In a new book, the political theorist offers a stout defense of liberalism against threats from left and right — and predicts that Ukraine will revive “the spirit of 1989.”
STANFORD, Calif. — On a recent morning, Francis Fukuyama was sitting in his basement office on the idyllic campus of Stanford University, talking about drones.
Not the Turkish-made drones that have been crucial to the defense of Ukraine, a cause that Fukuyama, a leading voice on American foreign policy for decades, has vocally championed. But the humbler, D.I.Y. ones he started building again about six months ago in his home workshop.
He has also built his own land-based rovers and fine furniture — a painstaking pursuit he picked up decades ago when he decided to turn a walnut tree that toppled in his yard into a pair of Pembroke tables. Just drying the wood, he said, took three years.
“What happens is I start this very ambitious project and it’s so exhausting that at the end of it, I get sick of it,” he said. “I have a lot of hobbies,” he added, a bit sheepishly.
One thing Fukuyama, 69, has not gotten sick of is trying to answer the biggest questions about democracy, human nature and the long arc of historical progress. In 1989, he shot to unlikely celebrity with his essay “The End of History?,” which argued that the decline of Communism marked the end of grand ideological struggle and the “universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
Published a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall (and expanded into a best-selling book in 1992), it was an instant sensation, and has continued to inspire debate, mockery, memes and at least one nuclear-strength craft beer packaged inside a taxidermied squirrel.
Fukuyama moved on to more earthbound subjects, writing books on social trust, biotechnology, governance, the origins of political order and the decline (by his lights) of the neoconservative movement he emerged from. But he has also kept tinkering with — and defending — the thesis that made his name.
It looms behind his new book, “Liberalism and Its Discontents,” a short, staunch defense of classical liberal values against what he sees as threats from both the identitarian left and — far more dangerously — the populist, nationalist right.
The Fukuyama of 1989 saw the end of grand ideological struggle as potentially a little “boring.” But the Fukuyama of 2022 has mustered a bit more passion, especially since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a country he has been visiting regularly since 2013.
In early March, he predicted that Russia was “headed for an outright defeat,” which will revive “the spirit of 1989” and “get us out of our funk about the declining state of global democracy.” He has been deluged with interview requests ever since.
“There’s been so much cynicism about the idea of democracy, including in many democratic countries,” he said. “This makes it so vivid why it’s better to live in a liberal society.”
Fukuyama (Frank to his friends) grew up in New York City, where his father was a minister and an academic. (He traces his own love of making things partly to his paternal grandfather, a Japanese immigrant who opened a hardware store in the Little Tokyo neighborhood in the early 1900s.)
He fell in love with philosophy at Cornell University, where he studied classics. If “The End of History” had a beginning, it might be a seminar on Plato’s “Republic” taught by the charismatic political philosopher Allan Bloom, the future author of “The Closing of the American Mind.”
In Plato’s dialogue, Socrates begins by debating the nature of justice. “It struck me as what people ought to be doing, asking these really big questions,” Fukuyama said. But how he got from there to neoconservative foreign policy, he said, “is a bit more complicated.”
After a dalliance with postmodern literary theory at Yale, he transferred to Harvard’s Ph.D. program in government, where he wrote a dissertation on Soviet foreign policy in the Middle East. Early in the Reagan administration, his friend and fellow neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz hired him at the State Department’s Office of Policy Planning.
It was during a later stint there, in the George H.W. Bush administration, that Fukuyama wrote “The End of History?,” which was originally delivered at an academic conference organized by Bloom.
Published in the journal The National Interest with commentaries by a half dozen leading figures, the essay (which was grounded in a reading of Hegel’s abstruse philosophy of history) landed like a bombshell, “outselling everything, even the pornography,” one Washington newsstand owner reported.
For some, it was one of the most important foreign policy essays since George Kennan’s famous “X” article, which called for the “containment” of Soviet Communism. For others, it was dangerous Cold War triumphalism.
Fukuyama, currently a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, still seems a bit amazed by it all, recalling a “Woody Allen-like experience” on an airplane.
“The guy next to me pulled out a copy of Time with an article about it,” he said. “I wanted to tap him on the shoulder and say, ‘Hey, that’s me!’”
He realized he wanted to be a writer, not a bureaucrat. And success gave him the freedom, as he put it, “to teach myself stuff I didn’t know.”
For “Trust,” a study of the connections between culture and economic life, he dived into the work of the sociologist Max Weber. “Our Posthuman Future” took on biotechnology. His two-book “Origins of Political Order” series surveyed 50,000 years of human evolution. (“The research got a little out of hand,” he admitted.)
Fame, he said, also made him “less reliant on the good opinion of a circle of friends.” In 2004, he broke with his fellow neoconservatives over what he saw as their delusionally sunny assessment of the Iraq war.
In an article in The National Interest, he blasted people like the columnist Charles Krauthammer for promoting a reckless nation-building project untethered to reality, and betraying neoconservatism’s traditional wariness of grand social experiments.
Today, Fukuyama called the resulting schism “difficult” but liberating. “I could think on my own,” he said. He said he hasn’t spoken since to Wolfowitz (at the time, the deputy secretary of defense), though Fukuyama — a strong critic of Donald Trump — recently patched it up with another old neoconservative friend, William Kristol, following Kristol’s Never Trump turn.
Jacob Heilbrunn, the author of “They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons” and current editor of The National Interest, said Fukuyama had a more reality-based perspective than his ex-friends.
“Intellectuals have a predilection for extremism,” Heilbrunn said. “He came out of an extreme movement, but I think he managed to keep his bearings.”
Fukuyama described it as a matter of correcting your ideas when experience proves them wrong. As for his politics today, he described himself as “more left-wing” on economics but center-right on many cultural issues.
Fukuyama has a modest, straight-shooting demeanor, but he can display a wry competitive streak. Asked about the contest between his “end of history” thesis and Samuel Huntington’s West-against-the-rest “clash of civilizations,” he offered a state of play.
“In the 1990s and early 2000s, it looked like I was ahead, but after Sept. 11, people started arguing he was right,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s conclusive that I’m going to lose.”
Liberal democracy, he believes, isn’t just an accidental, culturally contingent byproduct of a particular historical moment, as some of his critics have argued. “I do believe there’s an arc of history, and it bends toward some form of justice,” he said.
In his new book, released on Tuesday by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Fukuyama argues that liberalism is threatened not by a rival ideology, but by “absolutized” versions of its own principles. On the right, the promoters of neoliberal economics have turned the ideal of individual autonomy and the free market into a religion, warping the economy and leading to dangerous systemic instability. And on the left, he argues, progressives have abandoned individual autonomy and free speech in favor of claims of group rights that threaten national cohesion.
“The answer to these discontents,” he writes, “isn’t to abandon liberalism, but to moderate it.”
Fukuyama said that Eric Chinski, his editor at Farrar, Straus, pushed him to engage with the most thoughtful critics of race-blind liberal individualism, like the Black philosopher Charles W. Mills, rather than the latest media-driven outrage stoked by anti-critical race theory activists.
He may disagree with them, but many critical race theorists in the academy, Fukuyama said, “are making serious arguments” in response to liberalism’s historical, and continuing, failure to fully extend equal rights to all.
He’s more scathing about the “postliberal” intellectuals of the American right, with their admiration for Hungary’s Viktor Orban, like the legal scholar Adrian Vermeule (whom he describes as having “flirted with the idea of overtly authoritarian government”) and the political scientist Patrick Deneen.
But Fukuyama is less interested in polemics than practicalities. If he emerged in 1989 as a kind of prophet, today he’s a boots-on-the-ground social scientist, concerned with what it takes to keep systems and structures working.
One recent morning, as part of a class called “Policy Problem-Solving in the Real World,” he led two dozen graduate students through a simulation of a real-life anticorruption campaign in Indonesia. It’s an exercise he has led in countries around the world (including Ukraine), as part of a leadership-training program run by Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed until last year.
The students broke into groups playing the president, the police, civil society and so on, as Fukuyama peppered them with questions. “Oooh,” he said as one team issued a veiled ultimatum. “Someone is making threats.”
“It’s all about political power,” he explained, as the teams huddled. “You don’t win by making academic arguments. You win because you bring people to your side.”
The solutions he offers at the end of “Liberalism and Its Discontents” may seem boringly technocratic (“devolve power to the lowest appropriate level of government”) or abstract (“protect freedom of speech, with an appropriate understanding of limits”).
And his final sentence — a plea to recover “a sense of moderation, both individual and communal” — is hardly the kind of thing that sends people pouring into the streets.
He said he’s not sure what will. “One of the problems with ‘The End of History’ is that it did breed complacency,” he said. “But you have to be vigilant. And you have to keep struggling.”
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