Jascha Mounk (3:35)

So we're recording this at the end of the year 2025. It truly has been an eventful year, an impactful year. I guess it feels like it went in two phases. The first phase was Donald Trump taking power and taking office and turning out to be quite shockingly and impressively efficient and effective, taking control of the reins of power much more so than the first time he was in office. And it felt for a few months as though the entire architecture of the American government was changing. And now in the last months, it has felt a little bit as though that revolution had started to slow in various ways. The title that we gave the piece that you published yesterday in Persuasion is Don't Panic, Trump Is Flagging. So where do you think we are at in terms of the Trump administration and its ability to transform America at the end of this year?

Francis Fukuyama (4:35)

Well, Jascha, you've made that whole account in a way, kind of morally neutral. The question is whether he's been transformative and effective rather than whether he's been good or bad. And I think the good or bad issue is probably the prior one.

Jascha Mounk (4:54)

I assume we agreed about that. But feel free to make the implicit explicit.

Francis Fukuyama (4:59)

I do think that to me, the surprising thing was actually how bad he'd become in his second time in office. I had written various things at the time of the election predicting that a lot of these centrist Republican friends of mine were saying, well, he wasn't so bad the first time around and he'll probably be good for the economy and so on and so forth. And I felt that that just wasn't likely to happen, that he was going to be much worse the second time around. But even I not anticipate how much worse he would be, that he would have this very explicit authoritarian agenda of trying to do everything through executive order, bypassing Congress, trying to ignore the courts as best he could, and then engaging in a revenge tour. So the Susie Wiles interview that appeared in Vanity Fair actually pointed to this, that she thought that she had an agreement that he would only pursue the revenge part of his agenda for 90 days. And he actually intended, which is kind

Jascha Mounk (6:12)

of an extraordinary thing to say in the first place, you have 90 days to take revenge and men will get serious.

Francis Fukuyama (6:17)

Right. But he completely ignored that supposed agreement. And the revenge part of the. The term has really kicked in very powerfully now in terms of effectiveness. That is actually the one saving grace that a lot of the incompetence from the first term seems to have reappeared. I mean, part of it is that the stuff he wants to do, you just can't do. I mean, you can't invent a charge and get a grand jury to indict somebody that hasn't done anything wrong. And that's clearly the case with both Letitia James and James Comey that, you know, only Donald Trump thinks they actually committed a crime, but they couldn't get a, you know, a legitimate prosecutor to actually make that case. And when they got a incompetent prosecutor to make the case, the grand jury rejected the charges, which is just extraordinary because grand juries in the United States never reject charges that are, you know, prosecutors don't bring cases that they know they can't get through a grand jury.

Jascha Mounk (7:27)

The famous line from, I think a New York prosecuted in the 1980s was that I could indict a ham sandwich if I so chose.

Francis Fukuyama (7:33)

Yeah, that's right. That's right. And it turns out they couldn't indict a ham sandwich. And in fact, the indictment, you know, the felony indictment for this person that threw a ham sandwich at a ICE officer also failed to stick. So, yeah, you really are, you know, retreating back into this comedy of errors of the sort that you saw in the first term, which I think is good for the cause of justice per se in. But it's also very revealing of, you know, the, you know, the bad intentions that are playing out now that, you know, I think the Justice Department, the people that follow the Justice Department are completely appalled at how Pam Bondi has succeeded in hollowing it out. The whole civil rights division and, you know, very large number of the prosecutors, attorneys there have left department or been kicked out. The morale has just plummeted because everybody can see what's happening, and they are not serious about law enforcement. In fact. All right, so if we want to get into things that were unusual about this year, I think that, you know, one of them has to be just the extraordinary level of political corruption that, you know, this administration has engaged in where they are, you know, it begins with the pardons, right? So everybody expected he pardoned all the January 6th people. He said that he wouldn't pardon the ones that had done criminal, you know, real violence. But that turned to that went by the wayside right away, but he basically is just selling pardons. Anybody, any rich person that wants to get out of jail just approaches him through some intermediary and, you know, they're out of jail free for a. The administration that claims that it's waging a war on illegal drugs. You know, why pardon, you know, the former president of Honduras, you know, Hernandez, who was convicted of very, very serious drug charges, and these charges began in the first Trump administration, you know.

Jascha Mounk (9:45)

Yeah, that was remarkable to me. I mean, you know, there's, there's some pieces of corruption where, you know, you see how it just serves the financial interests of Trump. There's some pieces where you think, you know, he's buil building political alliances. That was one that just did seem to defy logic even beyond the other level of outrages.

Francis Fukuyama (10:03)

Well, I suspect that in time, we're going to learn why it happened, and I suspect that there's going to be some personal element to this where somebody in the Trump orbit is benefiting by his being released personally, because that seems to be the way that he's conducting a lot of these pardons. And, and frankly, foreign policy. I mean, India received a 50% tariff because President Modi wouldn't support his bid to get a Nobel Peace Prize, but

Jascha Mounk (10:33)

he got the FIFA Peace Prize. So it's all good.

Francis Fukuyama (10:35)

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, that's. Yeah, it was interesting. He had to put it around his own neck. But, yeah, I mean, it's really hard to describe what his foreign policy is since a lot of it is actually dictated by his personal needs and his desire for personal glory and not any concept of national interest, which is why he's actually been crosswise with some of his MAGA base, because they expected him to be a consistent isolationist, and he's actually been anything but. So these are all surprises that have occurred in the course of 2025 and things that I think even the most pessimistic among us didn't anticipate.

Jascha Mounk (11:22)

There's a great, if depressing, tour de raison, and I agree with you that I certainly had low expectations of a Trump administration, but they were significantly exceeded in how bad things have been. You know, I mean, before we get more into the substance of things, I'm just struck by the fact that the Trump administration is a proof that shamelessness really works in life. You know, just the level of shamelessness on some of those corrupt things, the level of shamelessness on some of the personality cult things. You know, there's a piece of news reality recently, which really pales in comparison to many other things that have happened over the course of the last 12 months. But it's very striking to me, which is when there used to be free entry to national parks on Juneteenth since a few years ago, and on Martin Luther King Day since much longer ago. And both of those things were cut by the Trump administration, which is part of a kind of broader cultural agenda, which is perhaps unsurprising coming from the MAGA movement. But then they granted free entry to the national parks on Donald Trump's birthday, and it's just, again, who cares which days you have entry to the national parks? There's much worse things happening in the US Government. But just all of Trump's career has been this proof over and over again that this form of shamelessness works. And I was wondering, you thought a lot about human passions, the importance of tumors in politics, the way in which some people like Donald Trump, might be driven by megalomania, by an attempt not just to have self respect, but also to dominate others. What explains the way in which we seem to forgive the shamelessness of some others like Donald Trump? Why does that kind of thing not lead us to rebel? The way that I think we had a friend or acquaintance who is shameless in similar ways in our daily life, and we go, oh, my God, I want to cut this person out of my life. I'm sick of him. But somehow, when it's on a larger canvas by a political leader, we forgive it in ways, which is the interesting thing about Donald Trump. A lot of people who vote for Donald Trump are good Americans who are very polite, very sweet people who would not put up with a neighbor and would not put up with an acquaintance who acts like Donald Trump, and yet they vote for him when it comes to elections. And not just some of them may be grudgingly, because I think Ashe has political views and I don't love how he stands for us. But, you know, but many of them, you know, they seem to enjoy at the big political stage what they wouldn't enjoy in their personal life. And I've never quite been able to make sense of that.

Francis Fukuyama (13:56)

Well, I do think that a lot of this is facilitated by the Internet, that we now have this electronically mediated form of communication with other people that really does not impose any barriers to the most base instincts that people have. And so, you know, if you think about it like in, when I was Young, in the 19, let's say, in the 1960s, if you wanted to openly insult people on a Big scale. How would you do it? You know, you'd go to the bar and you'd yell at somebody, but, you know, that would be the limit of the reach of, you know, what you, what you could say. But now you can speak to millions of people at the same time and you're going to get more people engaged if you say something and insulting and gross and so forth. I mean, there's obviously been an element of fear also that I think has induced a lot of more sensible Republicans to toe the line with respect to Trump because he does have this fanatical base that he can threaten people with. But that's going to be interesting now because I do perceive that there are now cracks in that front. And the moment that people begin to lose their fear of Trump, I think the who thing could come crashing down in fairly short order. I know that we've been waiting for this to happen for the last eight years and it hasn't yet. But I think that you're now seeing people realizing that he is only going to be around at most another three years and they got to think about their future after Trump.

Jascha Mounk (15:35)

And is that a matter of Trump getting old? Is it a matter of him being term limited? Is it a matter of him becoming unpopular? Is it a mix of those three things?

Francis Fukuyama (15:43)

Yeah, I think it's all three of those things. I mean, I think that his health and his mental state are clearly deteriorating. I mean, he always rambled and said weird things, but it's just getting worse. I think yesterday or the day before he posted on truth social like 160 times, somebody actually compiled a list of those, those postings. And most of them are just completely deranged. I mean, he's reposting the most bizarre conspiracy theories out there. And so there's something that, I guess I just think of it as being a little bit like Caligula, the Emperor Caligula who made his horse into a senator or consul or something that at a certain point you just, it, it goes to your head. You know, I think this is a general problem with presidents and, and presidential systems is that the whole system is, is meant in order to feed the ego of whoever is the president. Because in a presidential administration, everybody around you wants something from you and fears you. And therefore even a mild mannered president like Jimmy Carter ended up, you know, acting in very uncharacteristic ways because of the power that that office gives you. Now, when you take somebody like Trump, who is already a narcissist, very self preoccupied, and you give him you know, that kind of power. And then also the narrative that while I was down and they were getting at me, they were trying to persecute me, but I showed them by getting reelected. Then, you know, you end up with a personality that thinks that they can do absolutely anything. And I think that's kind of the behavior that, that we've been seeing. But at a certain point, you know, that fear is, I think, going to erode. And I think we're, we're seeing some signs of that already.

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Jascha Mounk (18:22)

And obviously, if in 2026 Democrats do take back the House of Representatives, perhaps have a strong showing in the Senate, you know, that'll accelerate that process. That's one of the big things I think to watch in the coming year. So if you think thesis is that the administration is getting stuck at the moment, there's kind of two ways of projecting that out into the future. One is that it's run out of energy. It had a set of agenda points that it wanted to put in place at the beginning. It had a theory about how to really transform the United States through a mix of the limit of that program, incompetence, some amount of pushback from other branches of government, including the judiciary, which I think has been in some ways more critical than some people have portrayed it as. They've gotten stuck and now they're just going to be sort of flailing about for the next three years. The other way of thinking about it is that as they realize more and more that they're stuck, they're going to get more and more desperate to get out of the stuckness. And Trump clearly is somebody who's always hyperactive. He's not somebody who's, I think there's a lot of presidents who sort of get stuck. And by the time that they're in the second term in office and they're running out of time, they sort of look forward to the presidential library and they sort of accept they're fading away. Something about Trump's Personality makes it very hard to imagine that. So obviously it's good news that the administration is getting stuck. There is also, I think, a concern that it can lead to a form of desperation to get unstuck, which could make the administration even more radical than it's been in the first year. How do you think the dynamic is going to play out? Recording 2025 in review Trump took office on January 20th of 2025. So we're less than one quarter through this term. There's a little over three years left to go.

Francis Fukuyama (20:12)

Don't remind me.

Jascha Mounk (20:13)

Yes, well, sorry. I don't want you to be too cheerful at the end of the year. How is this going to play out? What are they going to do to get the cut out of the mud?

Francis Fukuyama (20:25)

Well, one immediate fear is the coming midterm election in November 2026. I think that clearly by intention, they'd be perfectly Trump and his fellow Republicans would be perfectly happy to try to manipulate that election the way they tried in previous ones. It's going to be hard for them to do that because midterm election, it's all handled by states, municipalities, lower levels of government. The federal government, unfortunately, does not have a major role in administering elections. And so it's going to be hard. Furthermore, if the polls are right about the size of the potential blue wave that's going to happen next November. It's one thing to manipulate an election that's off by two or three points, as in many of our previous elections, but if the Democratic challenger is ahead by 10 points, you can't do that. And so you're kind of stuck with the citizen's choice. And then if you want to escalate from that point, you got to do things like calling in ICE or the military to actually prevent your opponent from taking power. And that's the point at which, again, I don't want to be too Pollyannish about this, but I just find it hard to see that if Trump actually tries to use one of these power agencies to overturn election results, that they're going to just salute and obey. You know, clearly that's kind of in the background of these discussions about, you know, going after Mark Kelly and these other national security Democrats that, you know, that advise soldiers not to obey unlawful orders. I think that Trump is probably anticipating that he's going to be giving some unlawful orders, and he wants to make sure that they're personally loyal. Now, this is all going to boil down to a question we don't know the answer to is how are they going to react. You know, one thing that I think is quite worrisome is ice. I mean, they now have a budget bigger than the FBI, but bigger than any domestic law enforcement agency. They are recruiting people very rapidly right now. And the kind of people that are willing to go into ICE at this point are very likely to be pretty die hard Trump supporters. So it's possible that he will have by next November a coercive instrument that is loyal to him personally and that sets up some pretty scary possibilities for how he might try to use this. But I don't know. Somehow I just think that this is going to be a bridge too far even for him to actually use, in effect, military force to stay in power. But I don't know. What do you think?

Jascha Mounk (23:26)

Well, first, I just have a complete side note about ice. Regular listeners to the podcast may know that sometimes we have pre recorded ads that are played. This is one of the things we do in order to be able to pay our sound engineers and our producer and so on. You know, if you want to avoid those, please become a paying subscriber, go to persuasion.community or to yashamunk.substack.com and you're going to be able to access a version of a podcast without those annoying prerecorded ads. So please do that. Why am I talking about this? Because there's certain categories you can choose to opt in and out of. And of course, one of the categories that I've opted out of having ads delivered to is politics, because I don't want to, you know, some candidate who I really disagree with advertising to my listeners. Now I've had a couple of listeners to a podcast write to me saying, do you know that ICE recruitment ads are playing on your podcast? And I immediately wrote to Megaphone who saw the ad saying, what on earth is going on here? I obviously don't want ICE recruitment ads on my podcast. You know, has the politics category somehow been switched on again? And the answer is no. They deliberately misclassify it under corporate recruitment or things like that, which sound like you're going to get ads for Indeed.com or some whatever, HR software. And that way they can bypass all of the podcasts that don't want this kind of political content and they're able to get into the feed. It's just one of many ways in which the administration cuts corners. But it shows you sort of the scale of this recruitment drive for ICE and the amount of money that's going into that, which is quite striking. Well, Frank, I mean you asked me a question. I would like to respond, but I'm actually going to respond with another question, which is that I think the estimation of that depends on the answer to the following thing. There's one version of understanding what's been happening for the last nine months, which should make us relatively optimistic about how robust the institution of the American government are, which is here's a government that is breaking every rule and norm on the book. They're doing a lot of damage. There's a lot of corruption, a lot of bad things happening. But it doesn't seem like they're about to have power concentrated in their own hands in a way that makes it impossible to report on the Trump administration what it's doing wrong. There's no levelization of the media where you look at the New York Times and it's singing the praises of Donald Trump every day. Nothing like that is happening. As you're pointing out, there's certainly some concerns about all kinds of shenanigans they might try to engage in at the local level in the midterm elections in the coming year. But like you, I don't think that we're going to be able to stop a Democratic majority from taking seat in the House of Representatives if indeed the Democrats win the midterms. So the question then becomes, why is it? Is that because, actually, our institutions are subject to an incredible stress test right now? And in an imperfect way, in a way that certainly has a huge moral and political remainder, they ultimately are passing the test. They are actually able to stop Trump from concentrating power in his own hands in the way that Erdogan has in Turkey or on the other side. It's partially because, actually, the Trump administration is less competent than it looked in the first few months it took office. It has less of a plan than it seemed like in the first few months. There's too much personal revenge stuff going on by Trump. He's not strategic enough. He's too busy posting random rants on Truth Social. And so, actually, despite how extremely the Trump administration is ignoring the rules and the norms of the American republic, we are not seeing a real stress test. How are you reading this? How much of a vote of confidence is what seems like the relative ability so far of a system to withstand these extraordinary attacks in the system? And to what extent is it just a stroke of good luck that as well as being incredibly disdainful of Democratic rules and norms, Trump is distractible, irascible, obsessed with personal advancement and corruption, rather than with a kind of systematic attempt to dismantle the checks on his power.

Francis Fukuyama (27:42)

Yeah, well, actually both of those things can be true at the same time. I mean, it could be that he's not as competent in dismantling democracy as he could be, but also that there's going to be much more resistance. I mean, I'm pretty confident that American institutions are going to survive the next year and that the Democrats are going to likely win the House and they're going to take power and Trump's power is going to be very much diminished. The reason I say that is that, you know, a more coercive scenario where you don't listen to election results, you simply try to use force to get your way. Nobody's talking about none of the insiders. I mean, you know, the Republican loyalists, Trump loyalists are, you know, they're scrambling to decide what they're going to do once the Democrats take over the House. They're not saying, okay, well, we're going to go to Mr. Trump and say call out ICE and prevent them from taking their seats. Nobody's talking that way. And I think that's a sign that people still respect the basic Democratic institution, that if the people really say they don't want this guy, they're going to have to give in to that to really plot a much more dangerous kind of takeover. Yeah, I do think it's probably beyond Trump. I mean, if you look at the way he's behaved in the past elections, it's always been a very slapdash kind of thing. And I don't see any signs that he's seriously contemplating the use of ICE to overturn an election at this point.

Jascha Mounk (29:32)

But what if he did? I guess is the counterfactual. Right. And I agree with you, it doesn't seem likely. But in terms of our confidence that the American republic is going to survive, not just Trump, but Vance or Donald Trump Jr. Whoever may come down the pipe in the next 20 years. Do you think that the last months have given you more or less confidence that the institutions could withstand a more systematic, cool headed way of trying to.

Francis Fukuyama (29:59)

Yeah, I think so. A lot of it has to do with the senior leadership of all the power institutions. Although Pete Hegseth has been trying to replace woke up senior officers. I think that the socialization of the officer corps in the US Military is actually pretty thorough and they're going to have to purge a lot more people if, you know, you're going to find generals that would be willing to order their troops to support a totally illegal, unconstitutional seizure of power. I think that even within the power institutions, it's divided. Right. So governors actually theoretically control National Guard, police forces are completely separate. ICE is a new organization. Can they actually be used as the tip of the spear to take over the US Government? I don't know. That just seems like a pretty difficult scenario to imagine, given that there's a lot of other other organized groups with guns that might resist that. And I'm not sure that anybody wants to walk down the path where you're fighting one of these organizations against the other.

Jascha Mounk (31:17)

Yeah. By the way, when people talk about civil war, I think there's a lot of very loose talk about civil war. And certainly on some of the definitions of civil war that are current in political science at the moment, you can imaginably get to a civil war in the United States. But that's because they've defined civil war down to about 100 people who die from political violence over the course of a year in the United States. And we probably already have a few dozen a year in various ways, including assassinations and people who die in protests and other things. And so might you get across the 100 line? Tragically, yes, that's absolutely imaginable. But to get to anything that a layperson would actually recognize as a civil war, you would have to have. Have different strands of the American state squaring off against each other because of different interpretations about who's in charge or whether they should obey an unlawful order. I don't think that is completely unimaginable, but I think we're quite far away from that. And I agree with you.

Francis Fukuyama (32:15)

Well, we've also had some. We've had some examples where he sent National Guard troops from other states, from red states into blue cities. And, you know, I guess when we were imagining what a conflict would look like, it would be something like that, you know, where the local authorities would resist these federal incursions. And they've been pretty cautious. I mean, they've done terrible things like arresting US Citizens and so forth, but, you know, they haven't really pushed things to a real confrontation where potentially, you know, the potential for that existed. So, again, it gives you a little bit of hope that when push comes to shove, it's really not going to lead to violence.

Jascha Mounk (33:01)

And I have to say that nowadays one isn't always impressed dealing with various agencies of the American state. But every time that I've dealt with senior military officers or been invited to institutions like the Naval Academy, these are deeply serious people, deeply serious institutions. And I think that is a great asset that The United States retains. We haven't quite dealt or covered with the judicial element here. There's very different interpretations about whether the Supreme Court is doing Donald Trump's bidding, his most extreme interpretation, whether it's trying to sidestep the biggest conflicts in order to avoid incurring Trump's wrath. And then there's more optimistic interpretations, according to which, you know, it has a conservative majority. It does roughly what the Federalist Society would have wanted it to do in 2013 or 2014 before Donald Trump entered politics. But it really is kind of a constitutionalist force that is going to rein in any straightforward abuses of power, any extreme abuse of power by Trump. Where do you fall along that interpretive spectrum? And is one of the ways in which a Trump administration might try to get unstuck that they will start to ignore judicial rulings in a more extreme way than they have so far? I mean, this year there's various points when the judge said, you can't deport this person, and the administration said, oh, sorry, they were already on the plane. We didn't get there in time. And some of that I think, was not sincere. I think sometimes they kind of did want to flout those rulings to some extent, but they haven't so far just said on this major ruling about what we have to do going forward, we're just going to ignore the Supreme Court. Screw you. How many troops do you have? That is a dog that hasn't barked yet. Might the dog bark? Coming down the next three years, how do you see the balance between the executive and the judicial branches going forward in the next three years?

Francis Fukuyama (34:54)

The lower levels of the federal judiciary have been very good. I think they've actually pushed back against some of the patently illegal things that Trump has tried to do through executive order. So the big question is really the Supreme Court. And I would say by the time we all come back from Christmas break, we're going to know there's three really big cases that are in front of the Supreme Court right now where there's probably going to be a decision not waiting until the end of the term in June, but within the next few weeks. So 1 is the 14th Amendment birthright Citizenship case, the second is the tariffs case, and the third is the overturning of Humphrey's executor. And my prediction right now is that Trump is actually going to lose on both the tariffs and the 14th Amendment cases, and he'll probably win and succeed on the Humphreys executor one, which is

Jascha Mounk (35:52)

roughly consonant with the Federalist Society theory of the case. Right. I mean, the Federalist Society, before Trump entered politics, would likely have been in favor of overturning something like Humphreys executor, but not have suggested the other two points.

Francis Fukuyama (36:04)

Yeah, and you can see this. I mean, the Wall Street Journal has been very critical of, you know, the birthright citizenship and the tariffs, certainly, but they actually are all in favor of overturning Humphrey's executor, and they kind of represent traditional, you know, conservative Republicanism. But, yeah, I think that based on the oral arguments before the court on the tariffs, it's a real uphill struggle to, you know, defend the current policy. I think that, you know, the 14th Amendment one is just so contrary to the obvious text of, you know, the Constitution. You know, that one, it revolves around this one little phrase and subject to the jurisdiction thereof. Right. That the 14th amendment says that all persons born and naturalized in the territory of the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States, United States. And the conservatives are trying to hang this overturn on that little phrase that somehow immigrants, illegal immigrants, are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. First of all, if you're an originalist, this is a completely fraudulent argument because what that is referring to is actually Native Americans, because at the time that the 14th amendment was passed, you still had Indian tribes that were regarded as sovereign nations. And I think what that phrase is referring to is the fact that, you know, they're still sovereign and we, you know, we're going to respect, I mean, they don't simply come under the jurisdiction of the United States because they have their own sovereignty, but it's also just factually not the case that illegal immigrants aren't subject to the laws of the United States. They may be evading those laws, but they're certainly subject to laws. So I just, I really don't see a grounds for, you know, seriously overturning the 14th Amendment. So then the political question becomes, if Trump suffers these two major setbacks, what's he going to do? And I'm not sure he can do much of anything except flail around. Certainly with the tariffs, he'll try to find other legal authorities to keep them in place. But it's going to be really messy and, you know, there's going to be all these lawsuits trying to get back the tariff money that companies had had to surrender to the government. And, you know, it doesn't look good for him. You know, if, if that were to

Jascha Mounk (38:42)

happen, Pepsi, Prebiotic Cola in original and Cherry Vanilla, that Pepsi taste you love, with no artificial sweeteners and 3 grams of prebiotic fiber. Pepsi, prebiotic, cold, unbelievably Pepsi. Let's get a little bit beyond the United States. I want to come back to America at the end of the conversation, but when you look around the world, the picture from the United States is in a sense mixed, which is to say that it's really been a very, very bad year for the United States. But you can also see perhaps Trump's time in the limelight beginning to end. It's not that hard to imagine Democrat winning in 2028, though of course the Democratic Party has its own deep challenges of unpopularity which remain. But you look around the west more broadly and it just becomes extremely obvious that this political moment is not over. We thought that Poland might have turned a corner in recent elections, and then the presidential elections went for the representative of a law and justice right wing populist party. You see Giorgio Meloni quite firmly in office in Italy, even though at least in foreign policy she has proven to be more moderate than might have been expected. But most importantly, seen pollution. Nigel Farage's reform leading in Britain, Jordan Bardela or Marine Le Pen, depending on who will run which turns on court ruling, leading quite clearly in presidential polls in France. The alternative for Germany being the number one party in national opinion polls. That doesn't mean that it would be likely to rule those federal elections, which are quite a while away in any case, because it's a system of proportional representation and they're not anywhere close to an absolute majority. But they may very well enter government in the first state parliaments in East Germany and may even get an absolute majority in one of them. Clearly, whatever this moment is, is not over. Whatever is driving the rise of these populist parties is continuing. And just the phenomenal weakness of the moderates on the center left or on the center right is continuing to deepen. And I do, by the way, think that that should give us an expectation for the United States. That in conjunction of what's happening in Britain, France and Germany and what you've seen in Poland, with a quick backlash to a more moderate government, I very easily can imagine Democrats winning in 2028 because the Trump administration, I think, is going off the rails and it's way outside the cultural mainstream of the United States. And Trump is now quite unpopular and it's not clear that he has a successor that has his charisma and all of that. Not hard to imagine a Democrat winning in 2028. A Democrat winning in 2032 and 2036. Even if Republicans run very extreme candidates, Democrats actually building a broad political majority that will be required to lastingly move beyond this moment. Much harder to imagine, given the international context. So how do you assess this overall moment for democracy outside of the United States or beyond the United States?

Francis Fukuyama (41:38)

Those are two separate questions which we should discuss in turn. I think that the danger in Europe. Europe is clear, but there is also a danger that if you catastrophize too much, you get discouraged and think that you can't really fight back. And I think there are plenty of ways of fighting back. One of the most important things about Europe is actually the fact that they've got proportional representation. And that leads to none of these populist parties actually is going to get a majority in their legislatures. And so at that point, even if they do better in the coming elections, the other parties have two choices. They can actually form a coalition or they can form a cordon sanitaire. And that's what the Austrian parties are doing right now to keep the Freedom Party out of power. Either way, I think that that reduces the threat from these populist parties and actually going into a coalition with them may be the better of the two strategies. Because generally speaking, this happened both with Wilder's party in the Netherlands and with the Danish People's Party. They both were part of coalitions and they had to govern and they had to actually make compromises and they couldn't pose as these radical outsiders that were going to change everything and people just lost interest in them. So I think that there are ways of dealing with them. And there are also things that we don't know, like Jordan Bardella in France. You know, from a lot of his behavior, it seems like at the moment at least, he's much closer to Georgia Maloney than to Viktor Orban. You know, he's been meeting with business leaders. And I think that, you know, the French people themselves are not willing to give up on the EU and turn hard against it the way they, the, you know, the Hungarians have. And so I think that even, you know, so they've got a presidential system, they've got a winner take all, even though it's a two round system. So, you know, there's going to be one president of France, but I'm not convinced that if it's him that, you know, it's necessarily going to be such a disastrous outcome. And again, all these things are interdependent. And so, you know, by the time these European elections happen, Trump really looks like he's on his way out. That's also going to affect them and make the populist parties not seem like a wave, an inevitable wave that's going to hit everybody, but rather like a shot that was taken and then, you know, it just missed the target.

Jascha Mounk (44:27)

Look, I agree with much of what you said. Just to play devil's advocate on two points. The first is that but neither Britain nor France really have a proportional representation system. So in Britain you're right that Nigel Farage is far from having 50% of vote and opinion polls. But if the polls don't change from what they are at the moment, he probably would have a clear majority of his own in parliament. Obviously in France, as you pointed out, it's a runoff presidential system and Bardela is very, very likely to be in the second round of the election. And he's leading in most matchup, certainly against any left leaning candidate. Against some center, center right candidates like Edouard Philippe, it sort of looks around 50, 50 and that's a little bit harder to call. But that's actually extraordinary that even against the center right candidates or centrist candidates, he really is leading. When you match him up against somebody like Jean Luc Melanchon, the far left candidate who may very well get through to the second round because he has a big personal following, even though he's very unpopular among the French electorate as a whole, he may win by 75 or more percent. It would be the inverse of that famous election in 2002. Where was Jacques Chirac running for a second term in office against Jean Marie Le pen in which 80% of French people voted for the center right. For the moderate candidate. This time around it may be the far right candidate, the inheritor of Le Pen's movement, that may win a super majority in that election if it really ends up being a matchup against, against Menonchon. And then what does that do to where Europe stands? Look, I agree with you that Farage and Bardela are probably more moderate figures than Trump in a number of ways. It's certainly true. Obviously Farage was an enemy of European Union and one of the reasons why Britain left the European Union. Bardela is not saying that he wants to leave the European Union. I have heard though that he has said in private conversations to people that he, he's going to go to Frankfurt to the European Central bank as one of his first acts in office and say either you are buying our debt and helping us out of our budgetary crisis or everything is going to blow up and France is Too big to fail. So what are you going to do? So there is certainly, I don't think he wants to leave eu, but I think he wants to make demands of the eu, but are going to be very hard for Germany and the Netherlands and other countries to swallow in a way that would lead to a significant political crisis in the eu. The final point I just want to make is I think if you can take populist parties in as a junior coalition partner, that seems to have been a good strategy in certain circumstances. That has happened in benevolence in some other countries where they ultimately were forced into taking decisions, having responsibility for government. They were unable to deliver on all of their aspirations that led to them leading support. However, in many of these countries, it's now going to be a question of does the center right party want to be the junior coalition partner that puts them into the prime minister's seat, that puts them into the presidency, that's going to make them take power altogether. And that seems to me like a much harder calculation.

Francis Fukuyama (47:38)

Yeah. Although even having a junior coalition partner is still going to force you to back off of certain extreme positions. Yeah. Well, look, I mean, I'm not looking forward to, you know, Europe's future, particularly the lack of really inspiring leaders. I mean, Ker Starmer has been one of the worst. You know, everybody breathed a big sigh of relief when he was elected after, you know, all these crazy people that Conservatives were putting up. But he's just been so uninspiring. So. Yeah.

Jascha Mounk (48:15)

And Kertama, I think, is a genuine warning for the Democrats in the U.S. i mean, Gustama won a big electoral victory, a relatively narrow one in terms of popular vote, but a huge parliamentary majority, very, very successful election. And he won it because people were sick of a Conservative party that had ruled poorly, that had gotten more extreme in various ways. Even though Rishi Sunak, LAC Prime Minister was a relative moderate, they were relieved that the Labour Party was run by somebody more moderate than Jeremy Corbyn and others, and that was enough to get him elected. But then once you're in office, people don't judge you by the alternatives they've evaded in the past. They judge you by do you have a program, do you have a vision? And Keir Starmer doesn't have that. And that's actually, I think, a big difference to the Third Way, which had flaws of its own. But back when Bill Clinton was elected in the United States and when Tony Blair was elected in Britain, they did actually have a program. And part of that was A program of a cultural renewal which felt real at the time. I mean, the whole kind of moment of Cool Britannia, not Rule Britannia, but Cool Britannia, a more modern, exciting Britain. I remember when Gerhard Schroeder was elected in Germany. Not somebody who ended up having a distinguished chancellorship and certainly not somebody who ended up having a distinguished post chancellorship as a stooge of Vladimir Putin's. But to me, I was 16 years old. I'd been ruled all of my life, but held by Helmut Kori and Trudeau signified this kind of cultural liberation,

Francis Fukuyama (49:43)

this

Jascha Mounk (49:43)

moving on from this dodgy Germany of the 80s and early 90s. There was a moment of excitement. Starmer didn't have any of that. And when you lack all of that and all you are is, I'm not Vitori's and I'm not Jeremy Corbyn, then very quickly you're going to be judged very negatively. Are we meeting the moment intellectually? I mean, do we need to renew the liberal tradition in order to get out of this moment? Do we need to renew what it is like for people committed to liberal democracy to make a real offer to voters? Do we need to throw the kind of assumptions that I was raised in as somebody who came of age politically in the early 2000s overboard in a much more radical way in order to start from scratch? Or do you think we have the intellectual building blocks box of what a world after Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and so on looks like, and we just need to get politicians to buy into it and build on it. How lost are we intellectually, you think?

Francis Fukuyama (50:46)

Well, I don't know the answer to that. I do think that the way forward, I see a way forward for liberals. As you know, I've been very much a fan of this abundance agenda, but it has to do really with state power and executive authority. So one thing that Trump has done that is going to outlast him is he's changed the nature of executive authority. I think that one of the reasons that you get these strongmen, populist leaders appealing to people is that existing liberal governments are just stuck. They can't do stuff. They've accumulated way too many rules and constraints and so forth. And it shows up in a lot of ways. I mean, you know, the shoot him in the legs instinct comes from, you know, police forces that are very, very constrained in the way they go after criminals. This is very much an issue in Latin America where they really do have an out of control crime problem. And democratic governments following strict rule of law have simply not been able to deal with this issue in the United States. I think it really does have to do with things like infrastructure and the ability to do public projects, which really are very hard. We just had this example of a public toilet. One public toilet, like just one toilet, one toilet seat costing $1.7 million and taking years to, you know, years to construct. And I think that, you know, as Mark Dunkelman has argued, we've gone through these phases, either Hamiltonian or Jeffersonian. The Hamiltonians want to use state power effectively to do things in common interest. And the Jeffersonians are extremely suspicious of concentrated state power and therefore want to spread it out as far as they can. And really, since the 1960s, we've been in a very Jeffersonian moment where power is really pushed down to civil society, to localities. Here in California, a lot of cities have been able to block really important statewide and in fact, nationally important projects because of that shift in the balance of power. And so I think that really what abundance signifies is a recognition that actually state power, democratically legitimated and staying within the boundaries of a rule of law, can actually be used for good purposes. Because we've had a couple of generations of young Americans who don't believe that's possible, you know, that the enemy is the government. And there they join hands with, you know, traditional conservatives that never like the government. So I think that, you know, any vision for, you know, for reviving liberalism has to be built around a different conception of the state, that a democratically legitimated state, you know, can actually do things. It needs to be free to do things in many different domains, not simply building things, but also, you know, dealing with a lot of problems that just seem beyond the capacity of, you know, of contemporary government. So. So that's my general feeling about it's not a departure from liberalism because liberal societies used to be able to do this. The United States, I keep using this example, but in the early 1930s, they built the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Tennessee Valley Authority. All of these things happened within the space of three or four years. And that was kind of peak Hamiltonianism, when the Roosevelt administration use the government to do a lot of progressive things. And I think that that's a vision that we could and really need to return to.

Jascha Mounk (54:48)

To what extent is the problem that liberalism with a capital L or just democratic norms are often being invoked to justify things that are deeply inefficient and unjustifiable in ways that aren't exactly right? It is not that liberalism or democratic norms require those things. So one example of this is just there's so around getting anything built, and supposedly this is because of a rule of law, and it is because of liberalism and because of individual rights, but it's just because of particular set of legal procedures and administrative procedures and environmental laws that we've chosen. We absolutely had a rule of law in periods of American history where you could build a railway. And in fact, a railway is good for the environment, and so it's not required by that. Of course, another area of this is relating to immigration. When you look at Europe, a lot of very basic ability to close the border, ability to deport people, et cetera, is being undercut by extremely generous interpretations of a European charter of human rights and other things by European judges. And so you're effectively forcing a lot of people to choose between do you want to respect the rule of law, or do you want to have some sense that your politicians are able to do something about borders? And you frame the question that way, they're going to say, well, I care more about limiting immigration than I care about democracy. And you end up with a huge problem. I think. I mean, the third area of this is, as you're intimating some areas of public safety, of course there you have comparative differences. Europe has more of a welfare state, and it has, in general, lower levels of crime than the United States. But also in a European supermarket, if you go in and you steal a bunch of stuff, there's going to be a security guard who will tackle you and detain you until the police arrive, and then you're going to go to jail and probably not going to go to jail for very long, because European laws aren't particularly punitive, but they'll stop you from doing this in the United States. For reasons that I've never fully understood, there's a new pharmacy in my neighborhood in New York that it's just like half of the things are locked up. And this is a famous talking point, but it's just striking. And part of the reason is that if I went in there and I picked up a bunch of things and walked out, the security guard wouldn't stop, stop me, because for whatever rules, they're told not to do that. And perhaps that's because there's more guns in the United States or insurance or whatever reason, but there's democracies in Europe that somehow are able to set it up in such a way that when the store has a security guard, it'll actually stop you from stealing. And that just makes things more functional than to Say, yeah, we'll let you go. And then perhaps a cop will get around to reviewing the video coverage and somehow happens to see you in the street and arrest you. But most likely that's never going to happen. So how is it that we can

Francis Fukuyama (57:32)

diffuse

Jascha Mounk (57:34)

this real bit, real conflict between the rule of law and democracy and our ability to get things done, but a conflict that is real, not for unchangeable reasons, but because we've made bad choices?

Francis Fukuyama (57:49)

Well, I think that most of the constraints on our ability to do things are the result of bad choices and are completely unnecessary. I mean, I could entertain you for the next hour just telling you stories of ridiculous rules that make it very difficult to build things or make decisions. You're absolutely right. So, for example, in Britain, why is Nigel Farage making a comeback right now? In 2016, the British people voted narrowly to be sure to leave the European Union. And the thing that was most upsetting to them was high levels of immigration. And despite that vote and despite the trauma of leaving the eu, levels of immigration went up after that vote. And I think that the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights did play a role in making it very hard. I remember David Cameron at one point, there was some Syrian terrorist in Britain that had actually committed violent offenses in Britain and they wanted to send him back to Syria. And, you know, a European court wouldn't let them do that. And that seems just to me a perfect example of there being too much rule of law, you know, and it's very difficult, it seems, for any modern liberal democracy to actually roll things back to the, you know, they have a hard time making a trade off between having yet more rules and procedures and goals like efficiency, effectiveness, that sort of thing. But it's got to be done. I just think that if you don't do it, you're going to be constantly subject to these strong men that are going to say, well, I'm just going to ignore the rule of law completely and just smash everything. And then that's the way I'm going to accomplish things. There's got to be a middle ground between those positions.

Jascha Mounk (59:54)

Another striking example of this comes from Rory Stuart, the British politician from back when he was in charge of the UK Development Agency. He was Minister of Foreign Aid. I don't know what the name of the ministry was. And he discovered that some pot of money was going through to an organization that he had reason to mistrust. And I forget whether he was basically certain that it was going to, to support terrorist violence or the suspicion that it was that he thought we really should not be giving money to this organization. And he goes through this kind of extraordinary process he had to go through, and the extent to which he had to cap getting senior civil servants into his office and corralling him to say, have we stopped paying the money? And it was just because of bureaucratic procedures and hurdles and rule of law and all kinds of things, like virtually impossible for him to make sure the British state would stop giving money to his dangerous group. And it's just sort of extraordinary. And of course, none of that justifies any of what Trump has been doing, but it explains why people look at something like that and say, well, perhaps that's what we need. Right. And so I think getting that under control from within people who actually care about good governance and the rule of law and protecting it is, I think, exactly the case. I don't want to go too much longer, but a little bit more of an international outlook. What's the situation in Ukraine at the end of 2025? Are we going to see an end to that horrible war in 2026? And is there any chance left of us seeing an end to that war, which I don't want to say adjust them to that war, because I don't think that is in the realistic prospects at all, but at least one that avoids that conflict being reignited by Russia within the next years and give some relatively basic security guarantees to Ukraine.

Francis Fukuyama (61:42)

Well, I'm very worried about Ukraine after four years of really horrible fighting. Anything that's on the table right now is only going to delay a Russian attempt at takeover. And it's quite remarkable Putin has not given an inch. There was just this recent meeting with Zelensky and European leaders where they were trying to modify the 28 point document to actually strengthen some of the guarantees and walk back some of the territorial concessions. And even if they can get Trump to support this, it's not clear to me that Putin is going to agree to any of this. And so I think it probably will require much more unilateral measures on the part of the Europeans. They've got to overcome this reluctance of Belgium to release the money, the sequestered Russian money, because Ukraine needs about $30 billion of budget support every year. The Europeans have been giving that, but they can't do that forever. And there are ways of getting around it. But European decision making being what it is, it can be vetoed very easily by one reluctant party. And right now, I don't know exactly where that stands. They're certainly trying to get past that veto and that of Hungary and Slovakia. But whether they'll succeed in doing it is still very dicey. And I think that, I don't know. The most just outrageous thing, I think, is the total capitulation, the moral capitulation that's involved, this idea that, that we're actually going to make business deals and that our major objective in this negotiation should not be the security of a democratic Ukraine, but new opportunities for joint U.S. russian business ventures that the whole Trump family can get involved in. It's so repulsive and appalling. So, yeah, I'm not really, I'm not really optimistic about any of that. And I think that's even if all the optimistic things I said about next year's election come true, I don't think it's going to happen really enough to really help Ukraine much.

Jascha Mounk (64:12)

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Good Fight with the great Francis Fukuyama. In the rest of this conversation, Frank and I, I talk about the international scene. This conversation so far has been quite centered on the United States. But of course, there's huge questions coming up internationally in 2026. What is going to happen in the elections in Hungary? Can Europe renew itself? Can Europe actually become master of its own fate in a moment when it is deeply threatened politically, militarily and economically? What on earth are the plans of a Trump administration in Venezuela? What is the future of China? Is China's influence around the world just continuing to grow? To listen to that part of the conversation to support this podcast, please go to yashamung.substack.com thegoodfight and to celebrate the end of the year in a festive spirit, we're throwing in a special discount that's 25% off your first year. That means it's about 50 cents per full episode of this podcast. Jasamunk.substack.com the good fight. Thank you for listening today. Thank you for listening this whole year, and happy holidays.

Francis Fukuyama (65:42)

Sam.