Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Francis Fukuyama:

I think that’s really the kind of system that we’re heading back to where you reward a political supporter, not chosen on the basis of competence, but chosen on the basis of loyalty.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Francis Fukuyama. He’s a world-renowned political scientist and philosopher, best known for his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man. Since then, he’s written about everything from conservatism to biotechnology to international conflict to political order, identity and liberalism. You name it, he’s written about it.

The political moment we’re in keeps getting more complicated, overwhelming, and at times downright alarming. Fukuyama joins me to talk about Trump’s attacks on the civil service, the crisis of trust in America, and whether human nature leans more towards democracy or autocracy. That’s coming up. Stay tuned. Francis Fukuyama once argued that liberal democracy would be the end of political history. Was he right?

Francis Fukuyama, welcome to the show.

Francis Fukuyama:

Thank you very much for having me.

Preet Bharara:

We have a lot to talk about. I hope you have a lot to say. I think a lot of people, most people who have a pretty educated crew that listens to this podcast is familiar with your work and your writings over the years. Your most famous writing began as an essay, the End of History, which you turned into a book.

Could you just spend for the uninitiated a minute telling us what you meant by the book and how the title of the book, the End of History, may have been a little bit misinterpreted?

Francis Fukuyama:

This is a question I have to answer roughly once a week.

Preet Bharara:

I thought we’d start with that, get that out of the way, and then talk about the continuation of history.

Francis Fukuyama:

Well, so history in the sense I was using it is history with a capital H, meaning what you might call modernization development, and the end of history means what direction is that modernization process going? The argument that I made back in 1989, which picked up on philosophers like Hegel and Marx, is that there was a progressive history unfolding, but it seemed to be leading towards liberal democracy if you looked at it over a very long period of time.

It’s more like the objective of history rather than events simply happening. The common misunderstanding is that I was somehow saying things were going to stop occurring, and that was obviously-

Preet Bharara:

It was not a mission accomplished pronouncement.

Francis Fukuyama:

That’s right.

Preet Bharara:

Remind folks, especially the young, what was happening around 1989 and 1990 in the world that lent a sort of a note of optimism to works like yours?

Francis Fukuyama:

Well, in 1989 when I wrote the original article, we were in the midst of what one political scientist called the third wave of democratization, which had started in the 1970s, but we went from about 30, 35 democracies in the world to like 110 in the period from roughly 1973 up until the financial crisis in 2008.

Now we are going backwards unfortunately. Since about 2008, the number has decreased and we are in the midst of a lot of democratic backsliding with the rise of Russia and China, big authoritarian powers, but also the rise of a lot of populist movements and established democracies including our own. We are really in a deep democratic recession at the current moment.

Preet Bharara:

Would you say, in looking back now, I don’t want you to criticize your former self, but was there a bit of irrational exuberance given what was happening in ’89?

Francis Fukuyama:

Well, you have to remember at that time we had expected the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc to remain a kind of permanent feature of international relations. Then suddenly by the late 1980s, it had simply collapsed and the Soviet Union fell apart into a lot of constituent, much smaller states.

There wasn’t really a serious ideological challenger to the United States. That was part of the reason that I made that argument that there didn’t seem to be clear alternatives. I, in many ways, still don’t believe that there is a sustainable alternative. Obviously, you have authoritarian governments, but I think that in the long run and accountable and limited by rule of law, government is the most sustainable form of the way to organize human societies.

There’s no question that we’re in a very different period in which strong man rule has become much more popular.

Preet Bharara:

Are there particular features of human nature as opposed to the stability of structures or constitutional democracies that cause you to believe that those kinds of governments and those kinds of societies are more sustainable?

Francis Fukuyama:

Sure. I think that one of the features of a liberal democracy is law. That is to say rules that prevent the concentration-

Preet Bharara:

We’re going to come back to that a little bit.

Francis Fukuyama:

Right, but you’ve got rules that prevent the concentration of power. I think that that reflects a certain social wisdom that when governments act, they ought to act with a certain degree of consensus on the part of the governed. You can see that autocratic societies can make huge mistakes.

If you look at China, you had one-man rule under Mao Zedong, and you had The Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution under Xi Jinping, you had the Zero-COVID policies are policies. I don’t think a country that had spread out decision-making and sought more participation from other parts of the society would’ve made.

I think that’s one of the reasons that liberal democracies that do try to limit that kind of concentrated power should be in the long run more successful. There’s no question that in the short run, voters can make mistakes. Power can be misused in all sorts of ways.

Preet Bharara:

Just so I understand your definitions and history, did Rome’s and Athens represent liberal democracies?

Francis Fukuyama:

No. I think that liberal democracy is actually something that is a modern phenomenon. Athens had slavery. They did not have a liberal republic in the sense [inaudible 00:07:23]

Preet Bharara:

So did the United States for a good chunk of its time. Was the United States a liberal democracy before the Civil War?

Francis Fukuyama:

Well, you could argue that United States wasn’t a liberal democracy until the civil rights movement in the 1960s, because that was the first moment at which you had the enfranchisement of really the whole adult population. I think that there are degrees of democracy. The principle of universal citizen recognition was established at the time of the revolution with the Declaration of Independence statement that all men are created equal.

That didn’t include women, didn’t include men, white men without property. It obviously didn’t include slaves and one of the great struggles. I think also one of the great successes of our liberal republic over the centuries has been the gradual emergence of something that is much more like a genuine liberal democracy.

Preet Bharara:

I guess my question is if there’s something about human nature that counsels liberal democracy, and if that’s the way the arc goes, and if Rome and Athens didn’t represent those things, why was it only a recent and modern phenomenon when humans have been organizing themselves with governments and laws and governing bodies for millennia?

Francis Fukuyama:

I think that a lot of the reasons have to do with the general process of development, which includes economic development as well as the development of political institutions. As you get into the modern era, you have the discovery of markets, of capitalism, of incredible sources of wealth that then allow much larger parts of the population to be educated.

With that education, I think comes a change in values because one of the things that you hopefully learn as you become better educated is a certain amount of critical thinking. You don’t simply accept the authority of leaders because they’re wearing a uniform or they seem to be very powerful. You feel that you ought to have a voice in government.

I think that’s one of the reasons that capitalism that produces this kind of wealthy society and democratic and liberal institutions go together because you need that kind of citizen if you’re actually going to make a liberal democracy work. Yeah, I don’t think that there’s something intrinsic in human nature that leads you to a liberal democracy.

It is a socially created structure of institutions that is in some respects historically contingent, but nonetheless, it does prove to be better than many of the alternatives.

Preet Bharara:

You just said there’s nothing intrinsic about human nature that favors democracy. Is there anything intrinsic about human nature that favors autocracy?

Francis Fukuyama:

I wrote a two-volume book called The Origins of Political Order, and the second volume was political order in political decay. I made a different argument than the one I had originally laid out in the end of history where human nature plays a more negative role. Human beings I think are social creatures.

We couldn’t possibly have come to dominate the earth in the way that we have if that were not true. Human beings work together. Our natural sociability really has to do with friends and family. I mean, there are good biological reasons why we favor genetic relatives. Why we exchange with people that we’ve grown up with in this sort of thing.

The problem I think, is that a modern government needs to be impersonal, meaning that the state is not simply the household of the ruler. It’s not simply the friends and family of the chief warlord that runs the government. It’s really people that are chosen for their merit, for their characteristics that lead them to be good officials, professionalism and the like.

There’s this continual pull of friends and family. What you get is the emergence of modern governments that are impersonal and then they slip back, they get captured by people that basically want to turn the government into a family business. I don’t have to suggest to you contemporary examples of that happening.

Preet Bharara:

No, please do.

Francis Fukuyama:

Max Weber, the great sociologist called this patrimonialism, meaning that the ruler considers the government his patrimony and he can do what he wants and reward friends and punish enemies and so forth. I think what you’ve seen very clearly in the Trump administration beginning in the first term in 2016, but continuing up to the present is exactly that.

A modern state is supposed to award disaster relief to states that get into hurricanes and fires and this sort of thing. But what he’s done is say, well, California didn’t vote for me, so I’m not going to give them this kind of relief. Louisiana, when it gets hit by a hurricane, is a red state, and therefore the relief is going to go to that.

That’s the reintroduction of these personal criteria that have to do with not citizenship and a broad interest in public good, but really the attempt to reward friends and family at the expense of people outside that circle.

Preet Bharara:

Where do you put the singular act of pardoning one’s own son in that spectrum?

Francis Fukuyama:

That one is so off the charts. I actually do think that it’s a much more sinister kind of thing. Patrimonialism rewarding your friends and family, that’s the basis of corruption everywhere in the world. People always want to give their brother-in-law or friend from college a leg up.

Pardoning people that have used violence against police officers representing the authority of the state is it’s hard to imagine a deeper assault on the rule of law than that because it basically gives impunity to anybody that does it with the permission of the partner, the President of the United States.

Actually there’s this big debate before the election, is Donald Trump a fascist? I thought that that debate was a little bit misplaced because there are a lot of elements of fascism, genuine historical fascism that were missing. One of them is that fascist rulers like to create militias, and they have these extrajudicial coercive instruments that they’re likely using.

Preet Bharara:

Well, it’s still early.

Francis Fukuyama:

We’ve got time. Unfortunately, I think we’re moving in that direction because what else does it mean that you pardon people that used violence against your enemies.

Preet Bharara:

I was invoking Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter Biden. How would you rank the propriety of the Trump pardon [inaudible 00:14:58]

Francis Fukuyama:

I was very disappointed when he did that. You can see as a father why you would want to, but I think that in your public office as a president, you are duty bound to not let those kinds of personal factors affect your decision making. The scale of the wrong in that case is so different from, I think what Trump did with the January 6th rioters that it really doesn’t bear much comparison.

Preet Bharara:

I want to go back to the human nature question because it’s one that I’ve found interesting since I was in college and studied government myself. Is the effort at creating sustainable liberal democracy basically a continuing effort to play against type? Is it more optimistically sort of a liberation of our best selves, or is it something else completely?

Francis Fukuyama:

I think that it’s really more of the latter because it is part of a broader development process, a modernization process where if you look at human life in rich countries today, there’s never been a period of human history in which people were freer, better fed, taller, healthier. It’s really-

Preet Bharara:

Tell that to the kids.

Francis Fukuyama:

Well…

Preet Bharara:

They don’t believe you.

Francis Fukuyama:

That’s the thing. I mean, if you want to go to a developing country today, you’ll see really what the alternative is. I think that’s one of the problems that we have in America is we’re very fat and happy and kind of self-satisfied. We can tell ourselves that we’re suffering or we’re victimized and we don’t really recognize how most of humanity lived for most of human history.

We managed to get out of that situation. I think, as I said, one of the things that happens as you get richer is you get better educated, you have more knowledge, you therefore have greater opportunities. There’s a developing division of labor where you can specialize and you can learn things that a peasant living in an agrarian society would never in a million years have any contact with. I think that does make life better.

Preet Bharara:

Are you saying in any sense that the very success of liberal democracy sows the seeds of its own demise whereby people get richer, the middle class expands. People have their basic needs met, they get a little bored, they get a little fat and self-satisfied in the absence of struggle and the absence of adversity.

Overall, obviously there are pockets of that everywhere, but is that the cause then for the decay of the thing that that has been built?

Francis Fukuyama:

I actually made that argument in the original book, the End of History and the Last Man. This is the part about the last man.

Preet Bharara:

Is this part, do you still stick with that part or do you reject that part?

Francis Fukuyama:

No, I mean I think that it was actually quite prescient because what I said was that human beings in some sense want to struggle. They don’t want to be content just with being fat and happy. They want higher goals. They want to be recognized for great achievements.

If they’re living in a society that’s democratic, that’s prosperous, they don’t have to struggle anymore. They feel bad about that because they really do want kind of a higher self to emerge, and that’s why they get unhappy with peace and prosperity. You can see this in Eastern Europe, people lived under communism, under really terrible dictatorships for the whole period after 1945 in places like Poland and Hungary and so forth.

When they first emerged from communism, they were delighted. This was a terrific liberation for people that had been ground down by dictatorship. Now 35 years later, they assume the European Union is the baseline of human existence, and if they’re unhappy with something, then they get very resentful and they want something more.

I think that’s why in certain ways, some of these political developments go in generational cycles because you grow up under one set of conditions. Your ideas about how the world works are formed then, and then you stay that way until as conditions change. I think that’s part of what we’re experiencing today, both in the United States and in other rich democracies.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t mean to be pessimistic, but it sounds like humans can never be fully happy because you’re either struggling to try to achieve that sustainable society that’s fair, free, and prosperous, but then once you get there, you’re dissatisfied because of the absence of struggle. Are we all just Sisyphus? Is that the problem?

Francis Fukuyama:

Well, I don’t think that that necessarily leads you into a kind of cyclical history where you’re just repeating the same mistakes over and over again because I do think that people learn. I think an important lesson is that the democracy and the prosperity that we have experienced is not something to be taken for granted.

That in every generation people have to learn that they need to struggle to keep that kind of society going. People forget, that’s why you can’t really take for granted the continuing sustenance of a liberal democracy.

Preet Bharara:

You have said along these lines that what you have been struck by, I think more recently in your thinking and in your writing about the fragility of democracy. Why is democracy, even though you say it is ultimately over time and as compared to other forms of government and structures of society more sustainable, even though it’s the most sustainable in your words, it’s also quite, quite fragile. Can you elaborate on that?

Francis Fukuyama:

One of the arguments that I started making after I had written that original book was that technology is something that doesn’t reach an end of history, that technology continues to advance. I think that many of the challenges that we faced in contemporary democracies really have to do with changes in technology.

The rise of social media and the ability to live in a cyber world that is in many ways completely imaginary, I think has profoundly affected the way that people perceive reality In many ways. In this country, we’re living in two separate information universes where you take something like are vaccines safe or who won the 2020 election?

You get large parts of the population that really don’t agree on basic factual information like this. I think that this is something that was probably not possible when you had more authoritative media sources. With the internet, anyone can say anything. The standard for truth is not confirmation through the scientific method.

Then this foundation that we’ve built since the Enlightenment, it’s really who gets the most likes on social media. That’s one example of a challenge that I think did not exist in earlier years.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Francis Fukuyama after this.

We talk about a couple of concepts that are important to liberal democracy, liberty, and equality. Do you still believe what you wrote in 1992 that there is a universal hunger for liberty in all people? I’m not going to read the rest of it because I think you’ve changed your view, but the first part of the sentence, there is a universal hunger for liberty in all people.

Do you believe that? For themselves, I guess I should distinguish, is there a universal hunger for liberty for everyone?

Francis Fukuyama:

Well, if you’re reading it from something I wrote, I must have said it back then. George W. Bush also said something like that at the time of the Iraq War. At that point, I think that it was not a true statement. I think that what is really universal is people don’t like living under dictatorships.

They don’t like living under tyrants that really oppress them and take away their rights. Liberty may be freedom from that kind of tyranny. It also has certain very specific positive contents that we believe should exist in a healthy liberal democracy, meaning a positive sense of citizenship of participation and a belief in the fundamental equality of rights of fellow citizens.

Not everybody believes that. I don’t think there is a natural recognition of political rights that occurs. I think that’s something that’s learned over time. Oftentimes, it’s learned because you see how bad the alternative is. If you don’t respect other people’s rights, they’re not going to respect yours.

That’s something that happens through a lot of conflict and bloodshed, and it’s not something that just is universal and the direct product of some kind of universal human nature.

Preet Bharara:

It may just be, I don’t know which founding father, or maybe it was Ben Franklin who said, not the thing that everyone over quotes recently. It’s a republic if you can keep it, but the other one, which is democracy is the worst form of government other than all the others, which may be right.

Now, when we talk about autocracy or we talk about despotism, we’re talking about monarchy and dictatorship, I feel like when you use those phrases, what comes to people’s minds are the kinds of things you just mentioned where the people have their rights taken away. They’re indentured or they’re enslaved.

Nobody has any rights at all. It occurs to me that the kind of autocracy and dictatorship that is much more welcome to certain folks is the kind where there are general rules. They don’t apply to the leader, and the leader doesn’t have to deal with the Congress.

The leader doesn’t have to deal with the free press, and the leader doesn’t have to deal with cumbersome courts who block his agenda. So long as that leader through force whim or fiat passes laws and imposes policies that some of the populace agrees with not done by normal process, democratic process with votes and compromise and everything else.

So long as the leader who acts as a dictator is on the side of that group, then I think there are people who are not so turned off by that. Is that fair or not?

Francis Fukuyama:

Yeah, you’re absolutely right. I think Americans in particular have this very black and white view of democracy versus dictatorship. There are all sorts of degrees of dictatorship. Many authoritarian countries actually have rules and limits to what the ruler can do.

You can have a liberal autocracy that was Germany in the late 19th century, or that may be Singapore today, where things are very predictable. You have property rights, you have courts that function, but you don’t really have a lot of democratic participation.

That was true of China from the rise of Deng Xiaoping, I think up until the past decade where for example, the Chinese leadership accepted term limits, every 10 years, all of the senior leaders would quit and be replaced by another set. I think if other autocracies had term limits like that, they would do much better.

They would be much more durable and survivable because no leader who rules the country for 30, 40 years ever does it without making a whole lot of mistakes. Yes, I do think that you can get authoritarian governments that do observe certain limits to their power and as a result produce better economic growth. You can also have democracies that make huge mistakes because they err in the other direction.

Preet Bharara:

Look, I think we don’t talk about this the right way. Fast-forwarding to current events in the last week, as you might imagine, I and others have been spending a lot of time thinking about and talking about the judicial challenges to the kinds of things that Donald Trump and DOGE are trying to do.

To hear some people talk about it, including elected officials in our liberal democracy, to hear them talk about it, that there’s a process that has to be followed, that a lower court judge can have a particular view of something. Even though they have the right ability, wherewithal, funding, resources and prerogative to appeal it, which is what you do in a normal liberal democracy, they start calling for impeachment.

They start calling for term limits, they start calling for firing some percentage of judges every year. It sounds to me like there’s a subset of the American public who jibes with the policies and the cutting and other kinds of things that Trump want to do, and that’s fairly legitimate to like that. They would be willing to give up a lot of democratic process to have Donald Trump just be able to, with a wave of his hand, do by executive order that which our system does not necessarily always allow. How do you react to that?

Francis Fukuyama:

Well, I think that we are caught in a very unfortunate polarization because part of where that feeling comes from is what I have labeled in another book, vetocracy, because we have a constitutional system based on checks and balances. For a lot of government decision making, there are too many veto points what a political scientist would call a veto point where some organized group can stop something.

You see this particularly in infrastructure, really hard to build stuff in the United States because there’s such a complex permitting process that really it takes 10 years to do something that in China would happen in six months. People then rush to the opposite extreme and say, “No, no, we ought to cut away all of that process and simply delegate authority to a single leader that can do it.” That is a very unsafe practice.

What’s really hard is to make decision making easier, more effective and quicker, and yet maintain fundamental checks on power. This is what’s happened, we’ve rushed over to the other side and delegated to one person basically the authority to control the budget.

That’s really not remotely the vision of the founding fathers who understood that you really did have to spread out power and have those checks in place.

Preet Bharara:

Sticking with the current moment for a second, what do you think is going to happen? How is this going to play out? How will the forces of democracy and the forces counter to democracy and the way the media covers these things and the way the tectonic plates move, what’s in store for us?

Francis Fukuyama:

Well, actually that’s a question I should be asking you because you’re the lawyer, but I would say-

Preet Bharara:

Well, I’m asking you a bigger question than how a court case is going to turn out. How are we going to do as a country, sir?

Francis Fukuyama:

Well, look, I think that first of all, we are facing a gigantic constitutional challenge because Trump has been ruling in a way that the founding fathers never envisioned by executive order. Everything is just a decree of the king. Many of those are being challenged as we speak in the courts. I think that especially something like the birthright citizenship executive order are very likely to be overturned first by a lower federal court.

If it goes to the Supreme Court, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those are overturned there. Then you get the big challenge, will Donald Trump actually obey a court order that he doesn’t like? He did that mostly in his first term, but I think he’s feeling very self-confident and also angry that he didn’t push harder for the things he wanted the first time he was president.

If that happens, we’re set for a really, really big constitutional crisis. Because the truth of the matter is the courts cannot enforce their own orders. They require the executive branch to enforce them, and if the executive branch is the party that’s doing the wronging, you got a big problem. At that point, I think, I’m not sure where it goes.

Does it go into the streets? Does it go into some kind of internal protest within the administration? I think there’s lots of very scary alternatives there.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, I’m not too optimistic about internal protest given the personnel choices.

Francis Fukuyama:

The one thing that could happen is that Americans assume the government’s just there and it’s going to do its job. You could get some of these cuts will really have bad effects on people. You attack the FAA and you don’t have enough flight controllers in an airport and then you get a big traffic accident or you get an airplane accident.

It’s actually due to one of Elon Musk’s budget cuts. I think that that would make people see that there’s actually a direct connection between what the government does and their safety.

Preet Bharara:

Well, I’ll respectfully disagree with you. Insofar as now it is impossible for reasonable people to get across the idea of cause and effect. You might think, and I might think in the eventuality that you described, that it was the failure to fund government workers or to give them proper time off whatever the case may be.

The Trump folks can say whether true or not, that it was a function of a leftover policy of DEI, even if DEI has been eliminated for a year or two before the accident, that you’re hypothesizing and say, blithely, it’s just a hangover from DEI policy and that’s Barack Obama’s fault and Joe Biden’s fault, and tens of millions of people will buy that, don’t you think?

Francis Fukuyama:

No, you may be right about that. I think actually the more promising avenue is an economic policy because Trump is promising completely contradictory things. He wants low inflation, lower prices, and he also wants tariffs and deportations and he can’t have all of those simultaneously.

I think that kind of failure is going to be noticed by ordinary people if suddenly we have the much higher inflation rate and job losses and so forth.

Preet Bharara:

I want to talk about a related issue that is of concern that I don’t think the public fully understands because they have been used to a civil service in government. I think there are a lot of agencies that are rightly considered bloated and cutting would be worthwhile probably in a lot of places, but we didn’t always have a civil service.

If you don’t have a civil service and you still have jobs that need to be done because you cannot reduce the government payroll to zero, what you get instead was something that we used to have in many quarters, which is patronage.

Patronage is fine in hunky-dory in the short term for the political regime that’s in power, but it’s terrible in the long run. Do you have a view or do you want to explain a little bit about what is in store for us if we eviscerate the civil service?

Francis Fukuyama:

Well, beginning with Donald Trump’s favorite president, Andrew Jackson, you had the rise of the spoils system or the patronage system where virtually every federal official was there because of a favor owed him by some politician. In the late 19th century, the government, every post office postmaster would turn over every two years when the other party took power.

You had no professionalism, no continuity. You had these big city machines like Tammany Hall that were highly corrupt, which were the kind of epitome of patronage. It was only with the passage of the Pendleton Act in the early 1880s that you established a merit-based civil service for the first time with educational requirements, civil service exams, and the like.

I think that’s really the kind of system that we’re heading back to where you reward a political supporter, not chosen on the basis of competence, but chosen on the basis of loyalty. The United States is not going to collapse, but it’s going to be much more corrupt. It’s going to be much less efficient.

Part of the reason that the Pendleton Act was passed was that businesses didn’t want to have to bribe politicians all the time to protect their interests. They actually wanted-

Preet Bharara:

The cheaper way of going about it.

Francis Fukuyama:

Yeah. Right now, the business community is waiting and seeing, and they’re not taking an active role. I think it’s really important that they wake up and recognize that their fortunes really depend on having a nonpartisan, professional, competent government. If you destroy that kind of government, it’s not going to be good for them.

Preet Bharara:

It’s like having everything your way and it doesn’t add up with tariffs and lower inflation. Here, under the guise of trying to root out waste, fraud and abuse, you’re going to effectively replace a civil service system with a patronage system. Well, guess which system gives you more waste, fraud, and abuse? It’s the earlier one.

Is one solution here, and I want to quote something else that you wrote more recently. We always talk about the idea and the aspiration that everyone should vote and more people should be informed, which is, I guess slightly different from saying that more people should be thinking about politics at the center of their life.

There are people who say maybe politics is too much the center of too many people’s lives, even though we are very, very far away from full participation in elections. You wrote, I wonder if you could explain what you meant, trust is important. It’s the glue that makes institutions work and that makes norms work, and that keeps society on track.

I agree with that, but you’re right, quote, “In generalized social trust depends on large parts of the society being apolitical or depoliticized.” End quote, that sounds like a contradiction. Could you explain?

Francis Fukuyama:

Well, I think that you can see the drawbacks of excessive participation in the current situation where especially on the right, you have people that are incredibly mobilized, they’re glued to Fox News or to the internet or to Joe Rogan, and they’re sort of listening very intently and they’re very well-organized.

I think that that’s been one of the sources of polarization. Okay, so take this as an example. Americans should not be choosing the kind of food they eat, the kind of football teams they cheer for on the basis of partisan loyalties. What you’ve been seeing over the last few years is the spread of partisan politics into all sorts of areas where it didn’t exist before. Consumer choice should be boring and based on what kind of-

Preet Bharara:

The best commercial.

Francis Fukuyama:

[inaudible 00:39:54] you like, not whether you’re red or blue Republican or Democrat. In a way, the political activism has been going into all sorts of places that it shouldn’t. The one big worry I have is that there’s a whole bunch of officials in the US government that have what’s called for-cause removal protection, meaning that you can’t just arbitrarily fire them.

That’s the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a head of the Census Bureau, these inspector generals. I think people have wisely understood that these should not be regarded as politicized partisan offices. You need people that can manage these things impartially, and that’s exactly what’s being attacked right now.

These people are being fired and being replaced by people that are partisans. That’s a kind of political activism that is really dangerous. These jobs really ought to be de-politicized.

Preet Bharara:

What is your assessment or advice if you were being asked for the shape, form, and substance of a rational and effective opposition to Donald Trump and his administration?

Francis Fukuyama:

The ultimate check on Donald Trump is going to be an election. I mean, that’s the way our system works.

Preet Bharara:

We’re out of them. He’s done.

Francis Fukuyama:

Well…

Preet Bharara:

He’s two for three.

Francis Fukuyama:

That’s part of the reason that he’s on this tear right now because he won the last election and he won it pretty handily. He thinks that that gives him a lot of legitimacy. Really the only way that you’re going to reverse that is by winning the next election in the midterms, and that is going to be the product of people being mobilized.

I mean, first of all, it depends on him making mistakes. I think that he’s likely to make a lot of mistakes, especially in economic policy if he does what he’s threatening to do. Could be in foreign policy, if he actually wants to occupy Gaza, it’s an insane idea. Let him try. Assuming that he does make mistakes that are not going to be popular, then there’s going to be an opening in 2026.

I think to take advantage of that, you have to have just normal, boring, democratic politics. You’ve got to mobilize people. You’ve got to inform people. You’ve got to monitor what’s happening. You’ve got to make people aware of abuses and get them angry so that they will go to the polling place and vote for a different party.

Peel away some of the Republicans that I think at this point had been swallowing their discomfort with Trump because he’s intimidated them. At some point, they may be able to break free. I don’t see any way other than that to stop him.

Preet Bharara:

There are events that happened that changed one’s own thinking fairly substantially. I believe you’ve written that one of those events for you was the Iraq War. Fair?

Francis Fukuyama:

That’s absolutely right.

Preet Bharara:

How does a smart guy you see an event like that, that may have been predictable and then have a complete change of heart about fundamental things? Describe what your change of heart was and why?

Francis Fukuyama:

Well, I thought of myself from college days on as a conservative. I was part of this group that of self-styled neoconservatives that had been initially in favor of the Iraq War. As we got closer to the war, I began to think that this was not such a great idea because we wouldn’t be able to handle the post-war situation.

I had never been a kind of full-on pro-free market type of economic libertarian either, but I did think markets generally worked well. I think what happened in the first decade of the 21st century is you had this disaster of the Iraq war that was really pushed by a lot of my close friends, and you had the financial crisis in 2008.

Both in foreign policy and in economic policy, you had these big disasters that were the direct result of conservative ideas. I just think that if you can’t respond to reality hitting you like a two-by-four in the head, you’re not being at all honest as a citizen or as an intellectual. I think that’s really what shifted my thinking both about foreign policy.

We cannot rely on military force in the way that the Bush administration wanted to and free markets needed regulation. There you have it.

Preet Bharara:

Is there any connection between the Iraq War and what many believe is the folly of it and years later the rise of Donald Trump?

Francis Fukuyama:

Absolutely.

Preet Bharara:

Explain that link.

Francis Fukuyama:

Well, I think that there was a lot of resentment about the fact that we didn’t win those wars in the first place that they seemed to go on, that nobody was grateful to us for having liberated them, all of the promises that were made by the Bush administration and the continuing chaos in that what was still a very important part of the world.

I think that it really did feed this narrative about elites conspiring behind the backs of ordinary people to against their interests, because this really was, I mean, the war was not driven by grassroots support. It was really driven by elites that were really out of touch. I think with the working class people that actually go into the military and have to fight and die on behalf of foreign policy causes that they think up but don’t really affect ordinary people.

I think it definitely was one of the reasons that Donald Trump rose the power is he was really the first Republican candidate to openly say the war was a mistake.

Preet Bharara:

How is it that so many people think the Iraq War was a mistake? The President at the time was George W. Bush, and a lot of people had a change of heart about a lot of things and lost faith in institutions and trust in government and in the representations made by government.

Yet, if you look at the polls today, George W. Bush is viewed fairly favorably by the public. Do you have an explanation for that given the impact of the Iraq War on people’s thinking?

Francis Fukuyama:

I mean, my only explanation is that certainly among a certain class of more centrist voters, he’s viewed more favorably only because of what the alternative Republican is. It’s kind of amazing to think that Bush was actually a darling of the right at one point because what the right represents and what it believes in is so different from the days that he was president. I think that’s part of it.

The other thing is that people just have short memories. My students grew up, they came into consciousness way after the Iraq War had happened. All of the bitter fights that I remember at that time, they have no recollection of that. It just doesn’t matter to them.

Preet Bharara:

Lots of important stuff. Francis Fukuyama, thank you for being with us. Really appreciate your insight. Thanks so much.

Francis Fukuyama:

Great. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Francis Fukuyama continues for members of the CAFE Insider Community to try out the membership head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider. Stay tuned. After the break, I’ll answer your questions.

Now, let’s get to your questions. This question comes in an email from Ned who writes, “In the episode on February 3rd, is Trump winning or spinning? Preet says to Mark Bunda-Galibovich, specifically at minute 2013, “You found yourself employed in Greenland.” I can’t help but feel like he’s stressing the word employed just enough to make it sound like an homage to the Great Wall of Shang as Vizini.

If in addition to all the other impressive things Preet is, if you can also slip into fluent Princess Bride speak, that would be well inconceivable. I’ll take my answer on the air. Well, Ned, I have to tell you, you’re absolutely correct. It’s true. I try to limit my references to the Princess Bride as much as possible.

If you do like them, and not everyone likes them with such frequency, I commend you to a prior episode, an interview I did with Ben Wickler, who was the head of the Democrats in Wisconsin, where we had quite a back and forth about the Princess Bride and also other things relating to the Democratic Party. Enjoy.

This question comes in an email from Lindsay who writes, “Hi, Preet. What was your experience like when you worked on the Senate Judiciary Committee? What do lawyers do in that role? Why did you want to move from your job as an AUSA to work in Congress? Thank you.” Well, thanks, Lindsay. That’s a very good question.

The work of the Judiciary Committee is particularly relevant these days as confirmation hearings of tremendous consequence are taking place. We had the confirmation hearing of Pam Bondi. We had the confirmation hearing of Kash Patel to the FBI. As I record this on Wednesday, February 12th, there is taking place the confirmation hearing in the Judiciary Committee of Todd Blanche to be the Deputy Attorney General.

Going back to the other part of your question, why did I leave what I thought was the perfect job, the greatest job that I thought I would ever have in the Southern District of New York to be a staffer on the Judiciary Committee back in 2005? Well, walk down memory lane for me 20 years ago, almost to the day when I left for that position.

Part of the reason was what was going on at the time in the country at the beginning of 2005, the US Supreme Court was at its most static in terms of personnel in a generation or multiple generations. It had been something like 11 years since there had been a vacancy on the court and a need for a nomination and a fight or a battle over a nomination to the Supreme Court at the beginning of 2005, which was the beginning of the second term of George W. Bush.

There was lots of speculation, which turned out to be correct that there would be at least one, if not more vacancies on the Supreme Court. The principal speculation settled upon Sandra Day O’Connor. As I thought about the great job and career I was having in the US Attorney’s Office, out of the blue this opportunity came to be Chief Counsel to Senator Schumer in his role on the Judiciary Committee.

I thought to myself, “What could be more important? What could be more interesting? What could be more impactful than playing a part in the confirmation process of one or more Supreme Court justices?” As we talk about in the podcast all the time, Supreme Court has a profound impact and influence on people’s lives and on their livelihoods.

That’s always been true and will always continue to be true. I left with some trepidation not understanding exactly what goes on in the Judiciary Committee. Never lived in Washington. Never served for an elected official before. Sure enough, Sandra Day O’Connor, a few months into 2005, announced her retirement and John Roberts was nominated to take her position.

Then as we approached in September of that year, the confirmation hearings of John Roberts to be an associate Supreme Court Justice, people may remember that the weekend of Labor Day, the Chief Justice William Rehnquist suddenly passed away leaving two vacancies. There was a week-long break in the confirmation hearing of Justice Roberts, if I recall correctly.

He was renominated to be the chief justice to take the place of William Rehnquist. Then later, after the failed Supreme Court nomination of George Bush’s White House counsel, Harriet Miers, there came along, a gentleman by the name of Sam Alito, and he’s the one who ultimately took Sandra Day O’Connor’s job.

I left this job in New York, moved my family down to the D.C. area so I could be involved with and be a participant in the process of figuring out who our next Supreme Court justices should be. I should note a couple of things about that experience. One, I sat every day in the hearing room in the Senate office building the Hart Senate office building behind Senator Schumer.

Giving him advice and counsel on the kinds of questions he should ask on the way he should think about his vote exhaustively examining the records of both Roberts and Alito. At the end of those confirmation hearings, they both got confirmed, but I will state for the record that Senator Schumer voted against both. Now as to your question is what do lawyers do in that role?

I’ve already mentioned one aspect of the job dealing with confirmation hearings and nominations, whether that’s US attorneys or members of the Justice Department or Supreme Court justices, and not just Supreme Court justices, but appellate court judges and district court judges as well. That was a significant part of the job and an interesting and gratifying one, but also legislation.

Every aspect of legislation addressed by and voted upon by the Judiciary Committee was in my purview as well. I had a small staff of about three or four lawyers who were all doing very well. I’m proud of the alumni of that Judiciary Committee Office, whether it was crime legislation or immigration legislation or issues relating to the constitution or proposals to amend the Constitution.

All of those things came through the Judiciary Committee and so we got to work on those things as well. Then finally, the third category of work, I would say is oversight. They were regular oversight hearings, usually overseen by and spearheaded by the majority. When I worked in the Senate for four and a half years, the first two years we were in the minority.

Then in 2007 when the Democrats took back control of the Senate, we were in the majority as I’ve alluded to, I think a few times previously on the program, I had the privilege of helping to lead an investigation of the Justice Department back in 2007. Over what? Over its politicization of that department.

Lindsay, thanks for asking the question. I think it’s important to know that behind every member of the House of Representatives, every member of the United States Senate, there are hardworking, dedicated staff on the democratic side and the Republican side who are trying to do the best they can for their bosses and for the country.

I want to make just one more comment about some of the issues that have been roiling around in the first three weeks of Trump 2.0. There’s a lot of legitimate consternation about the challenges to the Constitution that we’re facing. Some people think that we’re in a constitutional crisis.

Some people think that it’s fast approaching and some people think that it’s inevitable at some point in the medium or late term. Usually what they’re talking about is there’s some executive action, either done one time or planned in the future, or of an ongoing nature that a court in the country going all the way up to the Supreme Court says needs to stop.

By the way, going back to 1803 in Marbury versus Madison. It is the courts that decide what the law means. They interpret the law. They interpret the scope of the authority that the executive branch has. No matter what tweets you see coming from Republican senators or other people associated with President Trump.

Those things are very important and they could very well be crises. The other worry that I have and that people should be thinking about are the softer ways that are not direct defiance of a Supreme Court ruling, where the executive will can be done in a way that’s in bad faith.

Contrary to the public interest and contrary to the spirit of legislation that has been duly passed by both houses of Congress. On the one hand, one could argue that you’re not allowed to literally dismantle USAID by executive fiat because it is a creature of statute or that you can’t just dismantle the Department of Education because it also is a creature of statute and you can’t just get rid of it.

I get all that, but that’s not the only way you can wreak havoc at various of these agencies. You can decide to keep the buildings. You can decide to keep the agencies and basically eviscerate them from within. I’ll give you an example. The CFPB, the Consumer Fraud Protection Bureau that has been a flashpoint of controversy between Democrats and Republicans between conservatives and progressives since its inception, is I think an important case in point.

The Trump administration does not necessarily have to do the thing that’s most obviously wrong or against the law, which is shuttering the entire agency. What it can do is it can fire the head of the CFPB, which it did. It can take one of its own cabinet members, give that person a dual role as the acting head of the CFPB, which they’ve done.

Who essentially says, “Don’t do anything. Pause on your investigations. Don’t do the work of the people. Don’t try to root out waste, fraud and abuse, which by the way, some of these folks relating to Trump seem to give lip service to caring a lot about, and that happens to be one of the missions of the CFPB.”

Are there excesses? Are there ways in which I have seen the CFPB has overreached in my time on the other side of the aisle? From the government? Sure. The point I’m making is, while it’s important to look and see what kinds of flagrant, constitutional, and statutory abuses might be engaged in by the Trump administration.

There are other softer ways that the dirty work can be done as well. There are entire areas of criminal law that Pam Bondi has decided just shouldn’t be enforced except in the most narrow of circumstances. Nothing unlawful about that. Nothing unconstitutional about that. Nothing even particularly unethical about that. Some people might welcome the reduced enforcement of some of those statutes.

I mentioned only to point out that we should not just be vigilant with respect to direct clashes between the administration and statutory obligations, but also be paying attention to the other ways that are harder to deal with, that the Trump administration can eviscerate government and some of its good purposes.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Francis Fukuyama. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at @PreetBharara with the hashtag #AskPreet.

You can also now reach me on Threads, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-2477-338. That’s 669- 24-PREET, or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producers are Noa Azulai and Jake Kaplan. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández. The CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Nat Weiner and Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, Stay Tuned.