Francis Fukuyama, the Stanford University political scientist, has acknowledged that the judgment he made about President Donald Trump 34 years ago was entirely wrong. In his 1992 book "The End of History and the Last Man," Fukuyama assessed Trump, then a New York real estate developer, as a figure who would pursue only economic ambition within the framework of liberal democracy.
Ahead of the September 8 release of his memoir "In the Realm of the Last Man," Fukuyama told The New York Times in an interview on the 31st of last month that he had believed men like Trump would choose to become very rich rather than become tyrants, but that he had not understood that simply being wealthy was not enough for him. He had not anticipated, he said, that the ambition of an economic elite he expected to be satisfied with accumulating wealth inside the system would in fact combine with a craving for political power and go as far as threatening the democratic system itself.
Fukuyama pointed to the rise of Trump and other populist politicians as a central factor in the crisis of liberalism. In his earlier book "Liberalism and Its Discontents," he cited Trump alongside Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, criticizing them on the grounds that they had used power won at the ballot box to disable core liberal institutions such as the judiciary, the press and the bureaucracy.
Fukuyama said, however, that the current crisis may not be permanent. "Human beings can grow bored with the peace and prosperity of liberal democracy and shake the system themselves," he said, adding that if they grow weary of authoritarianism and conflict, they may eventually seek to return to democracy.
