← Frankly Fukuyama
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- [00:05]
A
Welcome to another episode of the Frankly Fukuyama Podcast. I'm really delighted today to have two colleagues talking about a recent article that they wrote in for the Persuasion on Patrimonialisms. This is actually a topic that they've been involved in for some time. They wrote a very good book a while ago called the Assault on the how the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future. This is a book I really liked a lot because I actually think that having a modern state is really critical to development, to prosperity, to good government, and it really has come under attack. So Steve Hanson and Jeff Kopstein are both professors, political science professors. Steve teaches at William and Mary, and Jeff teaches at UC Irvine, and they're here to discuss the state as a family business under the Trump administration. So let's just begin, Steve and Jeff, to talk about the term patrimonialism. It's not something that comes to the lips of everybody. I mean, the Trump second administration has been denounced as a lot of things, as fascist, as authoritarian, and so forth. But patrimonialism is a different take on what they are doing to American government. So could you just explain what patrimonialism is and why? That's an important way of thinking about what's going on now, and you have to fight it out. Which one of you responds?
- [01:37]
B
Go for it, Steve.
- [01:38]
C
I'll go ahead and get us started. And typically Jeff will finish my sentences by now. Yeah. So patrimonialism obviously comes from a great sociological tradition, the great German sociologist Max Weber, who wrote about this, you know, way back in the end of the 19th, early 20th century. And it is a problem because it's a seven syllable word. So, you know, for punditry, we really should have shortened it somehow. But the essence of patrimonialism is precisely what we need to understand Trump, and that is the notion of the father, Patrimon, colonialism. It's the rule of the father over the entire state. So the government, in effect, becomes a reflection of the father's personality, and everyone in the household of the father is somehow invited to participate in the running of the state as a family business, as we say in this piece and in other things we've written. But what makes that distinct is that in the modern era that we now live in, with high tech and globalization and zoom meetings like this, we never really thought you could have rule over the state by fathers of the nation in this form. We thought it was an older form of government. Weber argued it was the oldest form of government that ever existed. And in many ways, that's still correct. But what we're seeing now is that even in a place like the United States of America, which is, you know, incredibly educated and sophisticated, you can still attract a remarkably broad base of people who like the idea that government should be run by the person who's the all wise kind of representative of the family. That is America. Of course, it has terrible consequences for governance.
- [03:05]
B
Yeah, I'll just throw in on top of that, that in order to understand what patrimonialism, you have to understand what came after it. What came after it. As Frank, you said right at the beginning, kind of modern, impersonal form of government. What do we mean by impersonal? Let's just use the most obvious example. When you go to the Department of Motor Vehicles, nobody looks at Fukuyama and says, fukuyama. Don't like that name very much. Don't think I'm going to give you the, I knew your dad. I'm not going to give you the license today. It's, I'm treated when I go in to the Department of Motor Vehicles or for any other government agency like a number. And I like to be treated like a number. I want to be treated impersonally. We hire on the basis of merit. We hire and our government is administered impersonally, not with reference to either the leader or to the people who are receiving those services or to the people who are being regulated. And what's really remarkable, none of us thought an anonymous on this phone call, on this zoom thought that we would ever see, and I don't think Weber viewed it as possible either, a return to this much older form of government. And that's sort of what we're seeing in real time, not just in the United States, but in other countries in the world.
- [04:16]
A
Yeah, that's quite remarkable. So why don't you give some concrete examples of the patrimonialist nature of the current administration in Washington?
- [04:28]
C
Yeah, you start, Jeff.
- [04:29]
B
Well, I mean, at the basic. You have. And in the. This went back to the first Trump administration, you had family members actually with, without any official positions, fulfilling sometimes or sort of quasi official positions fulfilling multiple roles within government. Right. And even in this current administration, the Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor are the same person. Right. Marco Rubio, of course, Jared Kushner, who has no official position within the government as a kind of a roving personal representative of the Trump family household. And he's, he's actually seen as that. But of course, you also have sort of an insider economy within the United States. Now, people who have personal access or favor with the president get outsized government contracts. The list is easy to name. You got, you know, Larry Ellison with TikTok, Peter Thiel Palantir has had a jump in contracts in the third quarter. Third quarter revenues jumped by 52% in 2025. Tim Cook at Apple Video, the chip maker, you know, was in a widely seen pay for play kind of stunt, was allowed to export the H200 chips to China in return for a 25% fee. Right. There's always corruption in all governments, but now it's sort of, sort of open and we haven't even begin, begun to measure the, the crypto gains that the Trump family household has gotten. The center For American progress one article preparation for this podcast estimates it's 1.8 billion in, in kind of revenue to the Trump clan. Right. From crypto gains and, and, and gifts. It's at this point it's tempting to say Griffs, but it's gifts. And so you have, what's, what's quite interesting about this in the United States, in order to do that, you not only needed to have these kind of insider beneficiaries, but you actually had to deconstruct the existing administration. Right. It's not like we were a third world country where there was no state to begin with. We had a state that was doing all these things. We have policy planning at the State Department and as you know, Frank, we had all, all of these separate functional bureaucracies that were staffed by experts. But in order to make that a family business, you not only have to have the family members or the court society, but you also have to deconstruct that which already exists. And that's what Trump with doge and et cetera, that's what they've been doing for the last year.
- [07:01]
A
So I think that in many ways corruption is kind of the key, right. That everything is a personal relationship. You're not running the state according to clear rules that apply to everybody. Everybody gets a one off deal. And that's really what distinguishes this regime from, you know, a simple authoritarian one. I mean, one thing about China that you could say is, you know, Xi Jinping began his leadership, you know, with a big anti corruption drive. Now there's controversy as to whether he was just purging his opponents or whether this really was about corruption. But I don't think that, I don't think that it's the essence of the Chinese regime, but it does seem to be the essence of this one Would you agree with that?
- [07:45]
C
Yeah, if I could jump in. I think really the definition of corruption tells us what we need to know, that is the use of public office for private gain. Well, if you don't have a conception of the public or the public good, then there is no distinction anymore. The whole idea that something is corrupt in government, in modern governance, it depends on the idea that when we go from our private lives into government service, into the very offices that we have our name played on, that we're doing the public's work, and we don't bring our private identities or interests into that office. And public servants take that incredibly seriously. In the United States, it's taken for granted, or it used to be, that you leave all of those partisan interests at the door when you're in a nonpartisan position in the foreign service or in the civil service. And of course, there are exceptions, and of course there's corruption, but it's prosecuted precisely because it's the exception and not the rule. What's amazing about patrimonialism under Trump or under any of its various types, is that you erode that distinction so much that people don't even know what it means anymore to have the public interest as opposed to one's private interest. It's clear Trump himself has no concept of the distinction. What's good for him is good for the U.S. and that's the essence of patrimonialism. It's a family business.
- [08:54]
B
So I, you know, I had this. I had this friend, we were talking about the potential for Jared Kushner to personally benefit from the plan to rebuild Gaza. And this friend of mine said, but, well, you know, who cares if. As long as he does good, he deserves it. Right? Two billion. If he makes $2 billion and creates peace in the Middle east, wonderful. It's great. Nobody else has done better. And it's in that seemingly anodyne remark that the whole thing resides. Of course, the leader deserves a jet from Qatar. Right. He's doing all these wonderful things. Right. And so when we're no longer able to see the distinction between the public good and the private interest, we'll know that the patrimonial regime has been fully consolidated. Now, we're not there yet because we're having this conversation, but at some point or another, this conversation will look like a sort of a relic of these three old guys talking about. You remember way back when there was this thing called the public realm.
- [09:52]
A
Yeah. I don't know if you've been following this particular scandal with Pam Bondi, but she, her former partner, law partner, just received a huge payment of money that apparently can be traceable to some Russian sources. And this money came in right at the time that she was arguing before a congressional committee that they ought to lose, loosen the rules on these kinds of fiscal transfers. And it's not just our wonderful Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has given a big contract to family members. So it's not just Donald Trump that's engaged in this kind of activity. I think it's spread very widely throughout his administration. And I think it underlines your point that this is essentially a normative thing where if they're given permission to behave in this manner, a lot of people are going to, you know, do the same thing Trump is doing.
- [10:45]
C
You know, I'll say it sets up a very simple incentive structure. And Putin is the master of this. He built the whole state in Russia quite powerfully on this basis, which is once you get consolidation of patrimonialism, anyone who's in the household, you know, the ruling family, you basically have two options. You can stay loyal and make billions, or you can decide to go into opposition and end up falling outside of a window somewhere mysteriously. And when you put it that simply, you know, most people will make the choice to stay loyal. It's worked in Russia, you have very few people defecting. I mean, the ones who have, we know about because they've ended up dead. We're not there yet. As Jeff says, you know, obviously, Trump's America is not anywhere near that level. But on the other hand, you know, this dynamic by which people increasingly just say all of these normative rules were a myth anyway. Right. The cynicism that feeds this machine. There never really was a separation of the public and the private anyway. It was always, you know, not observed. Of course, that's not true. Right? I mean, people in government know that it really was taken incredibly seriously. But the longer that goes on, the harder it is to re establish the idea that that's the norm.
- [11:45]
A
Well, let's talk about this. So in the article, you say that getting out of a patrimonial regime is difficult and different from getting out of a simple authoritarian regime. Why is that the case?
- [11:58]
B
Well, Steve, do you mind if I jump in? So, I mean, Steve raised an important point when he compared Trump to Putin. That is to say, you can have patrimonialism in both democratic and authoritarian regimes. And as you said, Frank, it's very hard to get out of. So what won't work. Let's talk about what, what we don't think will work. The most obvious thing, and we see it all the time now, if you on social media is evidence of Trump's cognitive decline, will the great daddy going crazy or going senile or getting too old actually get out of this? And we're pretty dubious that that will actually work. You know, public threats against political enemies, casual talk of seizing territory, renaming the Kennedy center after himself. You can think of all these things. I mean, you know, they're easy. Plaques at the White House that are totally inappropriate. Calling his predecessors names, creating a grand ballroom at the White House, issuing Trump coins, Mount Rushmore, the Epstein affair. And now we have the Melania movie. Right, where they actually have to pay people to go and see it. I saw that yesterday. It was so outrageous that I wasn't even sure whether it was real. And what all of this does, it dramatizes the personal dominance of this leader that he can get away with all of this stuff. In a way, it increases his power for his most ardent followers. And it's only for people like the three of us sitting here that says, come on, this is unpresidential. This is outrageous. This has been going on for a long time. And we don't think that's actually going, going to work. It hasn't worked in other places. Remember, these patrimonial leaders, in other instances, they serve a long time. Think about it like, you know, Marcos. Right. In the Philippines. Right. It can go on a very, very long time. And the end can be ignominious. But I don't think that alone is going to. Like all this talk about the 25th Amendment right for getting rid of a president. It's a lot of talk. So that's number one. We don't think we'll get out of this. I mean, Steve knows a lot about factional infighting, so maybe I should hand that over to Steve, which we also don't think will help us.
- [14:07]
C
Yeah, I mean, in the piece that we wrote and in the book, too, we talk about the mistake people make of looking at factional rivalries within a patrimonial household as somehow a sign of weakness. And you see it a lot in punditry about Trump as well. The mega civil war, as it's often referred to, you find that Marjorie Taylor Greene is suddenly getting on the outs and finally leaves Congress or Thom Tillis takes a stand. Yeah, there are different groups within the Republican Party, more or less maga, but so far the pattern is pretty clear, which is the people who want to go into opposition just exit. They leave Congress, you know, they resign, they don't run again, or they kind of meekly go back to their corner and agree they were wrong and then serve for a longer period of time. So that's very normal in patrimonial systems. I mean, the great father always has the rivals, you know, underneath who are incurring his favor. And we use the gendered term here. Obviously, it's usually men who do this. So the idea is everyone wants to please Daddy, but the one thing you can't do is say, I actually want to get rid of Daddy. If you cross the line into open opposition like that, then you are definitely in trouble. And in the full fledged patrimonial systems like Putin's Russia, then physical liquidation can result. So we should stop worrying about the tiny little gradations of Christian nationalism versus libertarianism versus executive authority support, et cetera, as a sign of weakness. Those matter for the kind of understanding the factions that support this regime. But it's not the way the regime falls to see, suddenly there's an open rebellion of all the libertari example.
- [15:36]
A
Well, let's talk about Daddy. I mean, he's 79 years old right now. He's declining. And I would not be surprised at all if he was not able to complete his term because of, you know, kind of just dropping dead at one point or some similar event. What's going to happen then? Does patrimonialism survive the death of the father?
- [16:00]
B
That's an interesting question. You know, in classic patrimonialism, of course, it's handed down within the family. And, you know, that's, you know, that's, that's kingship is all about here, Queenship. If you want to think about this family for a minute, that might be an interesting proposition. The interesting thing is that from a purely cognitive standpoint, the, the, the logical place is Ivanka, but that's there. You get into the gendered aspect of it. These female patrimonial leaders, if you will, they don't actually do that well, because there is an element of traditionalism to all of this, the strongman, the father of the family, which goes along with the Christian nationalism very well. Not to mention that Ivanka's J. So that, that might be problematic. The problem is that within Trump's orbit, you have both the kind of traditional, kind of neocon tendency within Republican politics that's there, let's say, embodied by Rubio, but he couldn't capture those other elements of the Trump coalition. Then you have the Christian national part of it, which is JD Vance, but he won't go. He probably couldn't capture the ones who just want lower taxes and aggressive foreign policy or kind of an internationalist foreign policy. So there's really no obvious leader. Right. That will be able to kind of pick up the mantle immediately. And succession is always a problem. It is always a problem. I mean, that's, you know, our procedural state. One of the things it does, apart from being a democracy, is we have a process for picking a new leader. That's democracy. Right. But in classical patrimonialism. Right. That's not how it works at all.
- [17:33]
C
Yeah, let me add, I mean, this is where we do see the real vulnerabilities of patrimonialism in the U.S. since you're asking about that, you know, the time limit really matters here. And part of that is just demographic. No one lives forever. Part of it is the term limits that still exist in the US Constitution and matter to lots of actors. You can't just wish it all away if you're Trump. This is why we think combating this Trump 2028 idea is so important. There's been a tendency to kind of, you know, laugh it off. You know, the hats are funny, but they aren't at all funny because this is actually one of the key strategies for a patrimonial regime to start playing fast and loose with a very hard deadline, which is the end of a four year term and only two terms total. The 22nd Amendment really, really matters here. Henry Hale at George Washington University wrote the best book on this in the Eurasian context. He says it's really when the sort of underlings begin to realize that the time limit is coming up, that the leader is simply too sick to continue, or there really is an election and there's too much protest to continue. That's when the underlings, who are purely instrumental, start thinking, do I want to keep loyalty to this particular father figure or is there a different father figure, maybe a bit younger, a bit more savvy, a bit more popular? I could switch to. And the whole house of cards can fall incredibly quickly because there's not a lot of principle behind this sort of regime. People aren't obeying it because of loyalty to the idea. Another big difference from China, by the way. Under the prc, whatever you think of communism, it is an ide. People can believe in it, but believing in Trumpism really is just believing in your own self interest and the kind of machismo of the leader. So that's actually underneath it all kind of fragile. When it hits these time Limits, Yeah.
- [19:08]
A
So that actually brings up the question of the upcoming midterm election in November. There's been some disagreement in my circle as to the degree of danger that Trump will try to manipulate the outcome. A colleague of mine pointed out that actually, because of the degree of corruption within the administration more broadly, there are a lot of players that actually would fear losing power because they will be vulnerable to criminal prosecution.
- [19:37]
B
Right.
- [19:38]
A
Including, it looks like, the Attorney General of the United States. And that gives everybody a big incentive not to lose power. Do you have an opinion about the likelihood that we are going to have a free and fair election in November?
- [19:51]
B
I mean, Steve, can I jump in there, please? Yeah, I think largely we will. But you're right, in patrimonial regimes, one of the reasons the leaders don't like to lose power is once they lose power. You see, in the United States, we tend to think, right, and we were all brought up to think, right, that a weakness of our system is great wealth brings you great power. But in fact, in patrimonial regimes, it's exactly the opposite. Great power brings you great wealth. And they say that Putin is one of the richest men in the world, but he's only one of the richest men in the world as long as he is president of Russia. The minute he loses that position, he would no longer be safe. And it's one of the reason why in Africa, oftentimes, leaders can't afford to give up power because they will be prosecuted as soon as they lose office. So you're right, Frank, that that's an incentive, but I think that for them not to have a free and fair election, but the greater danger it is tied back to this, this time limits thing. Trump today or yesterday circulated something. He's going back to talking about how the 2020 election was stolen, and he's doubling down on this. Right. Including some wild conspiracy theories about the Chinese and the Italians and satellites in space and manipulated voting machines. What is that all about? Right. Does he really want to just say he won the 2020 election? Well, yeah, probably part of it is that, but part of it is to sort of delegitimize the electoral procedures, kind of to call. Right. Completely taken as a whole. Right. And that's also with the 2020 running for 2028. And so all of this taken together is an attempt to kind of say what we're about to do in 2026. If it doesn't go the way he wants, then it's not legitimate. And it's interesting you say, I only like elections, if I win them, what that means, what that means, I don't like elections. Elections. Democracies are. Democracies are systems in which parties lose elections. If you don't believe that you have a chance of losing under any circumstances, you don't believe in democracy. Right. And that's a danger here, of course. And that's of course, what everybody is concerned about, including your colleague.
- [22:01]
C
Yeah. I'll add a few notes. I mean, one is that when Jeff and I wrote the Assault on the State, we actually thought this kind of patrimonial regime in the US Would be more like Orban in Hungary. That is to say, you could actually have somewhat free and fair elections. Decreasingly free and fair, but still with open participation. The ruling party is pretty popular, so it actually returns majorities anyway. People really don't like the opposition parties. They're tarred with the 2008 financial crisis. And in that kind of context, you could go several elections without too much heavy handed authoritarianism. You could actually have democracy and patrimonialism together. Trump, though, has shown a couple of things. One is he's so unpopular, right? I mean, his popularity rating is in the 40% level and it has not budged, sometimes a little lower than that. He's not going to win massive election campaigns in a free and fair election, unlike people like Orban or Putin in the early days, by the way. So for that reason, the kind of manipulation needed to stay in office has to be much more heavy handed. I think he's going to try. I mean, my own view is all the ICE stuff in Minneapolis, as horrible as it is, it isn't just about establishing prerogatives, the immigration sphere. It's also being able to raid blue cities and blue states with impunity with essentially a loyal police force of his own. And the raid in Fulton county that just took place is incredibly scary. Right. With Tulsi Gabbard there to allege all sorts of, as Jeff was saying, international conspiracies behind the previous vote for Biden. And this is all setting the stage to throw a ton of smoke into the system in the midterm elections to say that everyone who lost from the MAGA coalition must have lost for nefarious reasons. And all those who won fair and square obviously deserve their position. And it's going to be incredibly difficult, even with a fairly organized collective action of those who feel the democracy needs to be preserved to sustain collective action across the entirety of the federal United States in a way that's going to actually not Just contest the election fakery, but restore the correct results. Now, I'll give you, before I stop, I mean, there are some examples of success. Ukraine is remarkable in this respect. In the Orange Revolution, which was one of the first attempts to sort of rig this patrimonial succession in the former Soviet space, the entire Ukrainian population basically rose up and said, that was a fake election, we need to rerun it. And they finally convinced the judiciary in Ukraine to side with them. They reran the election and they got a free and fair result, and they had free and fair elections all the way with lots of turnover right up until the full scale of invasion of Ukraine. So that takes a lot of organization and a lot of civic solidarity. I think it exists in the United States, but it's going to be necessary.
- [24:34]
A
Let me ask you a different question. So, so let's say we get through the election, Trump leaves the stage, you know, a different administration takes power. It seems to me that there's still a lot of poison that's been injected into the American system that is not legal. It's normative, you know, that this whole pattern of officials, the loss of this ideal of an impersonal, nonpartisan civil service has been under assault. The idea that you don't go into a public office in order to make money for yourself, that's been reversed. And, you know, those precedents are now set. How do you eliminate that poison from the, you know, from the social system?
- [25:16]
B
It's really difficult. We've been thinking a lot about that. Let's say, right, Trump does leave and somebody else comes to power, recommitted to restructuring and restoring the impersonal civil service. What do you do with. Because, you know, what you've had now is thousands, actually tens of thousands of people who've left the civil service and that. And, and there's been heavy replacement, especially at the upper levels, with personal retainers, people who are broadly considered by the people below them to be incompetent. Right. And, but some of the, many of these people will have civil service protections. So what do you do if you come to power? Do you say, okay, on a one time basis, we're going to recreate the spoil system by firing all the previous distributional beneficiaries of Trump's corrupt patrimonial regiment, fire them, violating the idea of civil service, which you're then going to try to restore. Right. There's a kind of a logical performative contradiction there that I don't think anybody's figured their way out of and figured out how is this going to happen in the end? It is not easy to kind of restore that lost competence. I mean, there's small things that fly beneath the radar that even from the first term, in the first term, Trump's people eliminated a huge research arm within the Department of Agriculture by doing the following. They didn't actually eliminate it. They moved it from Washington, D.C. if you've ever been to the Department of Agriculture, it's gigantic. It's one of the largest in the entire US Government. It may be the second largest of all the departments, I'm not positive, after Defense. And what they did is this one arm, which is on research. They moved it to Kansas. Well, rather than moving, a lot of people said, well, I'm not moving to Kansas, and they just quit. Right. Which, of course, might have been the intention to begin with. You had hundreds of years of expertise on everything from soil quality to food safety to climate change. It was the research and development arc. Right. How do you replace all of that? Think about that. Massively over the US Government. The things that keep our air clean, our children taught by non quacks, public health, national security, our money for being worthless. I mean, all of the things that we take for granted, like the air we breathe, the public goods that government provides. How are we going to, over the long run, restore that? And Frank, you asked a good question. I don't think I've answered it. It's just, it's a gigantic issue.
- [27:36]
A
Well, by the way, I mean, I think we have an example of the difficulty of restoring good government in Poland, because the Law and Justice Party had ruled for, I believe, about eight years, and then it was defeated by Donald Tusk's more liberal coalition, but they're stuck with exactly that problem, that Law and Justice is inserted judges, it's inserted civil servants, all sorts of people that are protected. And the new government faces this problem of what do you do with these people? Do you violate the rules in order to get rid of them, or do you just have to? And I think for the most part, they've actually just kept them in place and then they're able to really obstruct policy change.
- [28:16]
C
Yeah. Ironically, that becomes a deep state of the sort that the right fantasized. Existed. Right. I mean, only it really is one. Yeah. I mean, if I can add a couple thoughts, you know, as a. As we're all involved with teaching young people, another real challenge is that now the credibility of a government job is nothing like it used to be. I mean, so many William and Mary graduates went on into civil service and public service and foreign service and believed that that was a whole career they could lead because they saw their, you know, their fathers do that and their mothers do that and their friends. And now, you know, you can be fired at the drop of a hat, and the pay isn't as good, and it doesn't look like it's going to be very fulfilling to serve the public. And so, for a whole range of reasons, understandably, young people are turning away from it. So what you need, and you need it really quickly, right? I mean, in 2028, you're going to need a call to public service of the JFK sort. You're going to need a very organized and charismatic leadership program to say, we want to rebuild the Republic. And rebuilding the Republic requires public service in government. You're going to have to do that in combination with some new kind of meritocratic tests. So I think one way you get around the dilemma, you use the tools of meritocracy to test the old people who were hired. If they can't pass them, then they're gone. But it's done through meritocracy. If you happen to pass, you know, then you can stay. A lot of people will be eliminated quickly with such tests, and not because they're rigged, but just because, you know, as Jeff said, people have been hired who are not particularly competent. I think it's still doable because there is a hunger among young people to make this country better. They're very depressed about the way things are going by and large, and even the kind of manosphere and, you know, young people who are attracted to Trump as a person who might disrupt things, mostly, though, they've turned away from him. But it is going to require leadership. And I worry. Last point. I worry that the Democratic Party sometimes mistakes the need for legal proceduralism with compromising too much. They're two different things. You know, you can have a very quick move toward proceduralism, and it can be done decisively and boldly. You don't have to compromise with every person who's already in place to get there.
- [30:14]
B
There.
- [30:14]
A
Another problem it strikes me that a future Democratic administration is going to have is a question of criminal prosecutions. I don't think that you can really wring this poison out of the system, this belief that you can enrich yourself in public office, unless people are actually punished for having done that. But then it becomes, you know, there's so many of them, and you can see a future administration being completely consumed with, with multiple criminal prosecutions. Of people from the previous administration. And that's going to be a problematic look politically. I'm not really sure how you deal with something like that.
- [30:52]
C
I mean, if I could jump in, Jeff, on this one and maybe you can follow up. This is very reminiscent of the debates about lustration after communism. You had these communist regimes that were horribly corrupt themselves. They fell in 1989 into 91. And then you had all those bureaucrats left over who were communists. Many of them were involved in. In repression of human rights or outright torture and killings. And so the question was, how quickly do we go through and get them all out of government? And the problem is, if you do it too quickly, one, you don't have a state anymore because these are the functionaries who made everything run. Same thing happened in Iraq, by the way, after the US invasion of Iraq. You can't get rid of the entirety of the old system because then you'll just end up with chaos and anarchy. But on the other hand, if you do nothing at all, people say, quite rightly, well, why did we have this revolution? It's the same old people in charge. So unfortunately, there is a kind of happy medium that has to be obtained, and I kind of referenced it earlier, which is bold action against the ringleaders, the top people. I mean, this is really what REIT Nuremberg was about. You make a visible public display that the top people who are complicit in crime are punished visibly. But you make a deal with the people at lower and mid levels that they continue to run the state as long as they're loyal to democracy, loyal to the law, and, you know, willing to pass a competency test.
- [32:04]
B
Yeah, I think one other thing we'll have to have happen, but the problem is they tried it. After 2020, they're going to have to find some allies on the Republican side who will acknowledge the abuses. Now, the problem is they had Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, Right. And the Republican Party sort of purged them. And they're going to have to try that again. There's going to have to. I mean, without this kind of giant, as my colleagues Daniel Seabod and Steve Levitsky call it, this giant abdication of the Republican Party from responsible government. And they're going to have to find some allies within there again, because it's simply unhealthy to have all of the people who are in favor of a rule of law state in one party. It doesn't make any sense and it probably won't work. Rebuilding that is going to be a Giant project. A giant project involving civic responsibility. And quite frankly, the universities have to not have a kind of completely mono intellectual culture like we have in half having for over a decade now in order to rebuild all of that. It's not going to be easy. I mean, every example that Steve mentioned and you mentioned, Frank, Poland, I mean, you can go on and on rebuilding normal, responsible government, whether it's in after, after either authoritarianism. And to repeat, Steve and I don't think that the giant danger we've written it is not authoritarianism. It's the destruction of government. Right. Which we all need rebuilding. That is not easy. It is probably even more difficult than putting back in democracy. We know from the example of Iraq. Yeah, you could have an election. Sure. Just set up polling stations, give everybody ink on their fingers. Remember that from George Bush, and everything's going to be fine. Well, we know it's very hard to actually run a place. There's a difference between democracy, governance, rebuilding responsibility, responsible governance. After all of this, the longer it goes on, the more difficult it is going to be. And that's why these conversations are super crucial. Right. And I don't think Steve and I have the answers yet. Right. But I think we put our finger on part of the problem.
- [34:16]
A
Well, that's music to my ears. You know, I've been arguing for a long time that actually creating a modern impersonal state is a much harder task than actually creating a democracy. And, you know, that's a challenge that many countries have unfortunately failed. And that's why you have these stalled democratic transitions. That's why you have poor development results, you know, in the economic sphere and so forth. And unfortunately, we're going to face a version of that in the United States if we are lucky enough to get to a point where rebuilding becomes possible. Well, in any event, Steve and Jeff, thank you very much for talking. We'll put the link to the article in the notes for this show. In the meantime, time. Well, we'll continue the struggle for good government, even if that seems a little nerdy and, you know, not. Not the first item on the top of people's minds at the moment.
- [35:08]
C
Thank you so much for the opportunity to chat. It was really great.
- [35:11]
B
Okay, thank you, Frank.
- [35:12]
A
All right, great. Thanks very much. Thank you for listening to the Frankly Fukuyama podcast. If you like this podcast, consider subscribing to a member American purpose and my Frankly Fukuyama column at www. Persuasion.com municipality.