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.

The election is rigged. Democrats are already working to steal the election from Donald Trump, and the results are going to be illegitimate. That is, unless Trump wins. This is the message that has been percolating through segments of the online right. Over the past several weeks, conservative figures ranging from the fringe to the mainstream have been priming their audiences to declare fraud should the election not go their way. “The Democrats are rigging the 2024 election just like they did in 2020,” Laura Loomer, a right-wing troll and Trump ally, posted on the messaging app Telegram earlier this month. “From illegal voter registrations in Arizona, to widespread mail-in ballot fraud and encouraging democrats to flood the polls with illegal alien voters, they’re setting the stage to steal key swing states.”

Democrats “will be stealing Wisconsin and Michigan,” Owen Shroyer, the far-right host of the Infowars show, War Room, said on air last week. “I’d say that’s all but guaranteed at this point.” He then moved on to question why results might not be available on election night as they were in years prior to the rise of mail-in ballots (which take more time to count and process), a common right-wing line intended to further call the election’s integrity into question. The idea is that it’s supposedly fishy that votes now take longer to count, as though election fraud is something that cannot be done rapidly, but must be carefully aged like a delicate French cheese.

Even by the standards of the fringier segments of the right, Loomer and Shroyer are known for saying outrageous and polemic things. Still, more mainstream figures are also trying to more gently push the idea that election-security flaws may exist that could jeopardize the results. Fox News’s Jesse Watters accused Democrats of “trying to make elections less secure” on a segment during his show earlier this month. On Infowars, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed that voting machines were changing voters’ intended ballot choices in a reliably red, mostly rural county in Georgia. “I will be working to investigate this issue and ensure the integrity of our elections in Georgia,“ she later posted.

The claims fall into several rough categories that range from soft attempts to undermine the credibility of the election to outright conspiracy theories: that there are voting irregularities that suggest something is amiss, that the time it will take for results to be tallied is suspiciously long, that Democrats are encouraging explicit voter fraud, that a conspiracy is afoot to let noncitizens vote and potentially sway the election. But there is no evidence that the election is being rigged.

Given that the MAGA right seeded election denialism after Trump lost his bid for the presidency in 2020, such claims are is not surprising. Some kind of “Stop the Steal” redux has long seemed almost inevitable. Less obvious is what the downstream impacts will be. Claims that noncitizens are voting have already led to the erroneous removal of registered voters from the polls, as seen in Texas, but other effects are less clear. Intelligence officials have warned that they anticipate violence around the election. But what does that actually look like, especially if Trump loses?

In 2020, a series of escalating protests in Washington, D.C., culminated in the attack on the Capitol after the turn of the new year. January 6 was energized and encouraged by right-wing protests against COVID-era lockdowns in statehouses across the United States. A protest of hundreds of MAGA protestors had already happened in D.C. by this time in 2020. They served as dry runs for the big one.

This time around, nothing like this has happened in the lead-up to Election Day. Although the past year has seen notable far-right mobilization and activity, and Trump attracts large crowds at his rallies, it hasn’t reached the levels it did in 2020. There haven’t been practice protests across the country that could build up to a massive moment. A January 6-style event is possible, but it would require an abrupt shift in energy, and the will to mobilize would have to materialize almost immediately. And such mobilization would have to happen in a world where people have seen the consequences of January 6, understanding that they could face prosecution and convictions as well.

The right “can’t create momentum out of thin air,” Hannah Gais, a researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told me. Still, even if there isn’t energy in the streets, there is momentum online to reject a Trump loss, and that probably is going to escalate. This rhetoric will likely be translated into violence, just not the Capitol-riot kind. Gais fears that the spike in violent rhetoric encouraged by claims of election fraud could spur unpredictable, isolated instances of violence across the country, instead of large, organized January 6-style ones.

The intelligence community is similarly worried. In a memo, reported on by Wired, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis is concerned about an increased “risk of violence against government targets and ideological opponents,” heightened by the election season. According to the report, analysts have seen online discussions “preparing for future violence against public officials and federal agents.”Now more and more people, especially on the right, are openly fantasizing about subjecting their enemies to violent retribution, and in some cases, are actually already doing it

These fantasies are now starting to edge their way into reality. Last week, a man punched a poll worker after the official asked him to remove his MAGA hat to comply with electioneering laws. On Monday, hundreds of ballots were destroyed after ballot drop boxes were set on fire in Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington.

Other recent political violence has been more concerning. Earlier this year, a man in Pennsylvania beheaded his federal-employee father and called on others to kill federal employees. In a separate incident, a man in Arizona planned a mass shooting at a rap concert in an attempt to start a race war before the election. These events happened months ago, before the election was in full swing and before people started making unfounded claims about it being rigged. Should Trump lose on November 5, Loomer, Shroyer, Greene, and the like are laying the groundwork for very dark things to happen.