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Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History?” is remembered as a triumphalist argument heralding the permanent victory of liberal democracy. After it, and anything major that happened in the world, you would get people saying: Well, I guess history didn’t really end, did it?
I remember this particularly after Sept. 11, 2001. This Friday, of course, is its 25th anniversary. But this was such a terrible misreading of Fukuyama’s argument. Because if you actually read his essay, and particularly if you read the book that came out of that essay, he is saying something very different.
The book was called “The End of History and the Last Man,” and it was anything but triumphalist. Liberal democracy might win, Fukuyama thought. It might become the way most states organize themselves.
But it might win atop a cramped and partial vision of the human soul, one that believes in our ability to consume but has little room for our desire for recognition, for greatness, for daring. And no political system without room for those parts of our soul would be stable for very long. You cannot build a good society atop a flawed vision of human nature.
My view is that very few books in politics are as insightful or as important for understanding where liberal democracy went wrong, why figures like Donald Trump keep rising and why the opposition to them seems so wan and uninspiring so often.
This is a book that I think needs to be cleared of a sin it didn’t really commit because it has something to say to us now.
Fukuyama is a political scientist at Stanford University. He’s written many books since that one, including a two-volume series on the nature of political orders, a critique of the neoconservative world that he was once part of and a defense of liberalism from its attackers. But his new book is a memoir: “In the Realm of the Last Man.”
So I wanted to begin with the ideas of the end of history and the last man. I wanted to begin by rediscovering the book that made Fukuyama famous — so we can hear what it has to say about the world we now live in.
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Ezra Klein: Francis Fukuyama, welcome to the show.
Francis Fukuyama: Thanks very much for having me.
I want to begin the conversation with your most famous book — a book I’m a huge fan of — which is “The End of History and the Last Man.”
The book is built on an essay that came out in 1989. It’s a few months before the Berlin Wall falls. You have this moment where liberal democracy really seems to be triumphing. The end of history has become this highly memed, and in many ways simplified, concept.
So what was it?
Well, this was not my phrase. It was a phrase of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and he meant History with a capital H.
So we would use the words “development” or “modernization” today. But it’s directional, it’s progressive. Things are getting better. Human reason is prevailing in structuring societies. And the question of the end of history was not the end of events, it was: To what objective does this historical process seem to be leading?
The Marxists took that same concept of history. They believed in history, also, but they believed that the end was not a liberal society, it was a Communist utopia. And that was their guiding star in their political movement.
And my observation back in the late 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev was leading the Soviet Union, was that we weren’t going to get there. We were going to stop at the penultimate stage, which was some version of liberal democracy and a capitalist economy. And for me, that was the practical end of history that had really emerged.
So the way to think about the term “the end of history” is the end of the process of figuring out how to politically organize society.
Yeah, or the goal or the objective of that process.
Why did you think we were going to stop there?
Well, I didn’t know that we were going to stop, but all of these big systematic competitors had all either self-destructed or had been rejected by the people who once followed them. And I think the challenge that I was trying to make was to ask people: Can you locate something that’s better than this outcome?
Not necessarily that our society is perfect. It obviously is not. But is there an alternative form of political and social organization that you think will make people, in the end, happier and lead more fulfilled lives? And I, to this day, have not seen anyone really posit that.
Well, what the Marxists thought — and you talk about this in the book — is that a capitalist system has within it a contradiction that will inevitably lead to its undoing, which is you have this class conflict, and you have a small number of people at the top who are exploiting the great mass of workers beneath them. And that liberal democracy is lying when it says that it equally or even reasonably apportions freedom.
As the famous line goes: The fact that the rich and the poor men are not free to sleep under the bridge is not an equality of freedom.
So why are you not convinced class is such a dangerous contradiction?
Well, it could be, especially with the rise of technology. But for much of the period after 1945, you didn’t have pure capitalism. You had, basically, in most advanced countries, a form of social democracy.
And I think the democracy part of it was absolutely necessary, because unless you provide certain social protections — unless you do a certain amount of redistribution — the inequality in the society is going to become intolerable.
For most of that period, you actually had rising real incomes for working people. And so even though there was inequality, you had political stability because everybody could buy into it.
Now, I never argued that this would be true for all time. I think that the nature of technology is changing such that the degree of inequality has grown. I think globalization has also contributed to this. Unless you moderate those inequalities through political means, you’re just not going to have a stable democracy.
One of the things that I think is fascinating about the way you frame this in the book is you try to move the foundation for liberalism off the philosophers we normally give it to — Hobbes and Locke — and onto Hegel.
One of the ways you do that is to say that Hobbes and Locke had this much more narrow vision of what a liberal society, or even a just society, is trying to achieve — which is self-preservation, simply existing at a reasonable level of material well-being.
And you say Hegel understands the human soul better than that, and that the human soul wants more than that. It wants recognition.
The fundamental question for liberal societies — the one that will decide whether they are the end of history — is whether they are actually able to spread recognition around society equally enough. Not just freedom — recognition. Being seen, being valued enough to survive.
So tell me a bit about that move — that it’s actually recognition that is at the center of political life.
Well, this is an idea that goes all the way back to Plato. Socrates, as Plato writes in “The Republic,” asks: Well, we have reason, we have desire. But isn’t there a third part of the soul?
He calls that thymos, which can be translated as “spiritedness” or “pride.” And it’s a nonmaterial drive that people have — that they want other people to acknowledge their humanity.
So I invented these two Greek words, “isothymia” and “megalothymia.” Isothymia is basically the foundation of a liberal society — that everybody, by virtue of being born as a human being, has a certain base level of dignity that has to be recognized by the rest of society.
We recognize it in a liberal society by giving people rights. And that means that you are seen as a human being who has some share of the power of the community. And that generates a huge amount of resentment if you feel that other people are being recognized in a way that you are not. And that, really, I think, drives a lot of democratic politics.
Just to give you one example: In the gay marriage movement, you could have solved the economic problem of gay couples by giving them inheritance rights and that sort of thing — the ability to pass on property to the children they raise.
Civil unions.
Yeah, civil unions. But that wasn’t enough, because gay people wanted to have acknowledgment that their unions had just as much dignity and just as much value as that between a man and a woman. And I think that was the fundamental drive that led to the legalization of gay marriage. So that’s just an example.
But, I think, civil rights — Ralph Ellison wrote a novel, “Invisible Man,” back in the 1950s about the experience of African Americans who had moved from the South to the North. You didn’t have official, legally sanctioned segregation — what you had was the invisibility. That’s where the “invisible man” in the title comes from: that white people in the North simply didn’t see a Black person as a fellow human being.
And that was really what I think generated the deep resentment and distrust that existed in Northern cities and in racial politics.
One of the really interesting sections of the book is where you talk about the ways in which material politics and a politics of recognition can blur into each other. That there are many places where people have a level of material wealth that, say, in another country would be amazing, but in the country they’re in, because it puts them further down the scale of recognition, it is, for them, a terrible injury.
You have Adam Smith talking about this, that much of what people want from wealth is to be seen. It isn’t simply to consume.
So tell me a bit about that side of it. Because I think that also makes sense of some parts of our economic politics, too, where you’ll sometimes have somewhat self-satisfied liberals say: Well, actually, if you look on a chart, people have been getting richer, and it’s better than it was in the past, and we have antibiotics now.
But actually, if you understand that part of what people want from the money they make is to be seen and recognized a certain way in society — that actually contains within it a never enoughness, a constant instability. Because there is always a certain amount of inequality of recognition in society.
Right. Well, to expand a little bit on that Adam Smith section that you referred to, he says: The rich man glories in his wealth, and the poor man is unseen, is invisible to his fellow human beings. That’s really the pain of poverty, this invisibility to other people, and I think that still operates.
And if you think about our politics, a lot of it is about recognition rather than simply the distribution of material resources. A lot of populism today is driven by people who feel they’re invisible — that the world is run by educated elites, and they don’t listen to the concerns of people like them, and they don’t recognize them as being fully equal because they don’t have the education or the sophistication. I think that unequally distributed recognition is actually at the base of a lot of our problems.
I think it’s something you see in some cases on the left — I think wokeness had a lot of this in it — but also, in some cases, on the populist right. It’s a desire to invert status in a society. So a belief that your white privilege, or your wealth and your riches, make you suspect, and you should be treated as suspect until you, say, prove yourself otherwise.
On the right, this can take the form of attacks on their chosen elites — journalists and cosmopolitans. Populism has a lot of this in it: The people who have been judged excellent or who have attained power — there’s an effort to alter the moral valence of that power and the way society sees them. And I actually see the last couple of years as, in some ways, a fight between these.
Some of the radicalization of the tech right comes from their feeling of: Well, we did what you wanted. We made our money under capitalism. We built these great companies, and now you hate us. And that pushed them into a very, very different and, eventually, quite scary politics.
No, that’s absolutely right.
I think that your judgment of the moral character of the people you don’t like then blends with resentment at the fact that they are unjustly recognized, and that’s really the source of many of the forms of backlash that we see in our society, both on the left and the right. You don’t want to be seen as lesser than other people, and you get very resentful when you’re treated that way.
And the inversion, I think, is simply a demand that stops — that you be recognized at least as an equal. So just because you’ve made a lot of money doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person.
The real anger comes from people who feel that they’re victimized, that they are marginalized as a result of their identities. And that is now something that has occurred to a lot of people who occupied previously privileged positions in the society.
So you define, there, the version in which recognition is equal. But you said you invented another word. “Megalothymia,” is it?
Yes, megalothymia. So that is the desire to be recognized as greater than other people. And I think that this is obviously a threat in a democracy, because a liberal democracy is based on the premise that all people, all citizens, are essentially equal.
But that’s not enough for a certain group, a certain subset, of human beings. They want to dominate. They want to be more than others. It takes, oftentimes, a very negative form of political domination — so you want to be a dictator, an autocrat.
But it’s also necessary because you can’t have any kind of human excellence if you don’t have the desire to be better than other people. If you want to be a great pianist or a football star or a great artist, I think that’s also driven by a certain kind of desire to be recognized as better than other people.
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So I think that you can’t have a society of perfectly equal recognition. That has to be the basis for social cohesion, but you also can’t have a dynamic society without people who want something more than that.
I actually wrote about Donald Trump in the original book, “The End of History and the Last Man.”
He comes up a few times.
Yeah. And back then, I thought: Well, one of the virtues of living in a capitalist democracy is that this desire for unequal recognition can be satisfied just by becoming rich. It’s a way of bleeding off that energy.
Little did I know that, 30 years later, that wouldn’t be enough for Donald Trump — that he’d want political power as well as fortune.
So that brings us to the other side of the book, which gets talked about somewhat less. And maybe the way to get into this is simply to say: Who is the last man?
So the last man is the creature that Friedrich Nietzsche, the other great German philosopher of the 19th century, identified as the product of the end of history. A person who was satisfied with the things that liberalism provides — basically peace and prosperity — but had no further aspirations. No desires for a better vision of the world; nothing that they would risk their lives on behalf of.
And for Nietzsche, it was really that extraordinary ambition that was what made a human being a human being. And instead, in a liberal society, you have this very flat world where everybody has to tolerate everybody else, and nobody wants to think of themselves as better.
So there’s something interesting here.
One of the constant critiques of at least a portion of the right toward liberalism — for that matter, toward socialism — is that it’s fundamentally built on a lie, and that lie is equality.
And the form of equality that is a lie can take different versions. You can have people who see racial equality as a lie, and they get obsessed with race and I.Q. and things of that nature. You can have people who see individual equality as a lie.
Obviously, some people are more morally good than others. Other people are more talented, more capable, they work harder.
But many on the right see it as a dangerous lie that a society could or should be equal, and that the particular danger of that lie is that it blunts ambition. It pulls down those who would strive for excellence.
And I certainly see in much of the tech right reaction in the last couple of years — in some parts of the new right and how they look at society — a sense that this happened. This is why so many on the right are rediscovering Nietzsche, who is there in your title — the originator of the last man idea.
That’s right. Well, first of all, let me just defend the idea of universal equality, because I do think — ultimately, if you look historically, it derives from a certain Christian interpretation that human beings are fundamentally equal. There’s a passage in Galatians that says:
There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
And that fundamental insight, I think, has a real meaning because there’s a core something — in one of my books I labeled it Factor X — that makes every single human being recognizably human.
So I think that there is something, really, genuinely, to be protected in this idea: That every one of us has a certain moral core that is of great value and needs to be protected by the system.
But it’s also true that it leads to a flattening of our societies, because liberalism is necessarily pluralistic. It’s a recognition of the fact that different people pursue different ends, that they have different visions of the good life.
The reason you created liberalism in the first place in the 17th century was the wars of religion in which people killed themselves over minor theological differences. And there was a deliberate lowering of the human horizon to mean survival — you know: The right to life is superior to the right to the good life.
But this does take away something. People want to live the good life. They want to have higher aspirations.
If you look at modern America, we don’t ask that much of citizens. You obey the law, you pay your taxes, and that’s fine. You don’t have to sacrifice. You don’t have to take any grave risks on behalf of the society as a whole.
And I think that there is a part of the human psyche that actually wants that kind of life — that feels flattened if they don’t have the ability to, as the Declaration of Independence says, risk their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor for a cause. That’s why I think you get these jokers on Jan. 6 dressed up in camo, pretending that they are these patriots who are nobly defending this way of life.
I think that you have that striving for that degree of sacrifice, and it doesn’t exist in our society, and so you invent a cause.
So why in the original essay do you end on saying the end of history will be a sad time?
Well, I think it would be sad precisely because of that lack of risk and of a vision of a noble future that you are willing to struggle on behalf of.
I have another line in the original book that said that if you’re living in a society that is peaceful and democratic because of struggles of an earlier generation that were successful, then you’re going to struggle against peace and democracy because what you want to do is struggle for struggle’s sake.
And I think it’s that impulse that really drives a lot of extremist politics and disturbs the potential stability of a liberal society. It’s also a generational thing.
It’s clear that the people who want most desperately to live in a liberal society are people who live in dictatorships. There was genuine joy when Communism fell in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the late 1980s.
You can see this in all the people who get on boats, desperate to get out of a poor, corrupt, destitute country and to get to America or to Europe. And so there is a real enthusiasm for liberalism on the part of people who don’t have it.
And I think that we do go in these generational cycles, where once you have it, you take it for granted, and increasingly you look for something further. And so you’re not living in a dictatorship any longer, so you think Brussels is the dictatorship that you have to struggle against.
So there may be a rise and fall in the support for liberalism. But in the end, it’s going to be the most stable outcome that a human society can achieve.
You have a quote I often think about where you say:
We inhabitants of liberal democratic countries are by now so used to accounts of current events that reduce motivation to economic causes, so thoroughly bourgeois in our own perceptions, that we are frequently surprised to discover how totally noneconomic most political life is.
And I think that’s a bridge to something worth talking about this week. This is the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11.
I think the first time I remember a lot of people all of a sudden saying: Well, I guess the end of history wasn’t the end — it was actually Sept. 11. It was an attack on America from people coming out of an ideology that was fundamentally noneconomic, that was religious, that was very much concerned with recognition and humiliation — people willing to launch attacks in which they knew they themselves would die.
And one of the things that I think has come since then is that politics has been driven externally and internally by, I think, people whose motivations are much more about recognition.
And liberalism, as you say in the way this quote continues, does not:
… even have a common vocabulary for talking about the prideful and assertive side of human nature that is responsible for driving most wars and political conflicts.
So how do you think about that blind spot? And the way maybe Sept. 11 forced the resumption of recognizing that side of politics?
Well, it certainly forced the recognition that there were other people around the world who were driven by very noneconomic factors. If you’re willing to be a suicide bomber, you obviously feel that there is a completely nonmaterial cause that you’re serving.
I don’t think that it directly challenged liberalism in the way that people thought at the time. I think that radical Islamism is not an ideology that’s going to ever conquer the world — certainly not at this point. It only takes root in relatively poor, disorganized societies that are Muslim to begin with.
So in that sense, it was different from Marxism and Leninism, which genuinely had a kind of universal appeal in many different societies. And so I think the direct threat, that here was an alternative to liberalism that was very powerful, was simply not true. And in fact, in the years since Sept. 11, it has kind of faded.
What I think Sept. 11 triggered was actually the Western reaction, or overreaction, to both Afghanistan and to Iraq, that then set in motion a lot of other, I think, very dangerous trends: militarization of foreign policy, the beginnings of a surveillance state in the United States because of the fear of terrorism, and also — because the wars never resulted in a good outcome in either Afghanistan or Iraq — a great cynicism about American power and the use of American power that led directly to the emergence of people like Donald Trump.
So you were a neoconservative at that time. You signed some of the early letters arguing for the removal of Saddam Hussein.
Then the Iraq war itself led you to break with neoconservatism broadly. Why?
Well, I don’t have a problem with the use of force to get rid of a dictator. I mean, we did that in World War II with Germany and Japan, and that was a very positive outcome.
What I had been spending much of the 1990s studying was actually the use of power in developing countries that were culturally quite different in Central America, in Southeast Asia, in other places. And I was very skeptical as to whether the United States itself had the staying power to really transform a very different society.
In my view, we tried to do this in the Philippines, in Nicaragua, in Vietnam and many other places. And the American public gets tired after about four or five years, and then they give up, and the society is left worse off.
I was very worried that the Bush administration would succeed in getting rid of Saddam Hussein — but then would be at a loss on how to actually create a stable country in its wake. And it was worse than I anticipated. They were even less prepared for that long-term effort when they did the invasion, and that was the real problem that I had with it.
One thing you talk about in the memoir that you’ve released is you describe that as a reckoning with how much of your own thinking can be generated by who you’re around, what social circles you’re moving in. Just tell me about that meta-realization.
Yeah. Coming out of the Enlightenment, we have a certain view of human cognition that says: Well, human beings take in empirical information, they process it, they draw inferences, and that’s how they end up believing that certain things are true.
Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist, wrote a very interesting book about what he called motivated reasoning. He said that’s actually not the way that human reason works — that we start with the conclusions that we want to believe in, and we use our enormous cognitive abilities to marshal the evidence to support those views. And I have to say that Enlightenment view looks less and less true when you watch the politics of the present day.
And it was true for me, as well. I moved in this neoconservative social circle. I wrote a lot for Commentary magazine and other publications in that genre. And my own sense of who I was was very much shaped by the approbation of people who were also in that movement.
That’s what made it hard to break with them — because it means not just changing policies, but it means changing friendships. And that’s what happened.
One thing you saw right after Sept. 11, and in that period of run-up to war in Iraq, particularly, was a huge number of neoconservatives and other cultural commentators celebrating the return of a thymotic, passionate politics — this view that America had become decadent and soft, full of metrosexuals and management consultants. And here, finally, we had a struggle again. A clash of civilizations, a reason we needed this manly Texas rancher as our president.
Looking back, some of the rhetoric on this has a real quality of the absurd. But one thing I think you also see is that the Iraq war — the highly aggressive reaction America had for a long time afterward — has done very lasting damage to our politics. I see Trump as a direct descendant of it.
Right.
There is this constant belief, I think, on the part of some intellectuals, that violent struggle is an ennobling thing for societies. And yet I look at, certainly in more modern times, Vietnam and Iraq, and I see Israel right now, and I think the dangers of having your politics become profoundly oriented around violence, around reprisal, around struggle, around these more warlike virtues, is also very present and visible.
So I’m curious what lessons you take, not just about the question of: In what cases can America export democracy at the point of a gun? But what does it do to a polity when it sometimes gets the wish of people who think that we’ve grown soft and calculating? And all of a sudden, we have this return to the virtues or the vices of war?
Yeah, I actually talked about that in the last few chapters of “The End of History and the Last Man,” that there are certain thinkers, including Hegel, who felt that every now and then you had to have a war to recharge our batteries, so to speak, and to get us serious about things.
The trouble is that technology has moved on, and that’s just impossible. I mean, it’s not just nuclear weapons. You can’t have a little war with nuclear weapons. But conventional weapons have become so destructive that the negative impact of any kind of conflict right now is so potentially devastating that that’s simply not an alternative.
And so I think for a successful society that wants to bleed off that megalothymia, you need to find peaceful outlets for that kind of ambition.
I want to talk about the politicians who follow this — Barack Obama and Trump. And maybe the place to start, because I think this is almost the more interesting question for liberalism, is Barack Obama.
How in the broad story of America do you now see the Obama presidency?
Well, I think it was well-intentioned, but in a certain way it wasn’t ambitious enough, and I think that’s probably what a lot of his progressive critics think. That he said very soothing things about a post-racial America — just his very presence as president was an affirmation of that — but it didn’t really change any of the underlying social and economic inequalities that were driving the racial divide in the United States.
I think another perfectly just criticism was that he was too bought into what we now call neoliberalism, with the kinds of economic advisers that he surrounded himself with who accepted this new form — or the new evolution — of capitalism that was producing oligarchs and very large wealth inequalities, which you could have addressed through antitrust and through different tax policies.
But under Obama, you saw this problem that I describe in a couple of my books as vitocracy — that we have a very complex constitutional system built around checks and balances.
The essence of liberalism is the rule of law — that there should be rules that govern and limit executive power. But I think that the American government at that point had become so complex that it became really hard for anybody to do anything, either in a conservative direction, which frustrated Ronald Reagan, but also in a progressive direction.
Issues of climate change really require fairly strong, controversial decisions. You have clashing interests, and somebody has got to resolve those.
And so I think that the underlying institutional problems were really never addressed. Take the filibuster: It’s a completely nonconstitutional limitation of power. You could have gotten rid of the filibuster, but even that relatively low hurdle was not even attempted during that period.
The other thing that I would criticize Obama for was that, in the absence of the ability of the government to take on, frontally, many of these challenges — because it didn’t have the power to do it — you had the flourishing of a certain kind of identity politics in civil society. I don’t think that was the core of his presidency, but it certainly took hold in that period.
I do think it took hold in that period, but I think it took hold for a reason not unrelated to what you’re describing, which is: One of the ways I think about what has gone wrong in liberalism — because I think quite a bit has, and I think liberalism right now, even though I’m a liberal, has a real exhausted feeling to it.
My one line on this is that, first, liberalism captured the institutions, and then the institutions captured liberalism. And what I mean by that is that liberals, in many cases, built America’s political institutions. Certainly, as liberalism became the reigning ideology of the universities, liberals became the people who staffed these institutions.
And so then liberals became the people who owned their failures, who governed with the horizons of what these institutions could achieve.
Right.
And if you are the defenders of a system that doesn’t work, if your moral ambition is boundaried by what failing institutions can achieve, you’re not going to have a very exciting political philosophy or movement.
Yes, you’re absolutely right about that. I think that at this point, for me, it would be absolutely wrong to think that we need to go back to the pre-2016 world. That world was one in which the government was basically hobbled from doing anything ambitious.
I think what propelled Trump to power was the belief that it was too constraining, and so he simply wanted to become a dictator — to violate all sorts of rules in order to get things done. But you need a little bit of that in order to do progressive things.
It takes 10 years to get the permitting done to do a transmission line to get power from the middle of the country, where alternative energy is produced, to the West Coast where it’s consumed. And that’s the product of this proceduralism that was ushered in by people basically on the left.
So you’re right that they created this institutional straitjacket, and I think one of the big challenges is how to go back to a stronger government that can actually do good things.
Well, this proceduralism is, I think, a very biting tension right now. Because on the one hand, much of the critique that liberals, even the left, have of Donald Trump is the evisceration of procedure.
Right.
He wants to build a ballroom: He just bulldozes the East Wing.
And it’s true — he is eviscerating procedure. He is firing inspectors general. He is doing all kinds of things that, properly, you are not supposed to be able to do under our system of government.
It is very, very hard, I think, to become very spun up about violations of procedure and not then accidentally wrap yourself as a defender of procedure.
So if procedure is both the problem, in the sense that it is being ignored, but also a little bit when you’re in power, the problem in the sense it is being overly followed — that doesn’t leave you a very comfortable place to stand.
I think if a Democrat is elected in 2028, they’re going to have a big conundrum, because they’re going to want to do things — especially if they’re a more progressive, left-leaning Democrat — and they’re going to find themselves up against these same procedures that had hobbled Obama and Joe Biden.
Biden wanted to have high-speed internet in rural areas, and he was completely unable to produce that in the three years after the passage of that act. So they’re going to want more authority, and they’re going to have to, in a way, look a little bit more like Trump.
I think the trick is going to be to fundamentally stay within the law, but to modify the law in ways that grant, essentially, more power to the government to do things. And I think that’s going to be a hard thing to sell, because the immediate charge is: Oh, you’re just acting like Donald Trump. But in fact, he was responding to a real problem — this real institutional problem — in the way that American government was operating.
You wrote a book in 2022 that I think introduces an interesting tension into this, which is called “Liberalism and Its Discontents.”
And that book ends on a call for moderation, a sense of temperance, as the answer for what is ailing liberalism.
Here I ask you what you think of the Obama presidency, and what you fundamentally say to me is: It wasn’t radical enough. I ask you about American institutions and procedures, and you say liberals are going to have to be more like Donald Trump. They’ve got to get rid of the filibuster.
I’ve been arguing for ending the filibuster for a long time. I can tell you with certainty: People do not experience that as moderate. So I’m curious how you think about resolving these.
I guess, Ezra, in the end, you’re right that there is a contradiction there. The same vices that characterize bad dictatorial governments will also come to characterize good progressive ones.
People have been complaining about the Supreme Court overturning Humphrey’s Executor — this rule that allowed Congress to set terms under which a president could or could not fire an executive branch official in a multimember commission.
Roosevelt wanted to fire this guy, William Humphrey, who had been a commissioner for the F.T.C., because he felt that guy was getting in the way of his New Deal, progressive agenda.
So the very same constraint on executive power that we’re now criticizing a conservative Supreme Court for overturning was something that progressives wanted. I just think that’s built into our politics — that the same set of institutions can either be good or bad depending on the goal that you set.
So you have to have a good set of ends that you’re trying to achieve, but you also need power.
Let’s talk about the man who stepped into some of the failures here, or some of the resentments here, which is Donald Trump.
As you mentioned, Trump appears a couple of times in “The End of History and the Last Man.” But when he emerges into politics, he emerges as something other than simply an icon of capitalist success. He emerges as somebody bringing a renewed nationalism, a renewed belief in borders, a belief in maybe more traditional hierarchies in America.
And over time, he emerges in your telling as somebody who is either proposing or modeling a different form of government — a different regime, not just a different leader.
You’ve described him as repatrimonializing the government. What does that mean?
So let’s begin with another bit of psychology: It’s not natural to favor a well-qualified stranger over your relatives or your friends. It’s a very natural human desire to want to reward friends and family. So most states in human history were patrimonial, meaning they were run for the benefit of the rulers.
It was the ruler’s household, the friends and family of the ruler, who were given privileges and were able to enrich themselves — and the reason you went into politics was to enrich yourself. And I think that every society that has managed to create modern state institutions that are impersonal has had this constant backsliding temptation. Because the rulers themselves would like their friends and family to be favored.
Just one simple historical example: The Ottomans had one of the weirdest ways of getting to a modern state. They literally captured young boys in the Balkans, brought them to Istanbul and trained them to be administrators and generals.
But they couldn’t have families because they didn’t want nepotism, and they couldn’t resist the demand of the Janissaries to have children, to have families. So eventually, a sultan gave in, and you’re back in the whole nepotistic, patrimonial world that the Ottomans had briefly managed to get beyond.
We’re doing that right now. Instead of professional diplomats handling our Middle East policy, you get Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff — friends and family of Donald Trump. And you’re paying the price for it. Because a modern state really does need meritocratic, impersonal people running the state apparatus.
Are you surprised how easy it was for Trump to begin to build or rebuild that structure in a system that seemed just choked with rules and procedures to keep that from happening?
Yeah, I’m totally astounded that the American people don’t seem to really care that much. I mean, maybe in the fullness of time there will be some accountability. But yes, I would not have expected that the degree of corruption that exists in the current administration would have been tolerable to mainstream Republicans, for example.
When Trump roared back in the 2024 election, much more so than in 2016, he ran and assembled a coalition as a candidate of courage and thymos and passions. This really took hold after the nearly successful assassination attempt, with his bloodied fist in the air. You saw a rallying around him as an almost mythic, man-of-history figure.
I think a lot of that has drained out of the system now, as he seems a little bit more ridiculous, dangerous, campy — spending his time on the ballroom.
Yeah.
But is there something to be learned or seen about what at least some people wanted to see in him? What they thought he might represent that felt to them like it was missing?
Well, I think it’s all about power. I think that many of Trump’s defenders currently would say that the Democrats only produced weak leaders, and we want a strong leader. They’ll excuse the corruption by saying: Well, OK, maybe you’re getting corruption, but that’s the price you have to pay to have somebody who really wanted to close the border and was able to do that.
And they’ll look past all of the other institutional depredations that have happened under him, because they want that strength. It’s something that I wouldn’t have expected in American politics, because our system is really designed to guard against that kind of leader.
There’s a famous letter from Alexander Hamilton that anticipates Trump perfectly. He said: There will be a point in American politics where some person with great oratorical skills will come and rally people again in favor of his own personal power. And that was part of the reason they designed this complex constitutional system.
By the way, I’m not completely pessimistic. I think our institutions actually are going to hold at the end of this story. But we’re being taken for a very dangerous ride in the meantime.
You wrote — I forget when they actually came out — but these two books about the origins of modern political states. The central question in those books was: How do you get to Denmark?
How do you get from more rudimentary forms of human organization to the advanced, efficient, fair, neutral state both metaphorically and literally represented by Denmark.
I remember reading those books at the time and thinking that statement made sense. And as I was thinking about them again for this conversation, some part of me, when I framed the question: How do you get to Denmark? It no longer felt like the right question. That Denmark does not feel like the future.
I mean, one: Europe itself does not seem all that stable. You just saw the Alternative for Germany Party posting a huge result in a regional German election. You have far-right populism rising all across the continent. But also, there’s the generalized sense that Europe is falling behind, that it is itself being somewhat choked by rules and procedures, that China is roaring forward.
If you were writing those books today — if you were thinking about the formations of states and the pathway they’re traveling — do you still see Denmark as a goal?
No, absolutely. I mean, the reason I liked Denmark was not for the same reason as Bernie Sanders. It’s not because it’s got this huge welfare state. It’s because it’s run competently. And I just don’t see any period in human history in which competence in state administration is not a virtue. And it’s going to be a virtue if your goal is to restrict immigration.
It’s interesting. Danish politics has been more stable than ours, but they have really closed off immigration, despite the fact that there’s still a coalition with social democrats in it.
And some people — my colleague David Leonhardt, among others — have argued that’s why their politics have been more stable. That they basically merged liberalism with a more closed-border nationalism.
Yeah. But the thing is that they could actually do it competently, and they could actually achieve those goals.
So again, I just don’t see any circumstance in which having a competent, modern public administration isn’t going to be an advantage. That’s how countries get rich in the first place, and that’s how they manage the different crises that hit them at later points, like pandemics and financial crises. If we didn’t have a really competent set of financial managers in 2008, I think we would have been in big trouble.
I’m not saying that we don’t want competent administration. We do. And I’m not saying that isn’t very hard to achieve. It is.
But I want to try to push you toward the question I’m asking here, which is — again, with your more thymotic hat on — I think the conversation around Europe has changed a lot in the past decade, or two decades. We’ve gone from — I remember the spate of books in the early 2000s about whether the European Union was the future, and now Europe seems very left behind and a lot less stable politically.
And you have this sort of strange competition between an America that is operating in a reckless, chaotic, high-risk way and a China that is showing incredible capacity to build a 21st-century manufacturing and innovation juggernaut that is operating under a much more authoritarian form of politics. It takes risks, but in a very calculated way.
And somehow, the idea that what you’re trying to do is get to where Europe is — I mean, Europe feels a little bit like it’s getting left behind.
No, no. I am not trying to get to where Europe is. If you’re talking about over-procedural, excessive proceduralism, that’s Europe.
Basically, their bureaucrats make so many rules. You have member-state level rules, and then you’ve got the whole Brussels bureaucracy. And anybody operating in Europe will tell you that complying with this mountain of rules that they establish is why they don’t have a big tech industry.
For example, one of the things that former Italian prime minister Mario Draghi, and countless other reformers, have recommended is: Genuinely get a single market. That was the whole point of the European Community. You can’t have large-scale companies in Europe because every one of the 27 member states has all these niggling little rules. So they’re not there. They’re not a model.
So it’s very hard to sell across the countries in the way it’s very easy to sell in America.
Yeah. And for that reason, they have put limits on their own economic productivity by the fact that they don’t have competent administration that could actually make a uniform playing field for European companies.
OK, but I want to stop here, because I want you to try to resolve this tension more for me.
I remember Tyler Cowen, the economist, saying something of this nature, where he said: Look, you meet people who work in the government in Europe, and on average they are competent, they are cultured, they can say more to you about literature and books and art than the person in the same position in America. And yet the outcomes are not that good — that Europe is struggling.
Why? What is it about these competent governments that is not leading to more competent governance?
Well, that indicates they’re actually not so competent. I don’t think competence is measured by the number of rules that you pile up. At some point, I think competent governments have to cut back on those rules and rely on the common sense and the discretionary judgment of the people running those systems.
So I don’t think that it’s the case that they are actually competent. There’s a point at which you’re trapped in an institutional system that sees legitimacy lying in further rule making. I think legitimacy really comes from outcomes, and they’re at a point where they’re not getting outcomes because they’re choked by this rule-compliance mentality that they’ve developed.
One thing that I think is shifting the politics of America and Europe simultaneously — China is a little bit of a different case here — is that the platforms on which we politically communicate and the platforms in which we shape what we see politically have changed.
We’ve moved from people maybe read the newspaper in the morning, or they watch some nightly news show, to this much more anarchic, algorithmic, social — and beyond social — media environment. I never think it’s an accident that the populist right began to surge across the world at the time that political communication went algorithmic.
I’m curious how you see this in terms of some of these theories, and particularly the way that social media is a constant measuring of recognition: Are you seeing me? Are you liking me?
And the politicians get this constant feedback. It shifts how they act, how they think, how they generate a sense of how they’re doing.
Where does this fit in, in some of your theories of political orders and the human soul?
Well, ever since 2016, we’ve been having this prolonged debate about where all this populism is coming from, and everybody gives this list of seven or eight things: Economic inequality, globalization, incompetent leadership. And then they say at the end: and also, social media.
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I actually think that technology, exemplified by social media, is really much more important than most of the other explanations — that you can’t explain the timing for the rise of populism — and you can’t explain the particular nature that it has taken on — without social media.
For example, a lot of what it means to be a conservative these days — a populist conservative — is to believe in conspiracy theories. And it is much easier to promulgate — in fact, there are incentives for promulgating conspiracy theories on a completely unregulated internet.
The way you get followers, if you’re an internet influencer, is to say more and more outrageous things. Your credibility is not measured by whether you actually have done the fact-checking and have these institutional safeguards for the reliability of your information. It’s how many likes you get. And I think it has absolutely been at the core of a lot of the radicalization of the politics of countries that have gone online in that period.
So something that has been lurking in our conversation is China. You had said at the beginning that the end of history was about this question of: Would we come up with ways of organizing a complex society that was more successful, more desirable, than America?
I’ve seen you in more recent comments and interviews begin to grapple with the possibility that China represents a model that actually is working and could appeal on a wider scale. I think you said something like: We’re a third of the way to that actually being the more successful model.
So tell me what you think China both represents as a form of political organization — where it differs from liberal democracy — and what you then think that means for it as a possible model of what other countries and societies are going to try.
Sure. Well, I think a liberal democracy is based on having a competent state that is limited both by rule of law and by elections.
And China has the competent state — very competent — but it isn’t limited by either rule of law or elections. Therefore, the quality of governance there depends entirely on the quality of rulers.
One of the things about Chinese civilization is that Confucianism embodies bureaucracy as one of its foundational cultural characteristics: Educated people should be the ones who rule, and to this present day, that’s where Chinese party cadres are recruited from. They’re the best and brightest in society, so they’ve got this tremendously competent state.
It’s not just recently. I’ve thought all along that this is the only alternative political and social system that has a chance of being competitive with liberal democracy, precisely because they can deal with modern technology. They can be at the forefront of technology and, as a result, of economic growth.
The question is: Is this a sustainable model? And I think that there are reasons to still regard that as an open question, because their economy is based on doubling down on this export-driven model that made them rich in the first place.
That’s not a sustainable model. They’ve got big problems in their property market. They’re going to have huge problems with unemployment. Youth unemployment there is already at extraordinarily high levels. And so I don’t think you can take the sustainability of either their economic or political systems for granted.
The reason I started saying these things about China versus the United States is because the American model has deteriorated.
Right. Yeah, I’m not sure you can take the sustainability of our model for granted any longer.
No, absolutely right. It seems to me we’ve got an administration that is doing everything it can think of to weaken the United States vis-à-vis China: attacking the scientific establishment, attacking allies, being completely capricious and arbitrary in economic policy.
I mean, this is not something that a competent state does.
But maybe, to unite two things we were just talking about in the last couple of minutes: When people talk about our model, they tend to mean in their head, whether it’s America or Europe, a particular form of governance. But something that you gestured at a few times there is that form of governance took hold and flourished in a particular historical context — the postwar context — and a particular technological context.
The particular way we communicated. It was a period of newspapers and radio and TV.
And I think one of the open questions about us is whether or not these contingencies were fundamental. Whether or not there was something in the way a particular form of government connected to a particular moment in communications technology — a certain level of globalization.
And the question that’s coming, or maybe is already here, is how all of these models operate in a different, particularly technological era — how they adapt or don’t adapt to social and algorithmic media, how they adapt or don’t adapt to A.I., how they adapt or don’t adapt to globalization.
But I’m curious how you bring those things into your framework?
Oh, no — look, I’ve never said that liberal democracy was the best system under all possible technological conditions. I think, in fact, the nature of the technological horizon determines the kind of politics you can have, and I think for that reason, A.I. is going to be very threatening to our democratic system.
I wrote a book in the early 2000s, actually, about biotechnology, where I was arguing that if you could actually — through something like CRISPR-Cas9 — if you could modify the human gene line to modify human nature, you would attack some of the basic premises of modern liberalism. Because you could create different classes of human beings in a way that didn’t exist before.
And now you can combine the biotech with the A.I. and produce these really very science-fiction-like, but entirely conceivable, outcomes that are going to be completely toxic to the maintenance of the kind of egalitarian society that we’ve seen.
We’ve already seen this extraordinary concentration of wealth in the technology sector, and that by itself is also something that is very difficult for a democracy to deal with. So, yeah, I think that it’s all contingent on the nature of technology at any given point in time.
One way to look at a political system is that it is a collective technology for absorbing and responding to information, and it works better or worse depending on how well it’s able to do that. And I think increasingly, we’re seeing that the way our system is absorbing and responding to information is degrading.
A.I. is very much a system for absorbing, collecting, aggregating and then responding or reacting to information. And I’ve not seen any particularly convincing descriptions of how you might integrate that capacity more fundamentally into a political system.
But it’s a little bit hard for me to imagine there won’t be more profound experimentations around that. That maybe the set of systems we can imagine operating — which were more bound by the way human intelligence worked than the speed of human beings working with each other — is not the boundary.
And the world is going to be opening to stranger things in the next 10 or 20 years than were imagined in our 20th-century political science, if not always in our 20th-century science fiction.
Yeah. Well, I think that modern government is going to have to rely on A.I. simply to process information. Because there’s too much of it out there, and it’s too hard for human beings to absorb all of the inputs that they need to.
I think the real danger is in agentic A.I., where human beings delegate certain powers to machines that can then operate autonomously. It’s very interesting: At the frontier of computer science these days, they’re more like zoologists who have just discovered a new species, and they’re trying to observe how it behaves under different conditions. But they don’t really know what’s happening on the inside of the machine, even though they’re the ones who built it.
And they’re trying to make that new creature more powerful as fast as they possibly can. Even though they don’t know what that will do.
Yeah. I mean, it’s kind of a crazy race that’s going on right now.
I think that’s really the danger — this likelihood that we will over-delegate, and then the machine will develop values that may not really align with the ones that the creators hoped it would.
I mean, we already had this Hugging Face incident a couple of weeks ago, where a machine did something that was completely supposed to be off-limits. And that’s just the beginning, I think, of more stuff like that to come.
This is a point others have made, but the fear was always that the A.I.s would take agency from us. What’s obviously happening is we are handing that agency over as fast as we possibly can.
I have talked with people at these labs working on self-improvement. They don’t even necessarily think self-improvement is a good idea. But even if it’s not a good idea, if the other labs or the other countries are going to do it, they want to get there first.
And this is a place where I wonder about your perspective: So much of what we can or can’t do in terms of regulating A.I. is dependent on these, at least perceived, race dynamics between the U.S. and China, between firms and other firms.
This doesn’t feel to me like a problem without human precedent, but it is a problem coming at a time when the government of the U.S. is pretty erratic, and our confidence in our governing capacities is pretty low, where China is trying to catch up with us, where there’s a lot of enmity between the two countries.
I’m curious how you look at this more international-relations-based aspect of it?
Well, just on a domestic level, the state capacity problem comes back because you can’t regulate this technology if you don’t have people in the government who understand it, at least at a level that they can really get a hold of what’s going on and put some controls in place.
On the international question, obviously, there’s a geopolitics of A.I. that’s driving everybody forward — that they’re too worried about what China is going to do. I think some of that worry is a little bit misplaced because as far as I see it, the Chinese Communist Party is not a bunch of libertarians who say: Oh, great technology. Let’s just let it rip. We’re not going to try to control it.
They’re going to try to control it. If you create a model that is really good at breaking into the most classified computers your government runs, they’re not going to want to see that get out. They’re not going to want to have Chinese citizens having that capability.
So I’m not sure that there’s no basis on which you couldn’t get some ground rules laid down, despite the competition between the United States and China, that put some limits on this. And I think it’s going to be absolutely necessary, because even a big, powerful country like the United States can’t do this simply on its own.
One thing I’ve heard people worry about is whether or not — even if you could imagine a deal, whether or not that kind of deal would be verifiable, trustworthy.
People will say: I agree that China is not going to want a self-improving model able to break into classified computers running wild.
But at the same time, they’ll say: But China is probably more likely than we are, given the way they can wall off things from their media, etc., to say: That seems like a quite powerful weapon to have. Let’s actually bring the very best scientists into the government. Let’s give them the resources they really need, and let’s have them create something on our behalf that we can use the way we want to use it.
So to the extent this is a powerful weapon, a state that is good at creating things is going to try to create that weapon internally, and so you can’t trust the deal. You have to simply act as if the other partner is untrustworthy. Do you buy that?
I’m afraid that a lot of that logic is inevitable.
Yeah, I do not know whether it’s possible to control this technology. Even a powerful state like China is going to have trouble doing that, and when you have a globally competitive world, there may be certain things that you can’t really get the capacity to deal with.
So yeah, maybe it’s going to be the end of us all.
I want to avoid ending there on whether the A.I.s will kill us all. So I’m curious, given what you’ve seen in the politics of this era, it does not look like Trumpism is a dominant competitor ideology. I don’t think that repatrimonolizing the government is proving to be popular, even if it is not maybe as unpopular as one might have imagined.
So what do you see as an answer to some of these trends?
Well, I think that’s pretty simple. In countries where you can still have free and fair elections, you win elections because that’s the route to political power.
The model for this was really the Hungarian election last April, where Viktor Orban had been in power for 16 years. He had really turned Hungary into an authoritarian country in the midst of the European Union. But Peter Magyar had the political skill to organize a very broad coalition — to not just squeak out a narrow victory but a massive victory that was a very great repudiation of Orbanism.
I think America has a chance of doing something similar, probably not as decisive. But certainly it could send a very powerful message in the midterm elections that are coming up in November. And if the polls are to be believed, it could really take place.
What is the goal of liberalism? And here I don’t mean classical liberalism and its long history. I mean American liberals — the left-of-center, not quite socialist part of the Democratic Party. What is its moral goal at this point? In what way does it actually want to change society?
I think people look at Trump, and they know what he wants to do. I think they look at Bernie Sanders or Zohran Mamdani or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and they get a sense of where they feel the problem really is.
I’m not sure they could answer that well for your generic mainstream liberal Democrat.
Well, I don’t pretend to speak on behalf of that category of people. I can tell you what my vision of it would be. It really has to do with this whole question that I’ve been quite preoccupied with, which is state capacity.
I would like to see a government that can actually set generally accepted, not radical, goals — universal health care, building high-speed rail, doing all of these things — and actually being able to accomplish it in a reasonable amount of time.
I got preoccupied with NASA recently because, between John F. Kennedy’s announcement that they were going to go to the moon in 1961 and actually landing on the moon in 1969, was only eight years.
In the 2000s, George W. Bush announced that they were going to go back to the moon. That’s when the whole Artemis program got started. He said they were going to do it by 2015. Here it is, 2026, they finally got a rocket to go around the moon. But it didn’t actually land on the moon, and we’ll be lucky to land another human being there by 2030.
And so something has gone wrong in the ability of the American state to execute on the very good intentions that it announces. And I guess maybe this isn’t a moral vision, but it’s certainly a vision for a different kind of politics.
I would like to see an America that can announce a goal and actually get it done in a reasonable amount of time, at a reasonable cost.
Well, this is a very core argument of my co-authored book “Abundance,” so I’m thrilled to hear you say some of this. [Laughs.]
I think one thing that struck me about the reaction to “Abundance” and its argument for a much stronger state, was that many people came back to me and said: Well, what is the vision of the good life here? Is it just more stuff?
And I would say: No, no. We want more homes, we want more clean energy, we want more public infrastructure, we want more medical breakthroughs so we can have cures. These are all things that have already been identified as goals. This is what liberalism is already trying to achieve, and I’m saying it should be able to achieve it.
But after hearing again and again about the need for a vision of the good — The Point, which is a philosophical magazine, devoted a whole issue to liberalism and its vision of the good — I began to take more seriously that people felt something was absent and lacking.
The way I take some of the thymotic arguments you’re making in “The End of History and the Last Man” and apply them to modernity is not just that people want to fight in wars. I don’t think most people want to fight in wars. I don’t think most right wingers want to fight in wars. I think this is cosplay.
We do have wars, and they’re horrible — society is not excited about having a new draft in order to send its young men and women to fight, for instance.
What I do think, though, is that people want to believe they are engaged in some morally ambitious project to change the world in which they live. That is not all people want from politics. Many people just want lower prices.
But there is a level of politics that has an intense energy within it, and that any movement that cannot operate on both — you can have a politics that is all energy but can’t lower prices or achieve anything. Maybe you’d say that’s Donald Trump right now. And that doesn’t work when you try it.
But politics is driven by the people in it with a kind of energy to change things fundamentally. And so if you don’t have some answer for them — some answer for the moral crusade that they are involved in, and that beats in your own heart, too — I think your politics is not going to be successful, particularly in the modern attentional environment where energy and enthusiasm and outrage and inspiration are the coin of the realm.
I’m not so sure that you can’t do that in a liberal society. I mean, if you think about John F. Kennedy himself ——
Oh, I think you can. I just think you need a liberalism that wants it.
Well, yeah. I mean, it seems to me there are a lot of challenges out there that are achievable within the context of a real liberalism.
I mean, for example, the current distribution of wealth and power in the United States is something that could be changed. You don’t have to have these tech oligarchs running around, donating hundreds of millions of dollars to election campaigns so they can get outcomes favorable to themselves.
Having a state that can actually operate in this very difficult and very threatening technological environment is a plenty ambitious goal. I think it’s just a matter of articulating to people why it’s necessary and how it’s achievable, just in the government being able to master and control A.I. rather than the technology controlling and mastering the government. I mean, that’s a huge challenge that ——
And for that matter, human beings.
Yeah. Right.
So then always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?
The first two are ones you’re doubtless familiar with. One is Jennifer Pahlka’s “Recoding America.” I think she is the most insightful, in a way, critic of what’s wrong with the American bureaucracy, but she does it from a sympathetic standpoint. She understands why bureaucracy and government are necessary and how it could actually be reformed to do things better.
The second one is Marc J. Dunkelman’s “Why Nothing Works,” where he puts everything in a bigger historical context — a swing between Jeffersonianism, where power is pushed down as far as possible to the people, and a Hamiltonian vision where the government itself is the engine of change. And he argues that we’ve been in a Jeffersonian period ever since the 1960s, and we need to switch to a more Hamiltonian perspective.
The final one was written by an old friend of mine, Robert Wright — “The God Test.” He’s been covering artificial intelligence really since the 1980s. He interviewed Geoffrey Hinton way back then. He’s got the best explanation of how L.L.M.s work for a layperson.
It’s encased in an, ultimately, extremely optimistic, almost metaphysical theory about the progress not just that humans have made but all the way from single cell to multicell to different forms of animal life. But it’s an argument for seeing a broader pattern in the human story that artificial intelligence actually plays a positive role in.
Francis Fukuyama, thank you very much.
Thank you, Ezra.
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You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
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This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Julie Beer. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones, Aman Sahota and Gautam Sirkishan. Our recording engineer is Aman Sahota. Cinematography by Marina King. Video editing by Kristen Williamson, Dani Dillon and Brandon Belk-Yee. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser. Transcript editing by Kate Wilkinson and Marlaine Glicksman.
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Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. He is the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show” and the author of “Why We’re Polarized” and, with Derek Thompson, “Abundance.” Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox. Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. He is on Threads.
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뉴욕타임스 팟캐스트 <에즈라 클라인 쇼(The Ezra Klein Show)> 대담 녹취록(프랜시스 후쿠야마 편)에 대한 요약과 평론입니다.
<역사의 종언과 마지막 인간> 대담 요약
<1. 역사의 종언에 대한 오해와 티모스(Thymos)>
프랜시스 후쿠야마의 저서 <역사의 종언과 마지막 인간>은 자유민주주의의 일방적인 승리나 사건의 끝을 예고한 승리주의 서적이 아니다. 헤겔적 의미에서 인류 사회 조직의 궁극적 체제로서 자유민주주의와 자본주의 경제 이상의 대안을 찾기 어렵다는 주장이다.
자유민주주의의 취약점은 인간을 단순한 경제적 소비자(물질적 안락 추구)로 축소하여 파악한다는 점이다. 인간 영혼에는 플라톤이 말한 기개, 즉 인정받고자 하는 욕망인 <티모스(Thymos)>가 존재한다.
모든 인간이 동등하게 존엄을 인정받으려는 <이소티미아(Isothymia)>와 남보다 더 뛰어나고 우월하게 인정받고자 하는 <메갈로티미아(Megalothymia)>가 충돌하고 조율되는 과정이 정치의 본질이다. 현대의 포퓰리즘이나 정체성 정치는 엘리트 계층에게 인정받지 못하고 비가시화되었다고 느끼는 대중의 인정 투쟁에서 비롯된다.
<2. 마지막 인간과 민주주의의 위기>
니체가 경고한 <마지막 인간(The Last Man)>은 평화와 물질적 번영에 만족할 뿐, 목숨을 걸 만한 고귀한 이상이나 투쟁의 대상을 잃어버린 평평한 존재다.
시민에게 희생과 헌신을 요구하지 않는 사회에서는 오히려 갈등과 투쟁 자체를 추구하는 반동이 일어난다. 1월 6일 의사당 난입 사태나 극단주의 정치의 부상은 이러한 인정 욕구와 모험심의 왜곡된 표출이다.
<3. 9·11 테러, 이라크 전쟁, 네오콘과의 결별>
9·11 테러는 정치가 얼마나 비경제적 동기(인정과 굴욕감, 종교적 신념)에 의해 움직이는지 보여주었다.
그러나 급진 이슬람주의 자체가 자유민주주의를 대체할 보편적 대안이 될 수는 없었다. 진짜 문제는 미국의 과잉 대응(아프가니스탄·이라크 침공)이었으며, 다른 문화를 힘으로 민주화할 수 없다는 현실을 간과한 미국의 개입 실패는 정치적 냉소주의와 포퓰리즘의 토양이 되었다.
<4. 거부권 정치(Vetocracy)와 국가 역량(State Capacity)의 붕괴>
미국 자유주의는 견제와 균형, 과도한 절차주의에 갇혀 실제적인 성과를 내지 못하는 <거부권 정치(Vetocracy)>로 전락했다. 송전선 하나를 놓거나 고속 인터넷을 구축하는 데 수년이 걸리는 무능한 관료주의가 문제의 핵심이다.
도널드 트럼프는 이 무능한 절차를 무시하고 독재적으로 권력을 휘두름으로써 문제를 해결하려는 인물이며, 국가를 통치자의 사적 이익과 인맥으로 운영하는 <재가산화(Repatrimonialization)>를 시도하고 있다.
<5. 중국의 도전과 인공지능(AI)의 충격>
중국은 법치나 선거에 의해 제한되지 않지만 기술 관료적 유능함을 갖춘 국가로서, 현대 기술을 수용하고 경제 성장을 이끌며 자유민주주의의 유일한 실질적 경쟁 모델로 떠올랐다.
AI와 바이오 기술은 인간 본성과 평등이라는 자유주의의 기본 전제를 뒤흔들 위험을 내포하고 있다. 정부가 정보와 기술을 규제하고 통제할 수 있는 유능한 국가 역량을 회복하는 것이 현대 자유주의의 가장 시급한 과제다.
평론
<1. 물질주의적 정치학의 맹점을 꿰뚫은 통찰>
서구 정치학과 주류 자유주의는 유권자의 선택을 세금, 복지, GDP 등 철저히 물질적이고 합리적인 계산의 결과로 환원해 왔다. 그러나 후쿠야마의 진정한 기여는 인정과 자존감이라는 비물질적 차원(티모스)을 정치 분석의 핵심으로 복원한 데 있다. 트럼프 현상이나 서구 전역에서 일어나는 극우 포퓰리즘의 파도는 단순히 소득 불평등의 문제가 아니라, 문화적·교육적 엘리트로부터 무시당했다고 느끼는 집단들의 결렬한 분노가 원동력임을 명확히 설명해 준다.
<2. 절차주의의 덫에 걸린 자유주의와 유능함의 결핍>
자유주의가 법치와 절차적 공정성을 지키려는 과정에서 스스로 구축한 규칙의 감옥에 갇혔다는 지적은 매우 현실적이다. 결과를 만들어내지 못하는 절차는 대중에게 무능과 위선으로 비치며, 이는 트럼프와 같은 스트롱맨의 절차 파괴 행위를 대중이 용인하게 만드는 치명적인 취약점이 된다. 권력을 견제하는 법치를 유지하면서도 주거, 에너지, 인프라 등 실제적인 성과를 빠르고 과감하게 달성할 수 있는 <실행력 있는 국가>를 재건하지 못한다면, 자유주의는 스스로 붕괴할 위험에 처해 있다.
<3. 기술적 특이점과 민주주의의 지속 가능성에 대한 의문>
중국의 권위주의적 효율성과 알고리즘 미디어, 생성형 AI의 결합은 후쿠야마의 본래 명제에 가장 큰 도전 과제를 던진다. 자유민주주의가 정보의 처리 속도와 기술 패권 경쟁에서 권위주의 국가보다 우월한 시스템임을 입증하지 못한다면, <역사의 종언>이라는 명제는 헤겔식 진보의 마침표가 아니라 전후 특정 기술·미디어 환경에서만 잠시 꽃피웠던 예외적 순간으로 기록될 수도 있다. 자유주의가 살아남기 위해서는 도덕적 훈계를 넘어, 기술을 통제하고 분배할 수 있는 거대한 국가적 역량을 증명해 보여야 한다.
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<프랜시스 후쿠야마는 결국 옳았는가? — ‘역사의 종말’에서 국가역량·트럼프·중국·AI까지>
이 글은 2026년 9월 11일 <뉴욕타임스>의 <The Ezra Klein Show>에서 에즈라 클라인(Ezra Klein)이 프랜시스 후쿠야마(Francis Fukuyama)를 인터뷰한 내용을 편집한 대담이다. 제목은 도발적으로 “Was Francis Fukuyama Right All Along?”이라고 붙어 있지만, 실제 대화의 핵심은 “후쿠야마가 1989년에 옳았는가”를 판정하는 데 있지 않다. 오히려 지난 35년 동안 자유민주주의가 왜 흔들렸으며, 후쿠야마 자신이 무엇을 잘못 보았고 무엇을 여전히 옳다고 생각하는지를 검토하는 대화다.
1. ‘역사의 종말’은 자유주의의 최종 승리 선언이 아니었다
후쿠야마는 먼저 자신의 가장 유명한 명제가 오랫동안 잘못 이해되어 왔다고 말한다. 1989년의 논문과 1992년의 책 <역사의 종말과 최후의 인간(The End of History and the Last Man)>에서 말한 ‘역사의 종말’은 “앞으로 아무 사건도 일어나지 않는다”는 뜻이 아니었다.
그 개념은 헤겔(G. W. F. Hegel)의 역사철학에서 가져온 것이다. 역사를 단순한 사건의 연속이 아니라 인간 사회가 어떤 정치질서를 향해 발전하는 과정으로 보는 것이다. 마르크스도 비슷한 역사관을 가졌지만, 마르크스에게 종착점이 공산주의였다면 후쿠야마에게는 자유민주주의였다.
그가 1989년 그렇게 판단한 배경에는 소련 공산주의의 붕괴가 있었다. 파시즘은 이미 패배했고 공산주의도 내부적 모순 때문에 무너지고 있었다. 따라서 자유민주주의와 시장경제에 맞설 만한 보편적이고 체계적인 이념적 대안이 사라졌다는 것이다.
여기서 후쿠야마는 중요한 단서를 붙인다.
자유민주주의 사회가 완전하다는 뜻은 아니다.
불평등, 인종차별, 계급갈등, 민족주의, 전쟁은 계속 존재할 수 있다. 문제는 “그보다 더 보편적으로 정당성을 인정받는 정치체제가 존재하는가”라는 것이다.
이 점에서 오늘날까지도 그는 기본명제를 완전히 철회하지 않는다.
2. 후쿠야마 사상의 진짜 핵심은 ‘시장’보다 ‘인정’이다
클라인이 특히 주목하는 부분은 <역사의 종말>에서 흔히 잊히는 두 번째 절반, 즉 “최후의 인간”이다.
후쿠야마는 인간을 단순히 경제적 욕구를 충족하려는 존재로 보지 않는다. 플라톤의 <국가>에서 가져온 ‘튀모스(thymos)’라는 개념을 사용한다. 인간에게는 자신의 존엄과 가치를 다른 사람에게 인정받고자 하는 욕구가 있다는 것이다.
그는 이를 두 가지로 나눈다.
-
isothymia: 다른 사람과 동등한 존재로 인정받으려는 욕망
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megalothymia: 다른 사람보다 더 위대한 사람으로 인정받으려는 욕망
민주주의는 첫 번째 욕구를 제도화한다. 흑인, 여성, 성소수자 등이 동등한 시민권과 존엄을 요구하는 운동은 단순한 경제적 이해관계가 아니라 인정의 정치이기도 하다.
그러나 인간에게는 두 번째 욕구도 있다. 누구나 평등하게 대접받는 사회에서는 어떤 사람들은 “나는 특별하다”, “나는 다른 사람보다 위대하다”는 인정을 원한다.
후쿠야마는 여기에서 도널드 트럼프를 이미 1992년 책에서 일종의 사례로 언급했다고 지적한다. 부와 명성만으로 만족하지 못하고 정치권력을 통해 자신이 위대한 존재임을 확인받으려는 인간형이다.
이 점은 놀랍도록 현재적이다.
3. 왜 자유주의 사회에서 오히려 극단주의가 생기는가
후쿠야마의 흥미로운 주장은 자유민주주의가 성공하기 때문에 오히려 불만이 생길 수도 있다는 것이다.
안정되고 부유한 사회에서는 사람들이 전쟁이나 독재를 직접 경험하지 않는다. 민주주의와 평화를 당연한 것으로 생각한다. 그러다 보면 정치가 지루해지고 삶에서 영웅주의나 희생, 공동목표를 느끼기 어렵게 된다.
그 결과 사람들이 “투쟁을 위한 투쟁”을 찾을 수 있다.
후쿠야마는 이것을 세대적 순환으로 설명한다.
동유럽과 소련에서 자유주의는 독재를 경험한 사람들에게 해방이었다. 그러나 그 다음 세대에게 자유주의는 억압적인 관료주의나 기성질서처럼 느껴질 수 있다. 그 결과 브뤼셀의 EU 관료제나 워싱턴의 제도를 새로운 ‘독재’처럼 공격한다.
자유주의의 승리가 자유주의를 방어하려는 열정을 약화시키는 역설이다.
4. 9·11과 이라크전쟁은 후쿠야마를 바꾸었다
대담에서 가장 중요한 자기비판 가운데 하나는 이라크전쟁이다.
후쿠야마는 한때 미국 네오콘들과 가까웠으며, 사담 후세인 정권을 제거하는 데 찬성했다. 그러나 곧 네오콘들과 결별한다.
그 이유는 미국의 힘에 대한 과도한 낙관주의였다.
후쿠야마가 이후 국가형성(state-building)을 연구하면서 깨달은 것은 독재자를 제거하는 것과 제대로 작동하는 국가를 만드는 것은 전혀 다른 문제라는 점이었다.
민주주의에는 단지 선거와 자유만 필요한 것이 아니다.
행정을 수행할 관료제, 법집행 능력, 공공서비스, 사회적 신뢰, 제도적 기억이 필요하다.
이라크전쟁은 미국이 군사적으로 정권을 무너뜨릴 수는 있었지만 그 뒤의 국가를 만들어낼 능력은 갖지 못했다는 사실을 보여주었다.
베트남과 아프가니스탄도 같은 문제를 드러냈다.
이 대목에서 1990년대 후쿠야마와 2026년 후쿠야마 사이의 가장 중요한 변화가 나타난다. 초기에는 자유민주주의의 ‘정당성’을 강조했다면, 후기에는 자유민주주의의 ‘국가역량(state capacity)’을 강조한다.
5. 자유주의가 스스로 만든 함정: ‘비토크라시’
후쿠야마는 미국 민주주의의 문제를 ‘비토크라시(vetocracy)’라는 개념으로 설명한다.
권력이 집중되는 것을 막기 위해 미국은 수많은 견제장치를 만들었다. 문제는 견제장치가 너무 많아지면서 정부가 아무것도 하지 못하게 되었다는 것이다.
환경규제, 사법심사, 지방정부, 시민소송, 의회절차 등이 각각 정당한 목적에서 만들어졌지만 서로 중첩되면서 도로·주택·송전망·철도·에너지 시설 하나 건설하는 데 수년 또는 수십 년이 걸린다.
후쿠야마는 이를 다음과 같은 역설로 표현한다.
“자유주의가 제도를 장악했고, 다시 제도가 자유주의를 장악했다.”
즉 자유주의가 국가권력을 제한하려 했는데 그 결과 국가는 사회가 요구하는 일을 수행하기 어려워졌다.
이것이 트럼프의 매력을 설명하는 한 요소다.
트럼프는 “절차를 무시하고 그냥 해버리는 사람”으로 보인다. 후쿠야마는 트럼프의 권위주의를 옹호하지 않지만, 자유주의자들이 절차 자체를 정치의 목적으로 착각해서는 안 된다고 경고한다.
6. ‘덴마크에 도달하기’에서 다시 ‘능력 있는 국가’로
후쿠야마는 과거 저서에서 좋은 정치질서를 설명하기 위해 “덴마크에 도달하기(Getting to Denmark)”라는 표현을 사용했다.
덴마크는 민주주의, 법치, 행정능력이 비교적 잘 결합된 국가를 상징했다.
그러나 이번 인터뷰에서 그는 중요한 수정을 가한다.
“나는 더 이상 덴마크 자체를 목표라고 생각하지 않는다.”
유럽연합의 복잡한 규제와 절차주의가 경제적 역동성을 약화시킬 수 있기 때문이다. 문제는 규칙의 양이 아니라 국가가 실제 문제를 해결할 능력이 있는가이다.
자유와 법치만으로 충분하지 않다.
유능한 관료제와 정치적 결단력이 필요하다.
7. 중국은 ‘역사의 종말’에 대한 반증인가
대담에서 가장 어려운 질문은 중국이다.
중국은 후쿠야마의 초기 논제를 위협하는 가장 강력한 사례처럼 보인다. 자유민주주의 없이도 수십 년간 경제성장과 국가건설에 성공했기 때문이다.
후쿠야마도 중국 국가의 행정능력을 높게 평가한다.
그러나 중국 체제에는 결정적 약점이 있다고 본다. 권력은 법치나 선거로 제한되지 않는다. 결국 정치의 질은 최고지도자 개인의 판단에 크게 의존한다.
“좋은 황제”가 있으면 효율적으로 움직이지만 잘못된 판단을 하는 지도자가 등장할 경우 그것을 교정하는 제도적 장치가 약하다.
그는 최근 중국의 부동산 문제, 청년실업, 경제성장 둔화 등을 들어 중국 모델의 지속가능성이 아직 입증되지 않았다고 본다.
따라서 중국을 자유민주주의를 대체하는 확정된 새로운 보편모델로 인정하지 않는다.
8. 소셜미디어와 AI라는 새로운 문제
후쿠야마가 1989년 예상하지 못한 가장 큰 변화 가운데 하나는 기술이다.
소셜미디어는 특히 ‘인정 욕구’를 극단적으로 증폭시킨다.
사람들은 알고리즘을 통해 관심과 인정을 얻는다. 더 많은 팔로어를 얻으려면 점점 더 강한 주장과 감정적 표현을 해야 한다. 정치 역시 이 구조에 적응한다.
그 결과 사회적 분노와 인정투쟁이 기술적으로 증폭된다.
AI 문제는 더욱 심각하다.
후쿠야마는 정부가 AI를 이용해 방대한 정보를 처리해야 할 가능성을 인정하면서도, 인간이 점차 판단을 AI에게 넘겨주는 것을 우려한다.
특히 자기개선(self-improving) AI가 등장하면 인간이 자신이 이해하지 못하는 시스템에 권한을 넘길 가능성이 있다.
흥미롭게도 AI 시대에는 다시 강한 국가가 중요해진다. 거대 기술기업과 AI 시스템을 통제하려면 국가가 기술을 이해하고 규제할 행정능력을 가져야 하기 때문이다.
평론
이 대담의 가장 큰 장점은 후쿠야마가 자신의 1989년 명제를 고집스럽게 방어하지 않는다는 점이다. 그는 이라크전쟁, 국가형성, 트럼프, 중국, 소셜미디어, AI라는 새로운 현실을 받아들이면서 자신의 이론을 상당히 수정해 왔다.
따라서 “후쿠야마는 틀렸다”라는 통상적인 비판은 다소 피상적이다.
실제로 그는 1992년부터 자유민주주의의 승리 속에 이미 그 위기의 씨앗이 존재한다고 썼다. 인간은 단지 평화와 소비생활만으로 만족하지 않는다. 인정, 존엄, 위대함, 희생, 공동의 목적을 요구한다. 이 통찰은 오늘날 트럼프주의, 민족주의, 극우정치의 심리를 이해하는 데 여전히 강력하다.
그러나 그의 분석에는 한계도 있다.
가장 큰 문제는 사회갈등을 ‘인정’의 문제로 설명하는 경향이다. 인정은 중요하지만 계급관계, 자본의 권력, 노동의 불안정, 제국주의와 전쟁, 세계경제의 불평등은 단순히 인정받지 못한 인간의 심리로 환원하기 어렵다.
예를 들어 트럼프 지지자를 “존엄을 인정받고 싶어 하는 사람들”로 분석하는 것은 상당 부분 맞지만, 미국 제조업의 쇠퇴, 노동조합 약화, 금융화, 지역경제 붕괴 같은 물질적 변화를 함께 설명하지 않으면 충분하지 않다.
또 하나 흥미로운 변화는 후쿠야마의 관심이 점점 자유주의에서 ‘국가’로 이동하고 있다는 사실이다.
1989년 후쿠야마에게 중요한 질문은
“어떤 정치체제가 정당한가?”
였다.
2026년 후쿠야마에게 더 중요한 질문은
“어떤 정부가 실제로 일을 해낼 수 있는가?”
가 되었다.
이것은 상당히 중요한 사상적 이동이다.
자유주의 민주주의가 권력을 제한하는 데만 몰두하고 주택을 짓지 못하고, 철도를 건설하지 못하고, 기후변화에 대응하지 못하고, AI를 규제하지 못한다면 시민들은 결국 “절차를 무시하고 일을 해내는 지도자”에게 끌릴 수 있다.
트럼프주의의 일부는 바로 이 자유주의 국가의 무능에 대한 반작용이라는 것이다.
그러나 여기에도 긴장이 존재한다. 국가역량을 강화하면 권력이 커지고, 권력이 커지면 자유주의가 그토록 중요하게 여긴 견제와 권리보호가 위협받을 수 있다. 후쿠야마 자신도 이 문제에 완전한 답을 제시하지 않는다.
결론
따라서 이 인터뷰의 제목 “후쿠야마는 결국 옳았는가?”에는 단순히 “그렇다” 또는 “아니다”라고 답하기 어렵다.
더 적절한 평가는 이렇다.
후쿠야마는 자유민주주의가 곧 전 세계에 안정적으로 정착할 것이라고 보았다면 틀렸다. 그러나 자유민주주의를 대체할 보편적 정치이념이 쉽게 등장하지 않을 것이라는 그의 주장은 아직 완전히 무너지지 않았다.
더 중요한 것은 그가 1992년 이미 제기했던 “최후의 인간” 문제다.
사람은 풍요롭고 안전하기만 하면 만족하는 존재가 아니다. 자신이 존중받고 있으며, 어떤 공동체에 속하고 있고, 자신의 삶이 더 큰 목적과 연결되어 있다는 느낌을 필요로 한다.
후쿠야마가 이번 대담의 마지막에서 사실상 도달하는 결론도 이것이다. 자유주의가 살아남으려면 단순히 법과 절차를 지키는 체제여서는 안 된다. 사회가 함께 추진할 목표를 제시하고, 그 목표를 실제로 실행할 국가능력을 갖추며, 시민들에게 “이 정치질서는 무엇을 위해 존재하는가”라는 질문에 답할 수 있어야 한다.
그런 의미에서 오늘날 후쿠야마가 말하는 것은 더 이상 단순한 <역사의 종말>이 아니다.
오히려 새로운 질문이다.
<자유주의는 사람들에게 자유를 주는 데서 그치지 않고, 사람들이 함께 무엇인가를 이루고 싶게 만드는 정치가 될 수 있는가?>
이 질문이야말로 이 23쪽 대담에서 가장 오래 남는 문제라고 할 수 있다.
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