Has Democracy Reached the End of Its History? A conversation with Francis Fukuyama
Fukuyama, a young political scientist fresh out of the RAND Corporation, published an essay in the National Interest that, as the New Yorker put it, “turned the foreign-policy world on its ear.” It was entitled “The End of History?” — and over the last three decades, many people seem to have forgotten that question mark.
Francis Fukuyama: In the US and in Europe, where you’ve got these right-wing nationalists rising, it’s often been attributed to growing economic inequality created by globalization. There’s this idea that a lot of working-class people have been left behind, as a result of outsourcing and that sort of thing.
FF: If it were just economic, you should be getting big left-wing populism arising everywhere, where people want more welfare benefits and more unemployment compensation, all this sort of thing.
But the biggest new voices are all on the right. And they’re nationalists. They’re anti-immigrant. And the complaint isn’t even so much that we’re losing our jobs, but that we’re losing our national identity.
Tobin Harshaw Bloomberg 29 July 2023
The End of History? Francis Fukuyama
The National Interest No. 16 (Summer 1989)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24027184
Three recent books about the future of democracy
Francis Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022)
Pranab Bardhan, A World of Insecurity: Democratic Disenchantment in Rich and Poor Countries (Harvard University Press, 2022)
Englund: Three recent books about the future of democracy (englundmacro.blogspot.com)
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