If America buckles to a rampant Trump, it may be the end of history

Francis Fukuyama admits that he was wrong. He was wrong about Donald Trump. To his credit, the world’s most famous political scientist saw Trump coming long before anyone else.

An episode of The Simpsons famously foresaw a Trump presidency as early as 2000, 16 years before he was elected. But Fukuyama was eight years ahead of The Simpsons in nominating Trump as the sort of character who could pose a potential danger to the democratic order.

Illustration by Simon Letch

In his most famous book, The End of History and the Last Man, published in 1992, Fukuyama wrote that “a developer like Donald Trump” was the sort of person who could not be satisfied by the customary offerings of a democracy.

It was normal that each of us seek the kind of recognition that the ancient Greeks thought necessary to satisfy the part of the soul they called thymos, the part craving fulfilment through recognition by our fellow humans. This explains, in part, the appeal of democracy; it recognises all adult citizens as equally entitled to political recognition. But some of us demand more than recognition by our peers. Some demand to be acknowledged as superior, to dominate. Fukuyama dubbed this “megalothymia”.

“This desire to be recognised as superior would normally be a big problem in a democracy where everybody was supposed to be equal,” Fukuyama tells me, “and that you needed outlets, therefore, for this energy.”

The good news was that democracy, when paired with a free-market capitalist economy, would offer the necessary outlet: “The good thing about having a capitalist economy is that instead of being a dictator, you could be a billionaire, and I gave Trump as an example.” The compulsion for superior status could be channelled harmlessly into the pursuit of ever-greater piles of money.

It was a winning combination. Democracy granted political equality. Capitalism allowed a safety-valve economic inequality. Fukuyama posited that it was so good, this liberal democratic capitalism, that it would prove to be the ultimate evolution of human governance – “the end of history”. His conclusion galvanised an intense debate that has raged for decades. The book was “rarely read but often denigrated”, in the words of Paul Sagar of King’s College, London.

Where did Fukuyama go wrong about Trump? “Little did I know back then that Trump would not be satisfied just with being a billionaire – if, indeed, he is a billionaire. It wouldn’t be enough for him.”

Nor would it be enough for Trump to compete for ultimate political power at the ballot box. He refused to accept the result of the 2020 election, and he’s made clear that he won’t accept the election result next week, either, unless he wins. His insistence on dominance brooks no constraint.

“Can’t you just shoot them?” Trump said to his then defence secretary, Mark Esper, referring to the Black Lives Matter protesters, on June 1, 2020, according to Esper’s memoir. “Just shoot them in the legs or something?”

But Esper refused to convey any such order, as did the then chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley. Much as the then vice president, Mike Pence, refused Trump’s demand that he refuse to certify the election result.

Fukuyama put faith in the checks and balances in the US Constitution designed to guard against the rise of a despot, but his faith is being tested. The Stanford professor is now deeply worried that the famed checks and balances might not be able to hold against a rampant Trump. Whether he wins or loses.

“In a constitutional system,” Fukuyama says, “a check and balance is not like a physical object that’s going to keep the president from doing something. It’s about all people and whether they buckle under the pressure and simply go along with the tyrant.”

In the White House, Trump frequently was frustrated by principled people in his administration and the civil service. And in challenging the 2020 election result, he was thwarted by election officials and judges.

On second thoughts … Francis Fukuyama now says: “The end of history does not necessarily imply that we will arrive at a stable, steady-state equilibrium of prosperous liberal democracy.” Credit: Getty Images

“The Republicans have recognised that Trump did not accomplish a lot of the things he wanted to do in the first term because they didn’t have people in the right positions,” says Fukuyama. “So I think that they’re determined not to let that happen again, and that’s why they’re trying to revive this Schedule F authority to fire whoever they want and replace them with a loyalist.”

Schedule F was imposed briefly by Trump to remove protections for the US civil service so that he could fire the bureaucracy en masse. It was rescinded by Joe Biden. US news site Axios reported that Trump plans to bring it back immediately if he were to win. His intention to sack and stack the bureaucracy is clear.

“So I’ve actually started an organisation to push back against this,” says Fukuyama. He co-founded protectandreformourcivilservice.org, part of a new infrastructure of organisations preparing to fend off the Trumpification of the federal workforce.

But Fukuyama sees Trump’s forces making inroads into the judiciary. “I think the judiciary was probably one of the strongest checking institutions in the first Trump presidency.” With more than 60 legal challenges to the 2020 election results, the courts dismissed every one.

But Trump’s most obvious gain since then is the Supreme Court decision in Trump v the US in July granting presidents immunity from prosecution for official acts. So the president legally could order the assassination of a political rival in the US, according to a dissenting opinion by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “BIG WIN,” Trump posted.

And Fukuyama points to a “ridiculous” federal judge, Aileen Cannon, in Florida who, he says, just does Trump’s bidding, and the Fifth Circuit of the federal court which has become the “go-to place for conservatives”.

The military high command proved to be another check against Trump’s anti-democratic impulses. Yet Trump may have a way around this, too, says Fukuyama: “The other thing that people are really worried about is this Insurrection Act,” originally enacted in 1792 to allow the president to deploy the military domestically to suppress rebellion or large-scale violence.

“Trump clearly wanted to use the military against protesters. He’s kind of itching. I sometimes think that he would like to see these big protests, you know, after he’s elected so that he could actually crack down.”

But the ultimate check on the abuse of presidential power is the American people themselves. And the news this week was disturbing. A CNN poll asked voters whether they expected Trump to concede defeat if he lost the election next week. Seven in 10 respondents – 69 per cent – answered “no”. So the US electorate believes that he’s a would-be dictator, yet he is a 50:50 prospect to win regardless. Among Republican voters, almost half – 45 per cent – expected that he would not concede if defeated. Do we have to conclude that America is a country knowingly and wilfully considering making itself into an autocracy?

Fukuyama’s view: “Perhaps a third of the Republican electorate actually likes the idea of Trump as dictator. Another third don’t take the prospect seriously, and a final third just aren’t paying attention. It doesn’t speak well for the American people.”

The sobering evidence of an American temptation to Trumpian tyranny has moved Fukuyama to revise his trademark thesis: “The end of history does not necessarily imply that we will arrive at a stable, steady-state equilibrium of prosperous liberal democracy,” he tells me.

“It could be that at the end of history all possible approaches to government will have been tried and found wanting, and that we will be consigned to simply cycling them in an eternal return of the same.

“We’ve already been through several pendulum swings between more liberal and more statist approaches to economic and social policy in the past century, without the pendulum coming to rest at a mid-point.”

Liberal democratic capitalism might indeed be the best available form of human governance, but Fukuyama now suggests that Americans’ understanding of the alternatives is so feeble, or their disgust with democracy so strong, that they are prepared to submit themselves to endlessly cycling through miseries that we thought civilisation had left behind.

“And if we go down the Trump route, there are all these populaces all over the place that are going to take inspiration from that,” Fukuyama foretells. “If it can happen in the US, you know, it can happen anywhere.”

This could be the election at the end of history. We have been warned.

Peter Hartcher is political editor.