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I. A Momentous Juncture

Francis Fukuyama went to bed early on the night of November 8, 2016. The sixty-six-year-old social theorist had accepted a conditional assignment to write about the U. S. presidential election for the Financial Times if and only if the victor in that contest was the man widely assumed to be on his way to a historic defeat. “I didn’t think I would have to write the piece,” he told me. The following morning, he was forced to conclude that liberal democracy, whose triumph as “the final form of human government” he had risen to fame declaring three decades ago, was threatened from within as it had not been in his lifetime. “The risk of sliding into a world of competitive and equally angry nationalisms is huge,” he wrote on November 9, “and if this happens it would mark as momentous a juncture as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.”

That year signaled not just a new stage of world history but also the emergence of Fukuyama, then thirty-seven, as its oracle. A young man of enormous intellectual energy, ambition, and brio, he published an article titled “The End of History?” in an obscure neoconservative policy journal. Announcing “the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism,” the article set the intellectual world alight and led to profiles in Time and The New York Times Magazine. A protégé of the philosophy professor Allan Bloom at Cornell, Fukuyama had distinguished himself as a foreign-policy advisor to George H. W. Bush by staking out an aggressive position with respect to the breakup of the Warsaw Pact and the reunification of Germany, among other inflection points on the way to the sudden collapse of the communist world. Fukuyama was not merely reacting to events but testing an explanatory framework, drawn from the nineteenth-century German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (the same framework used by Karl Marx to explain the inevitability of worldwide communist revolution).

The claim was never that human conflict was a thing of the past but rather that history was a coherent and directional process. By “end,” Fukuyama referred to a “goal” of history rather than a terminus, meaning that the “basic principles of the liberal democratic state could not be improved upon” by the communist utopia, or by any other, because liberal democratic principles were the only ones capable of satisfying the craving, inherent in every individual, for recognition of one’s moral equality. Fukuyama called this craving thymos, borrowing a term from Socrates.

The essay went on to herald the “triumph of the West” and “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution.” Such ringing, peremptory formulations were unsurpassable evocations of the euphoria of that historic moment, permanently inscribing Fukuyama into the annals of intellectual history—whether as sage or fool, or something in between, only posterity would tell.

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A minor aspect of every geopolitical crisis since then has been the ritualized use of Fukuyama’s name as a piñata in the prestige media, asserting some variant of “The End of the End of History.” But the underlying trend of the succeeding years was a continuous expansion of democracy. Between 1975 and 2005, the number of electoral democracies increased from around 35 to 110 and overall gross domestic product grew by a factor of four.

In the mid-2000s, however, that trend began to reverse itself and the world went into what Fukuyama calls a “democratic recession.” China and Russia have grown more authoritarian and assertive. Hungary, Turkey, Thailand, and Poland have regressed toward increasingly illiberal democracy. The Arab Spring descended into civil war throughout the Middle East. Anti-immigrant and anti–European Union parties gained strength in Germany, Austria, France, the Netherlands, even Sweden. And in 2016, Britain voted to leave the EU, and Donald Trump, running on an explicitly nativist platform, was elected president.

“The world is not moving toward greater democracy or converging toward greater openness,” Fukuyama conceded. “But it’s still too early to tell whether this is just a glitch akin to a market correction or some kind of permanent state of affairs. . . . People still would rather live in a prosperous, well-governed country than in Guatemala or Nepal or Zimbabwe, and so long as that’s the case, there will continue to be a lot of grassroots pressure for the institutions that produce stable, rich countries.”

We were speaking in his vacation cottage in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, several weeks before the publication of his latest book, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment. It is an airy, open space sparsely furnished with intricately carved woodworks of Fukuyama’s own hand. Carmel-by-the-Sea is a place apart from the country at large, a bubble of tranquility blessed with a microclimate several degrees cooler than its surrounding environs, overlooking perhaps the loveliest stretch of coastline anywhere in California. None of the houses in the one-square-mile town has a street number, to protect the privacy of its many well-known residents. Fukuyama speaks rapidly but with such evenness of cadence that he always conveys an impression of leisurely contemplation. His whole being appears to incline toward a temperamental moderation that is instinctively dialectical, always seeking to reconcile apparently contrary truths. This habit of mind seems at once precisely what the country needs more of at the moment and precisely what is being ousted from the discourse as the doomsayers commandeer the airwaves and mob the mobile device.

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“As a citizen, I am horrified,” Fukuyama said of Trump. “As a political scientist, I am delighted.” The rise of such a figure is “a kind of natural experiment where we get to see how theories like checks and balances work in practice and where we can gauge how strong American institutions are. It’s all just theoretical until these concepts are challenged.”

It is perhaps this division into distinct roles of concerned citizen and disinterested analyst that allows Fukuyama to preserve his rhetorical equanimity. He has avoided what he calls the “overdrawn” comparisons to 1930s Germany that have issued from the mouths of some of his colleagues, and he holds himself at a remove from the “Resistance.” “I think in the end our democratic system is perfectly adequate to contain Trump.” Though ultimately, he noted, it’s not the rivalrous branches of government or the federal bureaucracy or the courts upon whom the burden of holding Trump in check rests. “In a democracy, the ultimate check is always electoral,” he said. “If the Democrats manage to win back at least the House, they can start to undo some of the damage Trump has done.” And if not? “Then we’re in deep shit.”

II. A Master Concept

Politics was organized until recently “along a left-right spectrum defined by economic issues,” as Fukuyama puts it in Identity, which he wrote while shuttling between his vacation cottage and his house in Palo Alto, where he teaches at Stanford. But increasingly, the global political system has become a battleground for competing demands for recognition. Identity can be seen as an earnest attempt to keep the bloody passageway back into history shut.

In the book, Fukuyama probes beyond the immediate triggers of the populist nationalist upsurge to the deeper sources of the discord threatening to undo liberal democracy. He situates this discord in thymos, the universal craving for recognition, which he argues can serve as a master concept to explain “the dynamic new forces” currently shaping world events. It is thymos, Fukuyama argues, that is the seat of identity politics—a phrase typically associated with the Left but which he applies more broadly—and thymos that accounts for the increasingly bitter fragmentation of countries around the world into hostile camps.

"The passion for equal recognition...does not necessarily diminish with the achievement of greater de facto equality and material abundance, but may actually be stimulated by it."

Indeed, almost anyone can construe themselves as in some manner oppressed, and such claims are inherently more difficult to satisfy than economic ones. Fukuyama divides thymos into two different forms: “isothymia,” the desire to be seen as equal to everyone else, and “megalothymia,” the desire to be seen as superior. Liberal democracy can be “subverted internally” by either. In a remarkable passage, Fukuyama notes that “the passion for equal recognition . . . does not necessarily diminish with the achievement of greater de facto equality and material abundance, but may actually be stimulated by it. Tocqueville explained that when the differences between social classes or groups are great and supported by long-standing tradition, people become resigned or accepting of them. But when society is mobile and groups pull closer to one another, people become more acutely aware and resentful of the remaining differences.”

Back in 1992, Fukuyama was blithe about the “smallness of actually existing inequalities.” By the early 2010s, he had begun to sound the alarm about the rise of wealthy and powerful elites rigging the political system in their favor. This capture had led to “political decay,” in which special-interest groups were able to block the popular will, including on hot-button issues such as immigration, where polling indicated that a broad consensus existed. He began to call for a renewed left-wing movement to contest the growing consolidation of power.

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Fukuyama is hardly a trusted figure among Democrats, though he has, in recent years, taken to railing against what conservatism has become. He is exasperated with the large faction of the electorate willing to be persuaded by the crude and dishonest appeals of a man he took to be “a total idiot completely unqualified to be president.” But while deploring the remedy to which these voters resorted, he acknowledges the grievances that fueled their resentments. “Both the financial crises in the U. S. and the Eurozone and the migrant crises in Europe were regarded as elite-leadership failures, and rightly so in both cases. They did screw up.”

Yet traditional parties of the Left have been hemorrhaging support throughout Europe despite a three-decade rise in economic inequality in countries all around the globe. Fukuyama noted that the left-wing Occupy Wall Street movement “marched and demonstrated, then fizzled out,” while the Tea Party “succeeded in taking over both the Republican Party and much of Congress.” Instead of articulating an overarching vision of economic justice, many on the Left seem intent on elaborating ever more fractionated identity categories demanding recognition—a move that is intrinsically at cross-purposes to one that seeks change through mass democratic means. “The Democrats have become the party of minorities, white professionals, and educated white women,” Fukuyama said, “while the Republicans are the white people’s party. It’s a moral disaster for American democracy.”

III. An Incidental Fact

Fukuyama’s grandfather was an immigrant from Japan. He came to the United States in 1905, when it was still a nation with mostly open borders, to evade the draft for the Russo-Japanese war. He built a successful hardware store in downtown Los Angeles and became a community leader in Little Tokyo. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he was rounded up and sent to an internment camp by the U. S. government for the duration of World War II. Given two weeks to sell off his business, he did so to a white competitor for virtually nothing. “He basically lost his lifetime’s work,” Fukuyama said. After his release, Fukuyama’s grandfather was never able to establish himself in business again. When he finally became a naturalized citizen, he cast his first vote in the U. S. presidential election of 1964. The vote he cast was for Barry Goldwater.

“A lot of immigrants become quite conservative,” Fukuyama noted, explaining why the seemingly perverse vote, which his liberal father regarded as an outrage, was in fact consistent with the experience of migration and loss his grandfather had endured. “They feel that they worked hard to earn their place in this country, that America was a land of opportunity, that they had done well, and what was theirs was theirs.” Fukuyama is skeptical of projections of a “permanent Democratic majority” based on a ruling coalition of white liberals and minorities, in part because of his grandfather’s story. He noted that certain polls show that a slight majority of Hispanics—51 percent, according to Harvard-Harris—support stricter enforcement of immigration laws. I wanted to know about Fukuyama’s background because he has just written a book about identity in which he doesn’t mention his own. Fukuyama is one of a handful of enduring public intellectuals in America. He is also a person of Japanese ancestry. But he has always regarded the latter as an incidental rather than an essential fact about himself. “I grew up in a period when everybody just wanted to be Americans. Not Japanese Americans. Not holding on to our ethnic separateness.” The assertion seems a little quaint coming from an American academic in 2018. His consciousness of that fact imbues it with a touch of defiance.

“I grew up in a period when everybody just wanted to be Americans. Not Japanese Americans. Not holding on to our ethnic separateness.”

“I never felt like I was different from other people,” Fukuyama said, a statement expressing a certain confident midcentury American consensus on the identity of the nation in which he was born—that the country has a single national identity expansive enough to encompass people of foreign descent like himself. Hearing him express it so bluntly in the context of today’s overheated discourse on identity reminds us just how rapidly the conceptual ground has shifted in a single lifetime.

Fukuyma went to a predominantly Jewish, strongly left-leaning private school in the Bronx, Riverdale Country Day. The progressivism of that time, the 1960s, insisted that America must be held to its own founding ideals. It was the next generation of academic radicals that began to insist that those ideals were themselves part of the apparatus of oppression. Fukuyama’s father always told him that “being forced to speak only English in school was the best thing that ever happened to him,” because it placed him on an equal footing with his peers, and that being Japanese “never prevented me from doing anything I wanted to do.” The message was that his son too should approach the world with this expectation and not that he was psychically vulnerable to small, backhanded slights. One senses that Fukuyama has no regrets for embracing it.

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After a short stint studying deconstruction with the postmodern thinkers Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes in Paris and comparative literature with Paul de Man at Yale, Fukuyama switched to the government department at Harvard, where he worked with Samuel Huntington. While the peers he left behind in the humanities made the long march through the universities, promulgating the deconstructionist, feminist, postcolonial, multicultural, and queer theories that have unseated the Western canon within those institutions, Fukuyama and his friends, a group that included Paul Wolfowitz (another Bloom protégé) and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, went to Washington, D. C., to work in the Pentagon and the State Department.

The “End of History” thesis, stripped of its internal texture and ambivalence and transformed into a meme, can be said to have played a role in the creation of the Bush Doctrine. But Fukuyama broke with Wolfowitz and Libby over their advocacy of preemptive war in Iraq. If “The End of History?” was “Marxist” in its framework, Fukuyama said, his neocon friends had become “Leninist” in believing the U. S. had the power to hasten the movement of history through military force. He believes they drew the wrong lessons from the Reagan years, specifically the belief that undemocratic societies would simply default toward democracy if we toppled their dictators. The Trump years have, however, brought Fukuyama back into contact with some of his old cohort. At a recent private meeting, he ran into Bill Kristol and Max Boot. “Boot told me, ‘You realized the bankruptcy of conservatism long before I did.’”

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Fukuyama was never an exponent of the globalist, open-borders cosmopolitanism with which “The End of History?” came to be associated among those who had never read it. He has always believed, for instance, that the nation-state is the “largest political unit that is viable in terms of actually delivering . . . stability and security” and that some irrational patriotic attachment to the state is a necessary aspect of sustaining its unity. In the last chapter of Identity, Fukuyama proposes compulsory national service to force Americans to encounter and cooperate with one another across class and party lines. He calls for the assimilation of immigrants into a culture that isn’t afraid to say what it values and what it rejects.

And finally, while calling for the redress of injustices brought to light by social movements such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, he urges the Left to abandon a conception of identity that undermines “the American national story by emphasizing victimization” in favor of “a progressive narrative” that “can also be told about the overcoming of barriers and the ever-broadening circles of people whose dignity the country has recognized, based on its founding principles.” All of which sounds eminently sensible, as many reviewers have largely acknowledged, but will anyone be listening? “I really wrote this book for an audience that is unlikely to heed it,” Fukuyama observed.

IV. A Curious Paradox

In the last paragraph of “The End of History?” Fukuyama posited that history’s finale would be a “very sad time,” in which the heroic exertions made on the road to attaining liberal democracy would give way to “the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.”

The first four sections of his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, describe how the thymotic drive, together with science and technology, leads history toward what Hegel called “the universal and homogenous state” of liberal democracy. The fifth, final, and most intriguing section of the book—which is among the most misunderstood and brilliant books of its time—shows why even a liberal democracy that has crossed over into a “post-historical” condition can be undone from within by the very same energy that brought it into existence.

He argued that even though liberal democracy does a better job than any conceivable system of government at satisfying desire, reason, and thymos at once, this does not mean that the problem of thymos is therefore solved. This is because thymos is a volatile aspect of human nature that can be channeled into benign pursuits, constrained by institutions, pacified by abundance, or directed toward great and useful works, but it can never be (nor should we want it to be) permanently quelled. “Human life, then, involves a curious paradox: It seems to require injustice, for the struggle against injustice is what calls forth what is highest in man,” Fukuyama wrote, before speculating about the emergence of men and women raised in the bosom of liberal democracy who grow bored with its very tranquility and come to “struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.”

This is the view from the End of History.

This article appears in the November '18 issue of Esquire. Subscribe