In his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, American political scientist Francis Fukuyama posed the question: if humanity has arrived at the most effective form of government, have we also arrived at the end of history?
Western liberal democracy had triumphed against communism in the battle of ideas, he claimed, yet in the 30 years since the book was published. liberal democracy has often seemed to be declining.
In his new offering, Liberalism and its Discontents, Fukuyama argues that liberalism is threatened not by a rival ideology, but has been pushed to new extremes by both the right and the left.
The answer, he writes, is not to abandon liberalism, but to moderate it.
Francis Fukuyama Photo: Supplied
At the end of The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama predicted liberal democracy was vulnerable to a strongman populist leader such as Vladimir Putin.
“The title of the book was The End of History and the Last Man and the 'last man' is a figure that comes from Friedrich Nietzsche who said that in a peaceful liberal society, people will have no aspirations, no struggles for justice. There'll be what he called 'men without chests', and that this was fundamentally something that human beings were not going to be happy with.
“I said something to the effect that if they can’t struggle on behalf of justice and freedom, then they're going to struggle against justice and freedom. And I sort of think that that's what's happening.”
Unrest borne of stability has crept into some societies, he says.
“We've had three generations of peace and prosperity since the end of the Second World War, we've had a full generation and more go by since the end of communism or the collapse of communism in Europe.
“I think a lot of people simply believe that peace and prosperity is their birthright, they don't have to struggle for it.
“And other people think that that's not enough, they want to have a national identity that unites them in a single religion or a single culture.”
India is an example of liberalism in retreat, Fukuyama says.
“People like Prime Minister Modi in India, who inherited a liberal India created by Gandhi and Nehru, an incredibly diverse society, which is exactly what liberal states are good at regulating.
“He's trying to change the national identity to one based on Hindu nationalism. And that, I think, is going to be pretty disastrous, because it's going to lead to a lot of communal violence. And it's an illustration of people not being content with just living peacefully in a liberal society, they want something more, they want this strong bonded sense of community.
“I think that's what's really roiling our world today.”
Fukuyama does not believe that liberal democracy is inherently doomed, however.
“There's a durability to the doctrine because it really is a way of allowing people that don't agree with each other on certain fundamental issues to tolerate one another and live peacefully.
“It's been proven actually a fairly durable doctrine, but it's also one that has its vulnerabilities because, as I said, people tend to take it for granted after a while and then seek other kinds of stronger, more tightly bonded communities.”
He believes that currently, the greatest threat to liberal democracy comes from the right.
“Especially in the United States, because the right has actually come to power and has been able to exercise power. That was Donald Trump in the years that he was president.
"And unfortunately, in 2024, he may get re-elected again, and if he comes back he's likely to do much more damage than he did in his first four years, because he'll be angry, and he'll be a little bit smarter about how to move the levers of government in a direction that he wants.”
The United States is not in good shape, Fukuyama says.
“Because of the extreme polarisation in which maybe a third of Americans believe some version of this lie that Trump told that the 2020 election had been stolen.
“So that I think is a clear and present danger to American democracy.”
The threat to democracy from the left is real, he says, but not quite as immediate and urgent.
"It's really the threat of intolerance, and a different conception of society, not as a collection of free individuals, but as a collection of groups that are defined in these fixed terms having to do with race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and so forth.”
This intolerance involves an unwillingness to listen to other arguments, he says.
“Especially in precincts like universities or certain parts of the media or in Hollywood, where these ideas are very prevalent,
“Firing people that dare to express a contrary opinion on Twitter. I think that, in general, that threat tends to be hyped very much by the right and it's probably not as pervasive as many of them would insist, but I do think that it's the case that in a lot of university settings, for example, that are supposed to be dedicated to freedom of speech. There's a certain range of issues where it's pretty hard actually to speak frankly.”
Photo: Supplied
The idea that elites, under the guise of democracy, have a hidden agenda to steer us in certain directions has taken hold on the left and the right, Fukuyama says.
“This was an idea that was really popularised in post-structuralism, postmodernism. It came to a head in the writings of Michel Foucault, who had a pretty systematic critique of modern natural science, which is a cognitive mode that's closely associated with liberalism, modern science and liberal politics grew up really at the same time and under the same conditions.
“What Foucault said was these days, the way that elites exercise power is not overtly, but through the language of science in which they appeal to the authority of science to get people to do what they want.”
That argument is now commonly made by those on the extreme right, he says.
“They've made similar arguments about vaccinations or mask-wearing or other public health measures that, according to them, are simply power-grabs by elites, because they want to be able to manipulate people.
“In both cases, I think that they're being vastly assisted in this effort by social media, because what social media has done and the internet more broadly, is to take away all of the filters and the fact-checkers and the verification that had been built into a lot of the older ways that we got information.”
Fukuyama believes human history is a story of moral progress, albeit with setbacks along the way.
“You have certain people on the left saying that essentially, police violence in Minneapolis and other American cities is just the latest form of lynching and the same kind of racial hierarchy that led to slavery is still the basic structure of American society.
“And I just think this is ridiculous. When I was younger, in the 1960s, African Americans could not walk in many parts of downtown Washington DC, the nation's capital, because there was still legal segregation.
“And this idea that we've made no progress whatsoever towards greater equality over the last several generations, I just think is absurd.”
A longer-term view is needed, Fukuyama says.
“The idea of equality and the ability of people to empathise with people that are different from them really has grown over the centuries.
“So, that's one modest reason to be a little optimistic about the overall direction that history has taken.”
Nevertheless, mature democracies can and do decay, he says.
“Maintaining a modern state, one that is not deeply corrupt, one that does not hand out benefits to friends and family, first and foremost, but that treats people as citizens, as relatively equal citizens, is actually something that is very hard to achieve.
“Because as human beings, we actually do have these pretty deep instincts to favour friends and family. And if you tell people you have to not do that, you have to give it to the most qualified person or person that's passed an exam or a person that has certain qualifications, we resist that.”
Historically you need a modern state to grow and govern big societies well, he says, but there is a necessary tension between free-market economics and liberal democracy.
“And I think what's happened in the last couple of decades is the liberal part dominated and led to, under these neoliberal doctrines, the deconstruction of states and their deregulation that then reduced the legitimacy of the system as a whole.”
