YouSaid · the spoken record

Francis Fukuyama

lines on the record: 45
first: 2023-07-10
most recent: 2023-07-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, you know, the answer to that could be that we're actually at the end of history, that we've kind of on a cyclical basis gone through all the major political farms that are possible. And, you know, now we're returning to a stronger state, more state intervention in the economy. We've been there before. It's not a new idea, but it actually may be one of the solutions to some of the problems that we're experiencing right now.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the answer to the first is no, I never thought that. I was always very shy and I couldn't imagine doing what politicians need to do in order to run for office. And I still can't imagine that I figured at some point in my life that the one thing I'm actually good at is writing books. And so I've now got a position where I can do that. I'm sorry, the second question you had was,”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are yeah, and so I actually think it's that comparative framework that I kind of grew up in. And what comparative politics does is it actually tries to put any individual country in a larger framework where you're seeing how things are different, but the same as other similarly situated countries.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know the self-confident opinions. I don't know exactly where that comes from. Maybe that is American. I mean, I feel that the intellectual milieu I come from is comparative political scientists. I remember earlier in my career talking to someone like Juan Linz at Yale University was a great comparative for one of my mentors, Seymour Martin Lipsit. They had this at the time I thought was this amazing ability to talk about different countries, different regions and very different situations, but to do it with a level of knowledge that was really, really impressive. And I always thought, boy, it would be great to be in that position. Now, you know, after 30 years of traveling to probably at least a dozen countries every year, I've actually been to a lot of places, you know.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I have been all along. I do think that if we had been better at giving them certain kinds of weapons like F-16s and long-range missiles, they wouldn't be in the situation. They'd be much more successful. I don't think it's too late to rectify that situation. It's not yet the case that we can simply ride off the counteroffensive as having failed. So I think if there's a breakthrough in that military conflict sometime this year, then things will look very different. And I think it's possible that that'll happen.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, he wanted to make Russia great again by basically reincorporating Ukraine and toppling its democratic government. And he is now a year and a half into an incredibly bloody, destructive war. You just had this Prigozhin uprising against him that shattered this illusion that he was trying to make that he's in control of everything. And it's hard to imagine a result that is less in line with what he originally expected. He's kind of the father of the modern Ukrainian nation because they now understand that they're not Russia and they're determined to keep it that way.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I say absolutely. You want to keep everyone safe. So I think in general, referenda are bad ways of making policy. And this was a gamble, you know, that just went really, really bad. And now it's really hard to undo.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the way, I wouldn't say that now. I would say the invasion of Ukraine was the biggest mistake any politician has made recently. But Brexit was up there. Yeah, I mean, Cameron obviously thought that he'd win the referendum, and this was an easy way to lance that particular boil, and that was a big miscalculation. You know, in the state of California, we hold referenda all the time. Should foreign actors be forced to wear condoms on set, we have to vote on that, you know. How did you vote?”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Prevents us from getting to outcomes. A lot of what drives people crazy is the fact that you implement a policy and then nothing happens for the next two years because there's something in the system that's coming it up. So I think a combination of a more active government with a more efficient and effective government is at least going to deal with some of the sources of that unhappiness.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, obviously, there's no simple answer to that, but I would say you need to do a couple of things. First of all, you need to address the inequality. And that just means more social protections and more redistribution. I mean, I actually think that, you know, the classic European social democracy was really what stabilized Europe in that two-generation period after 1945. And because of the rise of neoliberalism in the 80s and 90s, we got away from that. And I think that pendulum needs to swing back. But the second thing is that governments have just gotten less good at delivering, whether it's welfare benefits or health care or infrastructure, a whole bunch of things. And they need to get better at that. And that's a slightly different issue than just voting money because, as I said, we've bogged ourselves down in a kind of proceduralism that really...”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doesn't believe in and promote. And he's now, you know, he's polling at 20% of Democratic voters. How do you explain that? I don't think that there's an economic explanation.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is manipulating the apparent reality that you're experiencing and everything is false. And so I'm not sure that the situation of working class people in the rich world is so fragile and horrible compared to earlier periods that that by itself is what's driving this. But it's the combination of that experience with a cognitive environment that simply breeds and encourages in many ways distrust of any established authority. And I think that this kind of pervasive distrust, we have this guy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is the son of the first Robert F. Kennedy, who is a crackpot. He got his start complaining about vaccines, but basically he says his father was killed by the CIA. And, I mean, there isn't a conspiracy theory that he does.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think that the lack of respect is more a cultural phenomenon than an economic phenomenon. There's been this big debate ever since 2016 about whether the rise of populism is driven by just economic factors like inequality, people being left behind, or whether there's a more complex cultural source, which is related to the economic decline, but it's not identical. This feeling that elites do not respect me. That's been combined. This is something that's become more and more evident to me. The essence of populism is basically it's a belief that the world runs by conspiracies. You know, this is the red pill thing in the matrix that you've been taking the blue pill up to now where you thought that all these institutions were legitimate, but now that you've taken the red pill, you realize that there's actually this hidden world of elites.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They got the second largest, yeah, and Chinese, I mean, they've got everybody there, and they seem to be handling it, you know, quite well.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think there are a number of examples in Northern Europe. So I had this phrase getting to Denmark that I use in my political order books, not because I liked so much social democracy, but the low levels of corruption, kind of effective government, I think that they've achieved are quite rare. And I think in that part of Europe, democracy is actually a lot healthier than it is in the United States because you don't have the same degree of polarization. There still is a pretty healthy social consensus around the legitimacy of their own institutions. That's interesting. Canada, I didn't realize this, but they got 40 million people there and they've got this plan actually to build their population as fast as they can through immigration. And they seem to be handling that quite well.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't believe I have because I think if you take a long-term view of historical progress, you do get these setbacks and recessions. I mean, you think about what happened in the 1930s, collapse of democracy in Germany was a much bigger development than anything that's happened in the last 10 years. And then the world managed to recover. And even in the 60s and 70s, you had military coups all over the developing world, all over Latin America, and that got reversed. So I just think that you can't make these big judgments based on the experience of the last 10 years.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those thousand pages. But I think that in terms of the more elite perceptions of what I stood for, that may count for more than the meme that's out there.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, look, I've learned to get over the frustrations of that a long time ago when I post something on social media or elsewhere. I almost never read the comments because inevitably somebody's going to say, oh, Mr. End of History, what about this? What about that? And, you know, it's been going on for more than 30 years. And so I, you know, who needs it? I do think in terms of my subsequent career, it's been actually a great boon because it got me a good academic position. I could write, you know, so I've written a total of 10 books now. I actually think that the two volume series I did on political order was really my effort to rewrite the end of history with much more knowledge about the world than I had when I was in my 30s. And I made some corrections. And I think that most people on Twitter have not worked their way through.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Marxists said it's headed towards communism, and there will be a higher form of civilization that will displace what they call bourgeois democracy tied to capitalism. And my argument was I don't see that higher stage. I don't see a preferable form of government. And I think right now the only rival that seems plausible is China, which is definitely authoritarian. It's quasi-capitalist, but they've certainly been very good at providing stability and growth. But is that actually going to displace the democratic model? I have my doubts about that, but I'm open to the possibility.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, okay, so just to turn the autopilot on, so what was the end of history? You know, history with a capital H, you would probably describe in other terms as modernization or development today. And the question is, is there a progressive evolution of societies over very long periods of time that leads to certain forms of institutions? And my answer to that back then and today is yes, that I do think that there is a coherent process of modernization, and I think people that don't believe that should go live in Guatemala or Myanmar or some other very poor chaotic country that doesn't have the advantages and opportunities at Britain or the United States or Canada or many other countries offer. So that's the basic meaning of history. And then the end of history is where does that process look like? It's headed. And for many decades,”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now biotech, I actually wrote a whole book about this in the early 2000s because I think that in the end it has a much bigger capacity to shape society than digital technology. So I was wrong about the digital part. But I think biotech still is very powerful as a means of controlling other people if you can get into germline engineering, the pharmacological interventions that we've been able to make with people permit some part of society to control another part of society in ways that people dreamed about in previous eras, but they didn't have the capacity to actually make good on. So I do think that that's coming down the road.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I hesitate to say anything about AI. I've seen so much pontificating on this subject in the last few months. And I think that I'm not going to add to that, except to say that compared to something like blockchain or some of these other things that have come along, I think the generative AI is a much bigger deal. And you can see that affecting society in much bigger ways. It could be competitive to existing workers and ways of doing business. It could be actually complementary. So it'll increase productivity and efficiency. But I think anyone that claims to know which of these is going to happen, you shouldn't listen to them because who could have predicted the impact of electricity when”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, that Hegelian process is really not that different from classic Whig history in Britain that recognizes ups and downs, but the synthesis ultimately is going to be a higher form of liberal values. Look, I don't take a position on that. I think that there are reasons to think that in the long run liberal political systems are going to be more durable because they're better at dealing with diversity than authoritarian ones. They don't have those decision-making problems that I mentioned in authoritarian countries. But I think that rather than one model winning out over liberal democracy, what you could have is just a lot of countries maintaining some form of either not very good democracy or not very good authoritarianism. And there is no ultimate convergence.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot of the stuff that Modi has done is very destructive of liberal values, but how far he can push that, I'm not quite sure. Donald Trump, I think, is a very unique threat. And because the United States is so important to global democracy as a model and as a material supporter of democratic values, witness Ukraine, I do think that he represents a very unique threat. He's brilliant. He figured out this wellspring of intense resentment that existed in many parts of American society, and he capitalized on that in a really devilishly clever way. And if he gets re-elected in 2024, I think not just the United States, but a lot of liberal democracies are going to be in big trouble.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but it's part of the government. Orban is up there because he figured out this illiberal line of attack and is a very clever and smart politician. And so he pulls back just before the EU threatens to pull his subsidies. But he keeps, you know, he's still in power after all these years. Modi is very dangerous just because it's such a big country. thing that I don't understand about India, you know, India, if you look at it historically, it's been subject to a really strict centralized tyranny relatively few times in its history because it's completely different from China in that sense. China's got an extremely strong state and a weak civil society, whereas India, it's kind of the opposite. They've always had a rather weak state and a powerful social forces that push back against it.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I would put Brexit at the bottom of that list in terms of the seriousness because it now seems like a lot of people in Britain regret having made that choice and they could do it all over again. They wouldn't. It's just that procedurally it's just hard to figure out how to get there. I mean, you know, one impressive factoid is that support for immigration, as I understand it, in Britain's actually gone up since Brexit. So I don't think it means that there's this growing kind of intolerant fascist, quasi-fascist society emerging.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, that's right. I think that people want rule of law and procedural correctness, but they also want good outcomes. And sometimes those procedures and the checks and balances get in the way of achieving outcomes. You know, I think actually one of the biggest challenges to the liberal democratic model is the one going on in El Salvador right now. So El Salvador was absolutely consumed with gang violence and warfare. And you get this president, Naeib Bukele, who basically puts like 10% of the youth population in jail, you know, jailing all these gang members. And the rate of crime has dropped like 90% of families can now go out and actually enjoy a Sunday picnic without having to be worried about some Mara, you know, coming up and robbing them. And it's very hard to see any other democracy in Latin America that's been able to deal with this kind of security.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Yeah, so this is another problem with democracies, that although they do require buy-in, they also the same checks and balances prevent them from actually adjusting quickly. You know, one of the issues I've been looking at a lot in the last few years is infrastructure. In the United States, and I think in many parts of Europe, we don't build infrastructure very well. It takes too long. It's too expensive, certainly compared to China, which is a kind of champ at this stuff. And people notice this. You know, they say, you know, this project has been going on for the last 15 years. You know, where's the new international airport in Berlin? Fifth runway at Heathrow, all sorts of things like that. And I think that does have to do with the excessive proceduralism.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, the story we like to tell ourselves in liberal democracies is that if we make mistakes, we can correct. And I must say that that belief has gotten... Challenged in the last few years.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The standing committee of the Plit Bureau that could actually say to him, you know, I think this may not be the best policy. Why don't we reconsider? So I think that lacking those checks and balances and they need to get societal buy-in for your policies leads to poor decision making. And I think that China, it's not just zero COVID in China. Their economy is in real trouble. Virtually all their municipal governments and cities are broke. They don't really have a fiscal, a sustainable fiscal policy 20% unemployment for college graduates. They've got this oversaturated housing market. And I think that they could be facing just like Japan in the 1990s, the next 20 years of stagnant economic growth. And ultimately a shrinking population. And so I'm not sure that their model is going to look nearly as powerful down the road. It has.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's kind of a nightmare world. Well, on the authoritarian side, the word destined is a little bit strong, but I do think that there are reasons for thinking that authoritarian systems have got their own big problems of sustainability. You know, the first one is simply a matter of legitimacy, that if people are supporting it because of good performance rather than any kind of belief in sort of traditional values, then the moment the performance weakens, they're going to stop supporting. But the other one just has to do with decision making. You know, authoritarian states do not have checks and balances. And in both Russia and China, we've seen this huge concentration of power in one individual by Putin sitting at the end of this 30-foot table, you know, apart from his foreign minister and Xi Jinping in the course of zero COVID. There probably wasn't a single member of the...”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bank, President Biden all pile on attacking them. And I think that I've had a lot of democracy activist friends because we cultivate a big network of them from a lot of the global south that are saying, yes, we understand, you know, you have to treat gays and lesbians and transgender people equally you shouldn't discriminate. But a lot of times you people in the West come across as making that the only issue that you care about. And then this is picked up, I think, by the Putins and Orbans of the world and converted into this narrative that really what Western liberalism is, is all about LGBTQ rights and not these more fundamental kinds of freedoms.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's actually very complicated because if you look at the agenda of a lot of progressives, they do want to inject a lot of those cultural issues into the kinds of demands that are made. So, for example, LGBTQ rights in many ways kind of rise to the top of the Western liberal agenda when Uganda passes an anti-gay law. I mean, I thought this was very striking. Let me be clear, it's not a good law. It's a terrible law. It criminalizes homosexuality, big penalties are attached to homosexual acts, so forth. So it's not a good law. But Uganda has done a lot of anti-democratic things, like undermining freedom of speech, not allowing opposition parties, jiggering elections. And the West doesn't say anything about those, but this is the one issue where the development agencies, the world...”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now treated a lot more skeptically, and that means that the motor that might be driving global democracy is really not such a motor, after all. I'm sorry, you had the second of your three was.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Internet, and you say, you know, our vaccine's safe, you'll get a million hits purporting that they're not. So that was really important. The rise of China is also, I think, something that undermines a theory that was out there in the social sciences that I believed, and I actually still believe a certain version of that, which is that as a society becomes more educated, more middle class, that people are going to want to demand more personal freedom and some degree of participation in their political system. And that was true in South Korea and Taiwan as they modernized, they converted into democracies. Japan did that in an earlier age. But China has hit a level above where South Korea and Taiwan were, and they're still communist. And so I think that that theory, you know, we have to.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, all of them, I think, are important. The technology one is really important because, you know, really a lot of the disagreements that we have that lead to the polarization in contemporary America are based on completely different factual understandings of what the world is like. So the people that believe that the Democrats overturned the 2020 election, they think that there's a lot of evidence showing that there was all this ballot stuffing and so forth. And I think the COVID epidemic really sharpened a lot of those disagreements. Actually, that was driven in a way by the public health authorities making real mistakes that were excusable mistakes, I think, at the time, but they did overreach. But that then got transformed in social media to a deliberate elite conspiracy to want to control ordinary people. And, you know, right now, if you go on the...”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think that in this Twitter age, it's really easy to incite a lot of immediate hostility and anger. But this court is actually not as consistently a right-wing as I think some people feared.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, I would say overall that this conservative court is not as bad as people were fearing when they got this sixth conservative judge majority because there actually now are three justices in the middle that actually are persuadable by arguments. So it's true that they struck down affirmative action. By the way, that's a very popular position in the United States. Pull data shows 60% of Americans really don't like the idea of race-conscious decision making and hiring and school admissions, this sort of thing. But the same week they also came down with a six to three decision striking down this Republican effort to give full authority to state legislators to handle elections however they want it, which is something that all the Trumped election overturners had wanted to see pass.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, well, it depends. I think that on some of the civil rights issues like rights for transgender people, I think he actually believes a lot of that. And that's been fairly consistent on his part. It's just that in earlier years, these kind of cultural issues weren't so prominent. And so people's position on them didn't really matter all that much.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He didn't, when he was elected, he was elected as a centrist on the cultural issues. You know, he's been very supportive of a lot of that agenda, that identity politics agenda. It's really an economic policy where he's been more centrist, although even there he's moved further left than certainly the Clintons were willing to go.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Merged over the last decade or two that really offends them. I know plenty of conservative friends that understand perfectly well that Donald Trump is not fit to be president, but they just dislike the left so much that they're willing to hold their noses and either just be silent or actively support him.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the support from establishment Republicans, I think, is just a matter of cowardice. They all understand who he is and how bad he is, but their base has just shifted. And so, you know, for any of them to be viable, they got to talk themselves into liking him, which I think is a rather despicable posture if more of them actually showed some backbone. I think we wouldn't be where we are today. The core of his base are, you know, it was always said to be these working class people that had been put out of work by globalization and offshoring. I mean, there are people like that. One of the big changes is that a lot of the white working classes shifted from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, but a lot of them are middle class people. And I think for them, it's actually the left that they hate more. And in particular, the kind of woke progressive left that has held.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, actually, I think that's admirable because there are actually quite a number of neoconservatives that then turned into very vocal Trump critics. And I think that represented a real ideological consistency because they recognize that Trump is probably the biggest threat to American democracy or global democracy for that matter in the world today. And that therefore they had to defend those democratic values.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It all depends on the individual. I have not spoken to Paul Wolfwitz in 20 years because of what happened. Bill Crystal, who was also a big Neocon advocate of the war, I didn't speak to for about 15 years, but in the last few years he's emerged as a big, very vocal critic of Donald Trump. And so we started speaking again.”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These were both countries where the state had collapsed. Rory knows this from personal experience walking across Afghanistan, stateless society in many respects. And it suddenly dawned on me that especially Americans take the state for granted. They assume that it's always going to be there and that the main problem is to constrain it, to prevent it from impinging on individual rights, but that if you don't have a state in the first place, you're going to be in even bigger trouble because back in Hobbes' War of All Against All. And so that then determined much of what I, you know, was thinking about in writing over the next 20 years is where does the state come from?”
2023-07-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 26: Francis Fukuyama: Trump, Modi, and ‘The End of History’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source