Francis Fukuyama is a senior fellow with the Freeman Spogli Institute and the director of the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program at Stanford University. He’s written widely on development and international politics, 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 Discontents. Fukuyama sees a daunting set of shifting challenges to democracy in the world—from the rise of newly powerful authoritarian alternatives; to escalating internal conflicts; to challenges from media, technology, and even human psychology. But over the long term, he still sees democracy as more resilient—and authoritarian alternatives as weaker—than either might seem.

J.J. Gould: Why is democracy faltering in so many places?

Francis Fukuyama: It’s a complicated phenomenon with a lot of different dimensions. There’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 United States was really the only superpower in the world—and could set a lot of global rules to follow its liberal-democratic ideas.

Since, we’ve seen the rise of 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 don’t just represent alternatives to the Western order shaped primarily by the United States, either; they have agendas that deliberately challenge this order and the liberal-democratic ideas it’s based on.

In Russia’s case, that’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 formerly communist countries in Eastern Europe that it had dominated.

In China’s case, Beijing clearly feels that the West—and the United States in particular—has 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.

Here too, the causes are complicated. Within rich societies, globalization had the effect of creating inequalities, and a lot of working-class people started to feel their jobs were being taken away by elite decision-makers, as these jobs moved overseas. At the 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.

And these two dimensions have joined, in a way, because the one hope Vladimir Putin has for prevailing over Ukraine, 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.

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

And the two tendencies, right and left, have been feeding off of each other. I really think a lot of the support for Trump and now Ron DeSantis, and other populist conservatives, for instance, comes out of a reaction to what’s been happening on the progressive left.

“We’ve seen a waning of mainstream or legacy media sources—television networks, public broadcasters, major newspapers, and so on—and their displacement 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 media companies dependent on them, with business models that thrive not on providing high-quality information or interpretations but viral content. The second has contributed very significantly to political polarization, particularly 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.”

“Many authoritarian systems look extremely strong and competent—up to the point when they collapse. And we’ve seen some big authoritarian failures over 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 policy; in Russia, with the biggest failure of them all in the invasion of Ukraine. The disaster of this war is something that wouldn’t likely have 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 Jinping, 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 Iranians don’t see the regime as legitimate anymore.”

“The main thing democracy has going for it is the fundamental lack of any coherent alternative. Which was really the issue I was trying to address in my End of History book back in 1992. This wasn’t an argument that democracy would necessarily triumph everywhere—certainly not in the next generation. It was an examination of the question of whether there was another political system that’s coherent, stable, flourishing—and not democracy. 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 world.”