Last man standing

For 17 years now, democracy has been struggling globally. According to the U.S.-based monitor Freedom House, not only has the total number of democracies dropped; the democratic standards of those left—including the two biggest among them, the United States and India—have declined, as well. Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab Spring, has fallen back into dictatorship. Sudan, a great democratic hope after the 2019 overthrow of the Islamist dictator Omar al-Bashir, is engulfed in a chaotic civil war, in which the two battling factions are also both attacking the Sudanese people. Meanwhile, Europe is more than a year into a horrible conflict that one of the most powerful authoritarian states in the world started by invading its democratic neighbor—with the dual aim of controlling it and rolling back democracy regionally. Why is all of this happening?

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 extensively 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 democracy as facing a daunting set of shifting challenges—from rising autocratic alternatives to escalating internal conflicts, to challenges arising from media, technology, and even human psychology. Over the long term, though, he sees democracy as more resilient, and authoritarian alternatives as weaker, than they might seem …

John Jamesen 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 more or less to the time of the financial crisis in 2008, the United States was the only real superpower in the world—and could set a lot of global rules in line with its liberal-democratic ideas.