Last Man Standing

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The Long Game

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Why is democracy struggling so muc= h around the world? Francis Fukuyama on the recent history= and unwritten future of the open society.

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Anastasiia Krutota

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For 17 years, democracy ha= s been in decline globally. According to Freedom House, a Washingt= on-based research organization founded in 1941, not only has the number of = democracies dropped; the democratic health of many countries that remain de= mocracies—including the biggest among them, the United States and Ind= ia—has deteriorated as well. Now Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab Spring, has fallen back into di= ctatorship, while Sudan, a grea= t democratic hope after the 2019 overthrow of the Islamist dictator Omar al= -Bashir, is engulfed in a chaotic civil war—with two factions battlin= g each other and both attacking the Sudanese people. Meanwhile, one of the = world’s most powerful authoritarian states is more than a year into a= horrible conflict it started by invading its democratic neighbor with the = dual aim of controlling it and rolling back democracy regionally. Why is al= l of this happening?

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Francis Fukuyama = is a senior fellow with the Freeman Spogli Institute and the director of th= e Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program at Stanford Un= iversity. He’s written widely on development and international politi= cs, including in his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man—which has appeared in more than 20 foreign editions—and most = recently, Liberalism and Its Di= scontents. Fukuyama sees a daunting set of shifting chall= enges to democracy in the world—from the rise of newly powerful autho= ritarian alternatives; to escalating internal conflicts; to challenges from= media, technology, and even human psychology. But over the long term, he s= till sees democracy as more resilient—and authoritarian alternatives = as weaker—than either might seem.

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This article is part of a series in partnership with= the Human Rights Foundation<= /em>. Fukuyama is a speaker at the Oslo Freedom Forum this week.

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J.J. Gould: Why i= s democracy faltering in so many places?
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Francis Fukuyama:= It’s a complicated phenomenon with a lot of different dimensions. Th= ere’s a geopolitical dimension: From the fall of communism in Eastern= Europe in 1989 roughly to the time of the financial crisis in 2008, the Un= ited States was really the only superpower in the world—and could set= a lot of global rules to follow its liberal-democratic ideas.
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Since, we’ve seen the rise o= f two great authoritarian powers, Russia and China, and the emergence of an= era when the U.S. is no longer the only superpower. These rising powers do= n’t just represent alternatives to the Western order shaped primarily= by the United States, either; they have agendas that deliberately challeng= e this order and the liberal-democratic ideas it’s based on.
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In Russia’s case, that&rsquo= ;s most obviously been by invading Ukraine—which isn’t just an = attack on Ukrainian democracy but a challenge to the entire order that took= shape after 1991, when democracy spread into the former Soviet Union and f= ormerly communist countries in Eastern Europe that it had dominated.
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In China’s case, Beijing cle= arly feels that the West—and the United States in particular—ha= s humiliated it by dominating the international system, keeping China from = its rightful place. And the challenge from China is a challenge from a much= bigger, much more sophisticated power than Russia.
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But then, along with this geopolit= ical dimension, there’s been an internal challenge across many countr= ies that have been established democracies—in the upsurge of intolera= nt, right-wing populism. We’ve seen this around the world, including = in places like Hungary and Poland, but above all in the United States and i= n India—the world’s two largest democracies.

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Here too, the causes are complicat= ed. Within rich societies, globalization had the effect of creating inequal= ities, and a lot of working-class people started to feel their jobs were be= ing taken away by elite decision-makers, as these jobs moved overseas. At t= he same time, much of the fighting has ended up being over cultural issues.= A few years ago, those centered on immigration; now they center on issues = of civil rights and gender rights, like opposition to critical race theory,= transgenderism, and so on.

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And these two dimensions have join= ed, in a way, because the one hope Vladimir Putin has for prevailing over U= kraine, as I see it, is that Donald Trump is reelected and the Republicans = return to power in the U.S., where they could well switch sides in the war.=

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I think there’s another inte= rnal challenge, though, that’s coming from progressives—in the = United States and in other democracies—a lot of which centers on orth= odoxies about identity and a lack of toleration toward views that question = them. In certain spaces, like universities and Hollywood and the arts&mdash= ;more culturally elite types of spaces—that kind of orthodoxy can be = very smothering. So there’s a left-wing illiberal tendency we’v= e seen spreading as well.

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And the two tendencies, right and = left, have been feeding off of each other. I really think a lot of the supp= ort for Trump and now Ron DeSantis, and other populist conservatives, for i= nstance, comes out of a reaction to what’s been happening on the prog= ressive left.

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Aziz Acharki

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More from Francis Fukuyama at = The Signal:

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“We’ve seen a = waning of mainstream or legacy media sources—television netw= orks, public broadcasters, major newspapers, and so on—and their disp= lacement by alternative kinds of media. On the one hand, there’s been= a proliferation of niche media properties for fragmented audiences; on the= other, there’s been the rise of big social-media platforms, and medi= a companies dependent on them, with business models that thrive not on prov= iding high-quality information or interpretations but viral content. The se= cond has contributed very significantly to political polarization, particul= arly in the United States—because virality in news media favors more = extreme voices over more moderate or measured, or empirically grounded ones= . In this respect, I think, things are apt to get worse.”

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“Many authoritarian = systems look extremely strong and competent—up to the point = when they collapse. And we’ve seen some big authoritarian failures ov= er the past year—in Iran, with everything that led to the killing of = Mahsa Amini and the protests following it; in China, with the zero-covid po= licy; in Russia, with the biggest failure of them all in the invasion of Uk= raine. The disaster of this war is something that wouldn’t likely hav= e happened if Russia were a more liberal society, if it weren’t just = Putin ultimately making all the decisions—though he had to create buy= -in from his society before he could go ahead with this one. The zero-covid= policy in China, too, was the product of a single leader at the top, Xi Ji= nping, who continued with the policy way beyond the point when it made any = plausible sense. And in Iran, although the protest movement has died down, = society is seething and it’s increasingly clear that a majority of Ir= anians don’t see the regime as legitimate anymore.”

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“The main thing demo= cracy has going for it is the fundamental lack of any coherent alt= ernative. Which was really the issue I was trying to address in my End of H= istory book back in 1992. This wasn’t an argument that democracy woul= d necessarily triumph everywhere—certainly not in the next generation= . It was an examination of the question of whether there was another politi= cal system that’s coherent, stable, flourishing—and not democra= cy. And I simply don’t see that in the world. Which means, in the end= , people are going to have to come back to democracy—if they want to = have economic prosperity, if they want individual freedom, if they want to = have security. I think this is what can give us the most optimism that, in = the long run, there’s going to be a return to democracy around the wo= rld.”

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= Continue reading ...

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