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The End of Francis Fukuyama

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2024 › 10 › francis-fukuyama-end-greatly-exaggerated › 680439

From 11:09 a.m. to 11:14 a.m. yesterday, I thought Francis Fukuyama had died. When an X account that seemed connected with Stanford University announced the legendary political scientist’s passing, many people were fooled. Much to my chagrin, I was among them. And then the account declared itself to be a hoax by Tommaso Debenedetti, an Italian prankster. Minutes later, Fukuyama himself posted on X, “Last time I checked, I’m still alive.”

Debenedetti, whom I could not immediately reach for comment, has previously issued many fake death announcements, including for the economist Amartya Sen (still alive), the pseudonymous writer Elena Ferrante (still alive), the Cuban leader Fidel Castro (dead as of 2016). In 2012, Debenedetti told The Guardian that his purpose was to reveal how poorly the media do their job, arguing that “the Italian press never checks anything, especially if it is close to their political line.” But fooling people undercuts the idea of shared truth—a cornerstone of liberal democracy itself.

That the hoax was targeting Fukuyama, one of liberal democracy’s greatest defenders, made the situation all the more striking. In 1989, as communism was on the verge of collapse, Fukuyama published an essay called The End of History, which argued that modern liberal democracy had outcompeted every viable alternative political system. Humanity, he argued, had reached “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” (He later expanded the essay into a book, The End of History and the Last Man.)

[Francis Fukuyama: More proof that this really is the end of history]

But how durable is liberal democracy? Although Americans are experiencing far greater material prosperity than their forebears, fears of political violence are growing, and the Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, is using authoritarian language. Fukuyama foresaw the potential for trouble in 1989. “The end of history will be a very sad time,” he wrote back then. “The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands … Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.”

Wondering what Fukuyama thought of yesterday’s hoax—and our current political moment—I requested an interview. The transcript below has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Jerusalem Demsas: It’s great to find you alive and well. How are you feeling?

Francis Fukuyama: Yeah, that was an unusual event.

Demsas: How did you learn about your “death”?

Fukuyama: One of my former students, I guess, tweeted that this had happened and that it was a hoax. And then I went back and looked at the original tweet, and then it just went viral, and everybody was tweeting about it, so I decided I should actually assert that I was still alive. So it got a lot of attention.

Demsas: What was your reaction when you saw it?

Fukuyama: I couldn’t figure out what the motive was, and I also couldn’t figure out why anyone would take the time to produce a tweet like that. It was a pointless exercise. I guess the other reaction is that X, or Twitter, has become a cesspool of misinformation, and so it seemed it was a perfect thing to happen on X that might not happen on other platforms.

Demsas: Do you know who Tommaso Debenedetti is?

Fukuyama: No.

Demsas: He is an Italian who has claimed responsibility for a series of hoaxes, including the fake announced death of Amartya Sen. He told The Guardian years ago that the Italian press never checks anything. This seems like a part of his broader strategy to, I guess, reveal the problems with fact-checking in the media. What do you make of this strategy?

Fukuyama: Well, first of all, it wasn’t very successful. The fact that you can propagate something like this on Twitter doesn’t necessarily tell you much about the media. People debunked it within, I would say, seconds of this having been posted, so I’m not quite sure what kind of a weak link this exposes.

Demsas: This sort of informational ecosystem seriously weakens liberal democracy, right? If there cease to be shared facts, if it becomes difficult for voters to transmit their feelings about the world, culture, the economy to elected officials, it weakens the legitimacy of democratic signals.

Fukuyama: When I wrote my book Trust back in the mid-1990s, I described the United States as a high-trust society. That’s just completely wrong right now. And a lot of that really is due to the internet or to social media. This is a symptom of a much broader crisis, and it’s really hard to know how we’re going to ever get back to where we were 30 years ago.

Demsas: Does it say anything about the strength of liberal democracy that the democratization of media erodes trust?

Fukuyama: The classic theorists of democracy said that just formal institutions and popular participation weren’t enough, and that you had to have a certain amount of virtue among citizens for the system to work. And that continues to be true. One of the virtues that is not being cultivated right now is a willingness to check sources and not pass on rumors. I’ve caught myself doing that—where you see something that, if it fits your prior desires, then you’re very likely to just send it on and not worry about the consequences.

Demsas: Next week we have the election between Trump and Kamala Harris, and there are a great deal of normal policy distinctions between the two candidates. And when you look at why people are making their decisions, they often will point to things like inflation or immigration or abortion. But there’s also a distinction on this question of democracy too, right? Why does it feel like there’s this yearning for a more authoritarian leader within a democracy like the United States?

Fukuyama: What’s really infuriating about the current election is that so many Americans think this is a normal election over policy issues, and they don’t pay attention to underlying institutions, because that really is what’s at stake. It’s this erosion of those institutions that is really the most damaging thing. In a way, it doesn’t matter who wins the election, because the damage has already been done. You had a spontaneous degree of trust among Americans in earlier decades, and that has been steadily eroded. Even if Harris wins the election, that’s still going to be a burden on society. And so the stakes in this thing are much, much higher than just the question of partisan policies. And I guess the most disappointing thing is that 50 percent of Americans don’t see it that way. We just don’t see the deeper institutional issues at stake.

Demsas: We’re in a time of great affluence—tons of consumer choice, access to goods and services, bigger houses, bigger cars. George Orwell once wrote, in his 1940 review of Mein Kampf, that people have a desire to struggle over something greater than just these small policy details. [“Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet,” Orwell observed.] Does that desire create a problem for democracies?

Fukuyama: There’s actually a line in one of the last chapters of The End of History where I said almost exactly something like if people can’t struggle on behalf of peace and democracy, then they’re going to want to struggle against peace and democracy, because what they want to do is struggle and they can’t recognize themselves as full human beings, unless they’re engaged in the struggle.

Demsas: In The End of History, you wrote that “men have proven themselves able to endure the most extreme material hardships in the name of ideas that exist in the realm of the spirit alone, be it the divinity of cows or the nature of the Holy Trinity.” And I worry that liberal democracy is unable to provide the sorts of ideas that make people want to struggle or fight for it. Does it feel to you like it’s doomed?

Fukuyama: Well, I don’t think anything is doomed. This is the problem with peace and prosperity. It just makes people take [things] for granted. We’ve gone through periods of complacency, punctuated by big crises. And then in some of these prior cases, those crises were severe enough to actually remind people about why a liberal order is a good thing, and then they go back to that. But then time goes on so you repeat the cycle, with people forgetting and then remembering why liberal institutions are good.

Demsas: After Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, I had friends say, do you think your entire view of the American public would change if 120,000 people in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania had voted differently? And I wonder if that’s a question to ask ourselves now, if Trump wins again. Does it really say that much about people’s views on democracy?

Fukuyama: It has much deeper implications. The first time he won, he didn’t get a popular-vote majority. You could write it off as a blip. But everybody in the country has lots of information now about who he is and what he represents. So the second time around, it’s going to be a much more serious indictment of the American electorate.

Meet the Ostrich Voters

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2024 › 10 › ignoring-political-news › 680426

When Bryan Jarrell, an Evangelical pastor in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, came across an election-themed episode of a podcast, he’d skip right over it. He would mute the TV when political ads came on, tried to teach his social-media feeds that he wasn’t interested in politics, and would throw campaign mailers straight in the trash. He’d skim news headlines sometimes, but if he could tell that the story was about national politics, he’d keep scrolling.

Today, exactly one week before the election, he will begin researching both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump and make a decision about whom to support. He’s not sure where he’ll land—he is conservative on some social issues, but he doesn’t like Trump’s character.

Jarrell represents a set of Americans who, out of anxiety, exhaustion, or discouragement, are mostly tuning out campaign coverage yet will ultimately participate in the election. They’re political ostriches who, at the last minute, will take their head out of the sand. “For a decade now, people have started talking about news fatigue,” Ken Doctor, a news-industry analyst, told me. “People are tired of being bombarded with the news. And then it kind of matured into news avoidance.” This tendency escalated with the increasing ubiquity of both online news and Donald Trump, Doctor said.

[Derek Thompson: Click here if you want to be sad]

Jarrell started purposefully ignoring campaign coverage after he noticed that his parishioners would come to him in the lead-up to elections and describe genuine fear about one candidate or the other taking the White House. He decided to recommend this strategy, of abstaining from the news until the final week of the race, to his parishioners, and to follow it himself.

“How much energy did America collectively spend imagining a Biden-Trump election only in July to have Biden drop out?” Jarrell said to me. “If you wait ’til the last week, that’s still enough time to make an informed decision, but you haven’t wasted all that emotional energy stressing about something that may not even come to pass.”

A sizable percentage of Americans seems to feel similarly. A 2022 Reuters Institute report found that 42 percent of Americans “sometimes or often actively avoid the news,” up from 38 percent in 2017. The most common reasons people gave for avoiding the news were that it focused too much on politics and COVID, that it was biased, or that it made them feel unhappy or fatigued. In April, the Pew Research Center reported that 62 percent of Americans were already worn out by coverage of campaigns and candidates. A May poll by NORC at the University of Chicago found that 49 percent of those surveyed either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “I’m tired of receiving and processing news about the 2024 presidential election.” Not caring about politics is a hallmark of what political scientists call “low information” citizens, but unlike many in the low-information camp, political ostriches do intend to vote. They just don’t feel the need to follow the news in order to do so.

The reason ostriches and others avoid political news is simple: “It’s all negative; it’s divisive; I’m sick of it,” the Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told me, relaying the views she hears in focus groups.

In Jacksonville, Florida, 31-year-old Tawna Barker didn’t watch the debates, and on social media, she scrolls past political news, skipping what she feels are “inflammatory, heavily one-sided articles.” She plans to vote for a third-party candidate. “Neither [Trump nor Harris] really seems like they’re actually going to do anything to help us,” she told me.

Barker, who in 2016 supported Bernie Sanders, seemed disappointed by the fact that Hillary Clinton was the Democratic nominee that year. “Whoever’s running stuff behind the scenes is just gonna pick who they want to pick, and we just have to go along with it,” she said.

Cheryl Wilson Obermiller, a 66-year-old near Kansas City, Missouri, told me that she and her husband have swapped watching the news for taking walks or watching, say, Masterpiece Theater. She finds the news inflammatory, addictive, and occasionally insulting to people like her—she’s voting for Trump. She asks herself, “Am I wasting time watching politics when I could be helping my neighbor? And I think that’s something we all have to consider. Am I watching politics that are feeding in me an attitude that would make me look down on or dislike people?”

Obermiller still spends about an hour a day either reading or watching the news, down from about four to six hours several years ago. She gets the news that she does consume through Facebook groups and from Fox News’s Greg Gutfeld, “because I think he’s funny, even though a lot of times he says things that I kind of laugh about but I think are kind of mean,” she said.

[James Fallows: The media learned nothing from 2016]

Ignoring political news has become easier in recent years. Nearly half of Americans don’t subscribe to any news sources. Those seeking to dodge campaign coverage can choose to spend their time on apolitical TikToks and Instagram reels, and watch Netflix instead of CNN. “For people who are not interested in politics, which is most people, it’s actually easier than ever to not watch news shows, to not have the algorithm in your social-media feeds give you political information,” David Broockman, a political scientist at UC Berkeley, told me.

Broockman found in a recent study that just 15 percent of Americans watch at least eight hours of “partisan” TV, such as Fox or MSNBC, each month. “However little you think voters care about politics, you will still always overestimate how much they care,” Broockman said. This helps explain why both Trump and Harris are appearing on podcasts such as The Joe Rogan Experience and Call Her Daddy—they’re trying to get around people’s “I hate politics” filters.

If people are tuning out, it might not matter much for the election results. Most people already know whom they’re going to vote for; the universe of truly undecided voters is very small—likely less than 15 percent of the electorate. “The vast, vast, vast majority of voters settle into who they’re voting for, for whatever reasons they are, and then that’s kind of that, and there’s no information that they can get that is going to bump them off,” Dan Judy, a Republican pollster with North Star Opinion Research, told me. “There’s really a small number in most political campaigns of voters who are truly persuadable.” The willfully tuned-out will likely end up voting for whichever party they’ve always supported, but they will have suffered less agita in the process.

Jarrell, the pastor, feels that his approach to the news has made him more serene, and has given him more time to focus on his church and his family. “I believe that there’s a loving God in control of the universe,” he said, “and no matter who’s in the Oval Office, God’s still in heaven. And things are going to be okay.” That’s a hope he shares, surely, with Americans of all political persuasions.

Under the Spell of the Crowd

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2024 › 10 › under-spell-crowd › 680435

On Sunday afternoon, I stood for three hours in a block of Midtown Manhattan—33rd Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues—surrounded by thousands of Donald Trump supporters. Every half hour or so, the herd shuffled forward 15 or 20 feet before the police barriers up ahead closed again. Whenever we moved, a chant of “USA! USA!” broke out, only to die as soon as progress stopped. Madison Square Garden, where Trump and an all-star MAGA lineup were on the bill, stood in view the whole time, a few hundred feet away. Snipers perched on high-rise rooftops, and a pair of drones hovered overhead. A friend had bought two tickets, but word reached us from the front that tickets weren’t being checked—they were a ruse for the campaign to snag fundraising emails. As the sun drifted toward the Hudson River and the sparkling fall day cooled off, the clock was outrunning us.

I’ve been in Trump crowds before, but never in New York City. The familiarly scuzzy and desolate neighborhood around Penn Station was filled with a political throng wearing an unusual amount of red for a city that dresses dark. Because it was New York, there were a lot more Black and brown people, and a lot more Orthodox Jews, than you’d see at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. An occupying force of unmistakable locals had taken over the street. My disorientation deepened all afternoon.

No one had more than six inches of personal space. To exit through the crush sideways and climb over metal barriers for a bathroom break or cup of coffee would take a major effort of will. We were stuck. There was nothing to do but chat.

Next to me stood a solemn-looking man in his 20s who held a tiny American flag in one hand. He said that he worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—a world-famous, progressively orthodox cultural institution where his politics made him a lonely dissident. One of about three? No, he said—there were secret comrades in warehousing. I asked if he thought the country could come together after the election, whatever the result. His answer—that Trump had the support of an overwhelming majority of Americans, more than enough to clean up the mess, and that Democrats alone were guilty of demonizing their opponents, because Republicans were just saying what was true—sounded like a no.

An hour later and 100 feet farther along, I was standing beside Richard and Jason, Trinidad-born men in MAGA caps, who live near me in Brooklyn. They supported Trump because of high prices—a dozen eggs for $6—and lack of international respect; also, The Apprentice. Richard was certain that Trump would win in a landslide—would even take deep-blue New York City. (There’s a lot of secret Trump support in Flatbush, he confided.) When I asked if he would accept a result that went against his candidate, Richard simply repeated: Trump in a landslide. I almost believed him, because the street had become an echo chamber—not the virtual kind, but a physical one—and I began to understand the power of crowds over the mind. As the afternoon wore on, it became harder to hold on to the thought that all these thousands of people were wrong.

Around 3 o’clock—after two hours of standing, and no progress for at least 45 minutes—my lower back throbbed. It was becoming clear that we would never cross 7th Avenue and reach the promised land of Madison Square Garden, and I began to imagine a stampede. If this had been an ordinary Manhattan traffic jam, the blare of car horns would have been deafening. But the crowd remained shockingly patient and pleasant, making instant friends in the American way. Promoters for a local betting market tossed out red T-shirts that gave Trump a 57 percent chance to win, and Richard, Jason, and my other neighbors took up a cry of “Bet on Trump! Bet on Trump!” On the sidewalk, a near-perfect Kim Jong Un impersonator was barking, “No to democracy! Yes to autocracy! That’s why I support Donald J. Trump!” and everyone was laughing. Being fellow Americans together, or New Yorkers, or even Yankee fans, wouldn’t have been enough to prevent things from getting ugly. Today, the week before Election Day, only a political tribe—the Fellowship of Trump on 33rd Street—creates such solidarity.

Close to 4 o’clock, we hadn’t moved in well over an hour. With this motionlessness in the heart of New York City, the crowd congealed into a single thought, and the thought became reality—it was as if Trump had somehow already won. Wedged between the men from Flatbush and a metal barricade, I was living in Trump’s America. The smiles and laughter, the cheerful outbreaks of chanting, the helpful calls of “Chair coming through, wheelchair coming”—all these tokens of happiness depended on a mass delusion that had everyone in its grip. It was absolutely possible for the unanimous belief of all these thousands of people to be wrong. And if I stayed here any longer, I might go under the spell too, like a lost climber who sits down to rest in the snow for a few minutes and never gets up. I squeezed my way along the sidewalk until I found an opening in the barricades and slipped out.

So I, along with 10,000 or 20,000 others, missed the big show inside Madison Square Garden. I missed the racist jokes and vulgar insults and profanity directed at Puerto Ricans and other Latinos; at Jews, Palestinians, women, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, and the half of Americans who support Democrats. I missed the crude nativism, the conspiracy-theory mongering, the warnings of violence and revenge. I missed the grifters and the nepos, the opportunists and the fanatics, the heirs of Charles Lindbergh and Father Coughlin, the fascist wannabes who don’t quite have the chops—the dark mirror of the good will outside. I missed seeing what the hateful extravaganza would have done to my neighbors in the crowd on 33rd Street. And I went home wondering how a spell ever breaks.