Authoritarianism v. Democracy: Francis Fukuyama on The Year of Elections

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Democracy has been getting a major stress test this year, with nearly half the world’s voting population heading to the polls, and many casting votes in a time of democratic backsliding and growing extremism. Francis Fukuyama, senior fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute, joined Walter Isaacson. They spoke about the danger of taking democracy for granted, and how he sees the war in Ukraine ending, following his recent trip there.

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WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you, Christiane and Francis Fukuyama, welcome to the show.

FRANCIS FUKUYAMA, SENIOR FELLOW, STANFORD’S FREEMAN SPOGLI INSTITUTE: Thank you for having me.

ISAACSON: You were just in Ukraine, and we’ve reached a milestone just this week with 1 million casualties after two and a half years of war. What are they talking about in Ukraine about how this could end?

FUKUYAMA: There’s not a clear conception except that everyone feels that the war will not end until they can put more military pressure on Russia, and the Ukrainians are very frustrated at the Biden administration for having put restrictions on the way that some of their long-range weapons, particularly the ATACMS, the missiles, longer-range missiles are constrained to within just a, you know, a few kilometers of the border, and they feel that Russia is able to attack them with missiles from a safe sanctuary that they can’t reach, and they’re very upset about that.

ISAACSON: Would you agree with them, or do you think that it would be dangerous for U.S. to allow and the U.K. to allow its missiles to be used into the Russian homeland?

FUKUYAMA: I don’t think there’s any choice there. You know, the constraint has been driven by a fear of escalation on Russia’s part, especially on the part of the president. And I think that, as the Ukrainians pointed out, they’ve crossed many red lines where previously we thought, well, this was really going to get the Russians upset, and they haven’t reacted. The latest one was this incursion into Russia itself in Kursk, near Kursk, and again, the Russians have not retaliated. So, you know, I think the feeling is that is — we’ve been intimidated unnecessarily by these Russian threats, their largely bluffs and we really don’t have a way of pressuring them other than by, you know, opening up the range of these weapons.

ISAACSON: But it’s a fundamental precept in the Russian constitution, even that a serious attack on the Russian homeland would call for a nuclear response. You say you think they’re bluffing. Are there any worries? I mean, should we try to find other ways to put pressure?

FUKUYAMA: Well, look, it’s been with more than three weeks now since that incursion, they really haven’t, you know, moved at all in that direction. I think that if the Ukrainian army were about to occupy Moscow, then maybe, you know, that might be something to worry about. But I think at the moment, this is really been exposed to be a bluff.

ISAACSON: One of the things that’s been consistent, though, is that they have a fear of having aggressive neighbors, understandably so, given the history. And they wanted Ukraine not to be part of a NATO alliance, to be neutral. Senator Rand Paul was just on the show and said, we should guarantee that Ukraine will not be part of an alliance, a military alliance against Russia. What do you say to that?

FUKUYAMA: Well, I think it’s just silly. I mean, NATO was a defensive alliance, really to protect Europe against a Soviet attack, and it continues to be a defensive alliance. It’s never really done anything other than respond to threats. And so, it responded to the September 11th attacks on the United States under Article 5, but the idea that somehow, it’s an aggressive military alliance is just not borne out either by its doctrine or by its history.

ISAACSON: 2024 has been called the global year of elections. I think more than half of the world’s population is going to be voting. You have a really interesting piece in Foreign Affairs because we were sort of worrying, is this going to help promote more illiberal autocracies and populism or is it going to help liberal democracies? And I read the piece. I loved it. But the record is a bit mixed so far. Explain to me where you come out.

FUKUYAMA: Well, yes, it’s definitely mixed. I think that we’ve avoided the kind of catastrophic outcomes that many people were fearing from this round of elections where, you know, populist nationalist politicians would win in many big important countries, and they have made gains in certain places, but they’ve also lost in other places. You know, I think the most important thing that this year of elections demonstrates to me is that it’s possible to fight back. A lot of times people say, well, what can we do about this democratic backsliding? It’s happening all over the world and we seem to be helpless in the face of this. And I think what the elections show is that we’re — you know, we’re not helpless because in a number of countries, let’s say, notably India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi looked like he was heading towards, you know, possibly even a supermajority in the Indian lower house, he actually lost his majority and now has to go into a coalition, and it was a real setback to, you know, the momentum that he had looked like he was gaining.

ISAACSON: And what caused that? You say we can fight back against it. What happened in India that trimmed his power?

FUKUYAMA: You know, the answer to that is just a lot of boring stuff. The way you win elections is you make arguments, you mobilize voters, you capitalize on the mistakes of your opponents. I mean, that’s what democratic politics is supposed to look like. The other really important thing is unity. The year of elections really started off with the Polish election last — at the end of 2023. This right-wing party, the, you know, Law and Justice Party had been ruling Poland for eight years up to that point. They looked pretty invincible and the more liberal opposition was very fractured, but they managed to create a coalition. They campaigned together, and as a result they managed to win a majority and really set the right-wing party back. And, you know, it’s not exciting stuff, but I think that as long as you’re living in a country that does hold reasonably free and fair elections, that’s the way you fight back. You use democratic politics to preserve democracy.

ISAACSON: What are the lessons there for, say, European countries, especially France and Germany? Macron’s now doing that coalition act. Germany has had a right-wing party do incredibly well recently.

FUKUYAMA: Well, it’s partly, you know, more of what I just described, I mean, you have to fight these election battles as they come up. The French avoided having a right-wing national rally government of the Marine Le Pen group running the country because the left came together. They’ve got a two-round voting system, and they agreed to withdraw their weaker candidates. So, at least one of the — you know, the left-wing parties would win and it worked. It managed to keep the national rally out of power. You know, a lot of more democratic — liberal democratic groups oftentimes have a hard time cooperating. They may be more numerous in total, but they don’t work together well. There are a lot of prima donnas and, you know, a lot of very personalistic politics centered around one particular leader that doesn’t want to see it or cooperate with others. And I think that, you know, people just have to get over that. They have to realize that there is an overriding need to unify in the face of these kinds of electoral challenges.

ISAACSON: Do you think that’s a lesson for the Democratic Party here in the United States now?

FUKUYAMA: Yes, absolutely. I think that they really dodged a bullet. And actually, it kind of worked out accidentally that by the time President Biden agreed to step down, I think the Democrats were so tired of fearing, you know, the worst possible outcome, which was a Trump victory that they rallied around Kamala Harris, you know, in 48 hours. I think, paradoxically, if he had agreed to step down, you know, like, right after the June 27th debate, there would have actually been a much bigger, nastier fight among Democrats for who would get the crown. But, you know, it just worked out well for them. And that’s a warning for the future, because they really do need to be, you know, put on a unified face if they are going to exploit the — you know, the majority — the popular majority that they actually command.

ISAACSON: The framework, the large framework we’ve been talking about in the world and in your Foreign Affairs article is the struggle between authoritarian populist nationalism, let’s call it on one side, and liberal democracy on the other side. How does that new framework fit in and evolve from what you wrote about in 1992 in your “The End of History” book?

FUKUYAMA: Well, there’s obviously been a big reversal. You know, the beginning in 1989, there was a huge — well, actually, it started a decade prior to that with the democratizations in Spain and Portugal. But, you know, there’s a huge amount of momentum behind democracy that we saw explode across Europe, across the former Soviet Union, in Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s and early 2000s. Since then, I think that a lot of things have changed. You know, people began to take democracy for granted. It didn’t seem like this new thing. I think people appreciate democracy the most when they have to live under dictatorships. And the memory of that was already fading in many parts of the world. I think that also people that supported liberal democracy made a number of mistakes. You had a kind of extreme form of capitalism that created a lot of inequalities that left a lot of working-class people behind in in the rich world. You had a shift on the left to a kind of identity politics that fractured people’s, you know, senses of national unity and national identity. And I think all of those things began to feed a kind of populist opposition to — you know, to liberal democracy. And a lot of people were simply indifferent. They just took it for granted that things would always be that way.

ISAACSON: Well, one of the things in your piece is that, to some extent, it’s not just right-wing or left-wing when it comes to a more populist, perhaps authoritarianism, but it’s a resentment of corrupt elites and a corrupt establishment. Do you think that liberal democracies are understanding the depth of that resentment? And is there some truth to the fact that there should be some resentment to a corrupt establishment that tries to protect its power?

FUKUYAMA: Well, I think that that characterization is too extreme. I mean, you have to look at specific countries, and there are countries where there is a corrupt establishment. I would say that, you know, the bigger problem is a complacent establishment that has simply accepted a certain number of policy positions as gospel without really thinking about the impact. So, you know, we take a commitment to free trade. There’s lots of good theoretical reasons why free trade is going to make everybody richer, but, you know, a lot of the advocates of free trade didn’t understand that it wasn’t good for everybody, that there would be losers if you opened up, you know, your markets to foreign competition, they said, OK, we’ll take care of the losers. Don’t worry about it. But then they didn’t bother to do that. And, you know, because there wasn’t an immediate explosion, they just forgot about those people. And I think that’s really what’s fueled a lot of — you know, a lot of resentment. You know, there are other things as well that Democratic governments haven’t delivered on things that, you know, they’ve promised to do. I think that we’ve wrapped ourselves oftentimes and so many rules that we can’t build things. And then, you see an authoritarian government like China, you know, building things all over the world and people say, oh, that looks like a good alternative. And then, finally, you know, issues like crime. I mean, I think one of the biggest challenges to our complacent democracy is going on in El Salvador right now, because that country was completely in the thrall of these gangs, these Maras that extracted more money from the Salvadorian population than the government took in taxes at one point. You get a strong man like President Bukele that basically arrests, you know, 10 percent of the young male population, puts him in prison with no due process and the crime rate goes down. And that’s something that really matters to people. And it’s something that, you know, the democratic governments have not been delivering on. So, that’s not a recommendation for doing it. But I think it is a — you know, it’s a warning that if you actually don’t deliver on things that are really important to people like security, basic citizen security, like economic growth, then you’re going to be vulnerable to these kinds of populist attacks.

ISAACSON: I want to ask you a personal question based on something you wrote for persuasion. Your grandfather, I think, was from Japan in the early 1900s. Your mother came from Japan and when you were in school, you were teased and sometimes bullied for being Asian. And then you asked your dad and he said, just tell them you’re an American. America has been defining itself as people believe in a creed, this creed of liberal democracy. But J. D. Vance at the Republican Convention also talked about ancestry and the homeland of America. What did that — what did you feel about that?

FUKUYAMA: Well, I think it’s terrible. I think that Americans have made a lot of progress over the years. You know, you can, in a sense, say who’s an American by who’s allowed to vote in — as a citizen in this country. At the beginning of the American Republic, it was only white men with property. We fought a civil war that theoretically gave African Americans the right to vote, but that was unfortunately taken away from them for the next 100 years under Jim Crow and segregation. And so, it wasn’t until really the civil rights era that they were, you know, really allowed to participate politically. Women were not allowed to be full citizens until the 1920s. And so, you know, the definition of who’s an American became the civic understanding of an American is anyone who believes in American law, ideas, principles, a Declaration of Independence, and it doesn’t matter what their skin color is, or their national origin. And I think that that was a huge achievement that America got to very painfully through a lot of struggle and blood, sweat, and tears by the time of the civil rights era. That’s the moment when my father told me that I was simply an American, and I didn’t need to worry about where my ancestors came from. And I think what J. D. Vance is doing is basically moving us backwards to before that period in the 1960s, where it did matter who your parents were and what they looked like and, you know, what’s your ancestry was. He explicitly said that, you know, it’s not just about ideas, that not just anyone can be an American, that you somehow have to be, you know, kind of embedded in the country for generations before you really qualify, and I think that’s a very dangerous idea that’s going to exclude a whole lot of people, you know, like myself that, you know, didn’t have ancestors that came over on the Mayflower.

ISAACSON: Francis Fukuyama, thank you so much for joining us.

FUKUYAMA: Thank you very much.