other countries. If the “us” refers to the old established centrist parties and voters, then, yes, there was a degree of apathy in not taking the rising populist threat seriously at first. However, it could be that the pandemic has been good for liberals and bad for populists. The poll ratings of leaders like Angela Merkel and Jacinda Ardern have gone up as a result of their good performance, and bad leaders like Trump, Bolsonaro, and Lopez Obrador have seen setbacks. This may change as the economic recession drags on, but for now there is hope.