The writer Gary Indiana, who died last week at the age of 74, wrote about his obsessions with the calculated grace of a man who found them slightly embarrassing. He was a stylist of remarkable erudition, and possessed a startling range; his essays, criticism, plays, films, and fiction spanned seemingly endless topics, among them French Disneyland, Cuban prisons, the journalist Renata Adler, the sculptor Richard Serra, true-crime stories, the Boston Marathon bombings, and various men whose beauty slayed him. For the past several decades, he lived in a sixth-floor East Village walk-up cramped with thousands of volumes of literature. In Horse Crazy, Indiana’s first and best novel, his unnamed narrator invites a prospective boyfriend to his similarly cluttered apartment and feels ashamed—not of its mess, exactly, but of the sheer number of books on his shelves. “I suppose this is my life,” he says, after longing “for a garbage dumpster big enough to swallow the entire past.”

Born Gary Hoisington in 1950s New Hampshire, Indiana moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in the aftermath of the famed Summer of Love and spent the rest of his life unromantically hungover from the period. The bohemian artistic milieu where he came of age was shifting toward the pop, the conceptual, and the camp, but Indiana was both suspicious of the future and unwilling to be in the thrall of the traditional. He participated in the debauched, stoned zeitgeist yet wrote about sex without triumph or tenderness—his lovers were scorned, dissatisfied. After moving to New York City in 1978, he became one of the defining countercultural writers of the ’80s, a decade he skewered; his tenure as Village Voice’s art critic was notable more for what he despised than for what he liked. Yet so much of what he lampooned throughout his career obsessed him—gorgeous young gay men, bizarre drug addicts, the thorny legacy of the ’60s, the downtown Manhattan scene he all but embodied even though he refused to be affiliated with it. He kept the culture of his time close to his chest, because what was in vogue fueled his indignation.

Horse Crazy is a particularly caustic experience. The novel’s very Indiana-ish narrator has recently landed a desirable job as a cultural critic at an influential magazine—a moment of recognition that terrifies and distresses him. He has a bit of money, but he finds money disgusting; he can write about anything he wants, but this freedom feels like a prison. “The less free I am, the freer I appear to be,” he tells the reader, in one of the book’s many takedowns of the creative life. One might imagine that the 35-year-old has more tender feelings toward Gregory Burgess, a 27-year-old former heroin addict of “extravagant comeliness,” to whom the narrator writes an “old-fashioned” 20-page single-spaced letter professing his desire.

Yet Horse Crazy is one of the best American novels about obsession in part because the narrator mostly dislikes Gregory, subjecting this object of lust to the same derisive interior voice that comments on virtually every other aspect of his life. His pristine exterior notwithstanding, Gregory personifies the very elements that make the book’s protagonist want to retch: He is an ascendant photographer whose fussy, expensive prints are sourced from pornography magazines (to which he expresses a moralistic opposition that exasperates the narrator). He is extremely articulate, yet much of what he says is fatuous and clichéd, informed by undigested pop psychology picked up seemingly through the osmosis of youth. The narrator detests Gregory’s music tastes, his artistic opinions, and, after sufficient exposure, his charm. He admits to enjoying Gregory’s personality only during a shopping expedition at a Salvation Army, where the younger man picks out grotesque garments and then reveals that he chose them precisely for their hideousness—he wants to offend the sensibilities of the restaurant where he waits tables. Carried away by a rare gust of sentimentality, the enamored narrator brushes some freshly fallen snow from his beloved’s hair.

Love, in Horse Crazy, is transactional, one-sided, unconsummated, and cruel; it pushes Indiana’s fictional stand-in out of dreamy solitude and into the savage present. The insufferable facets of Gregory’s personality are reflections of Indiana’s city and era. Horse Crazy came out in 1989, at the close of a decade that saw New York wrecked by both AIDS and drug epidemics. Gregory refuses to have sex with the narrator partially because of HIV fears, even though he may be sleeping with other people. He’s duplicitous about money, and the protagonist worries that he may be supporting a drug habit. Indiana holds out the possibility that many of the narrator’s suspicions are projections of his own behavior—he, too, has a penchant for lying to his friends, borrowing cash from them, and then never paying them back. He drinks constantly and grows dependent on speed. His former lovers are dying of AIDS, and he fixates on the virus’s incubation period to figure out whether he’ll also get sick.

[Read: Street photography from ’80s and ’90s New York]

Indiana understood that romantic obsession is timeless, a perpetual coil that revolves around itself only to be severed because its ostensible focus is an individual in a particular time and place. Every detail of Gregory’s life seems dredged from a satirical version of New York City, after the so-called gay cancer was identified and before Rudy Giuliani became mayor. The restaurant where Gregory works is owned by a coke-addled Frenchman named Philippe who wields cleavers to threaten his employees—a funny and well-deployed stereotype of the epicurean figures who cropped up as Manhattan’s food scene exploded during the ’80s. Gregory’s costly photographic practice echoes the monumental Cibachrome prints of the then-buzzy artist Jeff Wall, and more generally the money that flowed into galleries throughout the decade. His apparently ham-handed embrace of identity politics (“I have no right to use images of women,” he says about his work) reflects an age when such concerns were beginning to gain prominence in art discourse. Gregory’s judgmental perspectives on sex comically echo the culture wars raging in the United States when Horse Crazy was published. If the novel’s narrator, and perhaps Indiana himself, found these things alternately tiresome and foreboding, they also drew him out of his life and his walls of books, offering the vague promise that he could be a lover and not an observer—which is to say, that he could be less like himself.

But Horse Crazy, like much of Indiana’s output, avoids a thoroughgoing cynicism even as it disregards affection as “the mortal illness of lonely people.” Indiana diminished concepts such as love and hope not because his life or his work lacked them, but because he didn’t want these nebulous formulations to be used as Band-Aids on chronic societal problems and symptoms of the human condition. In Horse Crazy, his implacable skepticism forces the reader to consider the alienating effects of an era characterized by lethal STIs, unrepentant capitalism, bulldozed cultural history, and pervasive substance addiction. The book’s true love affair is with what cannot be reclaimed: a world untouched by disease and unspoiled by money. Indiana’s idea of being truthful was to react exactly the way his epoch needed him to. The withering vestiges of avant-garde New York—the writers, critics, artists, filmmakers, and dancers who have hung on since its peak—feel a little less vital today without his contempt.

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.

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