Podcast: America vs itself: Political scientist Francis Fukuyama on the state of democracy

TRANSCRIPT: America vs itself: Political scientist Francis Fukuyama on the state of democracy

Francis Fukuyama:

The problem is that I think a lot of people on the left have been crying wolf for a long time. They have accused many Republicans over the years, people like Mitt Romney, who now looks like a saint for his willingness to criticize Trump. I mean, all of these Republicans made mistakes and they had policy differences that were quite serious with people on the left, but they were never threats to democratic institutions in themselves. And I think that's really the choice that we're going to face in the upcoming presidential election.

Ian Bremmer:

Hello and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. This is where you can listen to extended conversations from my interviews on public television. I'm Ian Bremmer, and today we are taking a cold, hard look at the fate of democracy in the extremely consequential year to come. Around the world, elections will test the limits of authoritarian appeal and the guardrails of democratic institutions, and that includes particularly right here in the United States.

This comes at a time when one-quarter, one-quarter of Americans believe that the FBI was behind the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol. That's right, 25%. So there's not a lot of shared trust among Americans or even shared agreement on basic facts as we head towards November the 5th. Here to talk about the global and domestic threats to democracy in 2024 is renowned Stanford political scientist, no, not me, another one, Francis Fukuyama.

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Ian Bremmer:

Frank Fukuyama, one of my favorite political scientists in the whole world, thanks for joining us.

Francis Fukuyama:

Thanks for having me, Ian.

Ian Bremmer:

And I say that as a political scientist, of course, it's important to me. So much I want to talk to you about, but I wanted to start with it is the Stockholm based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, and they say that half the world's countries are suffering from democratic decline. Now, I know we shouldn't trust the Swedes generally, but on this one, are they on board? Are they right? And what does it mean to you?

Francis Fukuyama:

Well, I think broadly there's been a recognition that we've been in a democratic recession really since about 2008 or so. There's only a small group of academics that for some reason disagree. But I think that if you consider both quantitatively the number of backsliders and qualitatively at the kind of backsliding that's occurred, it's hard to come to the conclusion that democracy is in good shape globally.

Ian Bremmer:

When the wall came down, we generally assumed that democracy was the most robust political system in the world. Not that we just eventually got to the right place. No one really seems to be saying that anymore. What's the principal reason for that?

Francis Fukuyama:

Well, first of all, there is no principal reason. I think there's several things that have been going on. So you have the successful consolidation of two big authoritarian, great powers, Russia and China, who succeeded in developing an economic model that looked sustainable. They were politically stable. But I think that the more troubling thing is what's been going on inside democracies where a lot of democracies simply have not delivered in terms of economic growth. Latin America, terrible situation in terms of just physical security of citizens.

Their governments haven't been able to provide that. In terms of levels of corruption, there are many countries that democratically elected governments that are stealing from their own people. And so there's a lot of reasons why democracy does not seem to be the kind of system that actually delivers the outcomes that were promised. And there probably was a little bit too much high expectation setting at the time that the Berlin Wall came down.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, when I look at some of the countries that have been serious backsliders, so Hungary for example, Turkey for example, would you say... I mean, is it even fair to call those countries democratic at this point?

Francis Fukuyama:

Well, there's a lot of argument over what qualifies, but I think that both of those have slipped over into the authoritarian category because their governments have jiggered the institutions through gerrymandering, through manipulation of elections through control of the media such that they really do not hold free and fair elections. And they've severely compromised their judicial system so that the rule of law is really not functioning or functions as an adjunct to state power rather than as a neutral arbiter of the law. So yeah, I don't think they qualify as democracies now.

Ian Bremmer:

I mean, the leaders of those countries, you wouldn't say that they are legitimate leaders as a consequence of that?

Francis Fukuyama:

Well, I think that both of them won elections. I think in both cases the government had so much control over the various levers of power that it's hard to say that either of them was elected through a free and fair electoral process. On the other hand, I do think that we shouldn't kid ourselves that this was just the work of a tiny elite minority that pulled the wool over everybody's eyes because there is some genuine popularity behind authoritarian government.

A better example of this is really El Salvador. El Salvador legitimately elected Nayib Bukele as president, but he embarked on this massive effort to simply round up people that he thought were gang members and put them in prison. No trial. No judicial process to find out whether they're actually guilty or not. And as a result, like 10% of the young men in the country are now sitting in prison, and it's been quite successful in reducing the level of gang violence in El Salvador by like 90%.

Ian Bremmer:

And meanwhile, his approval ratings are also something like 90%.

Francis Fukuyama:

That's right.

Ian Bremmer:

I mean, looking at this one in particular, and I remember, of course, when he came on board, he was well-known for that and for being a crypto tech bro that the latter hasn't worked out so well. I mean, when this problem is so persistent through so many administrations across the political spectrum, why does it take a strong man who doesn't care about democracy to do anything about it?

Francis Fukuyama:

Well, look, what he's done is not that different from Duterte in the Philippines. What the rule of law does is it puts constraints on the use of, among other things, police power. And so Bukele has been putting these gang members in jail. In Salvador, it's a little bit easier because the gang members all have these tattoos that pretty clearly identify them as members of gangs, so they just round up anybody with a tattoo and stick them in jail. There's no court proceeding. And in the process, they arrest a lot of innocent people.

And in Duterte's case, he killed a lot of innocent people because he basically told his police to go shoot and ask questions later. And so unfortunately, we have a presidential candidate in this country that wants to do something similar to deal with shoplifting and crime in the United States. So I think that in a liberal democracy, we deliberately constrain power. That's what makes a liberal democracy liberal rather than just a populist majoritarian democracy. But it does mean that there are certain things that we don't permit ourselves to do in the area of security and other things.

Ian Bremmer:

When the basic provision of human security, whether it's enough food to eat or freedom from gang violence is not provided by the government, I mean, I don't care what kind of a political system you're living in, common sense tells you you should revolt against that system.

Francis Fukuyama:

Well, that's right. I think in the end, there's a good reason why the government, a legitimate government, should have a monopoly of force. There's some cases that are actually more successful, like Colombia had this huge problem in the 1990s with Pablo Escobar. And you had the FARC, this left-wing insurgency. You had militias on the right that were battling it out in the streets. Essentially what that country did is to strengthen its central institutions, the army, the national police.

They haven't solved the drug problem, but they severely reduced the level of violence. And they did it not like Bukele by violating people's rights on a massive scale. There were violations, but they did it while still remaining a liberal democracy. So I think that it's not impossible for democracies to cope with these kinds of situations. What you do not want is for people to take coercion into their own hands and hire their own militias in order to protect their properties and their families. Because down that road, you basically just have... That's Somalia or Lebanon.

Ian Bremmer:

There's a good chance, right? That after they've arrested all the thugs that for decades, El Salvador will never have a representative government again. If this guy decides that he's going to do whatever he wants on corruption, on basic economic services, and the rest the people are going to have no... They'll have no method to address that.

Francis Fukuyama:

Well, this is a age-old problem of authoritarian government. The Chinese have this story about good emperors and bad emperors. So if you have a good emperor, that is to say a authoritarian leader like Lee Kuan Yew that basically is relatively moderate and has the interest of his people in mind, then you can get...

Ian Bremmer:

The former leader of Singapore.

Francis Fukuyama:

Yeah, Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore. You get amazing results. And indeed, when Deng Xiaoping was the premier leader in China, they converted to a market economy much faster than any other society could have done because he had authoritarian power. But what's happened in Chinese history is that you get good emperors on occasion, but more often you get bad emperors. And when you get a bad emperor, then you're really in trouble because you don't have any institutional constraints and that bad emperor can do an incredible amount of damage.

And there's really no way of stopping him until basically they die physically. And that was I think the problem with Mao Zedong. I think he was the last really bad emperor. We'll have to see about Xi Jinping. He's not looking so good either. But certainly Mao Zedong launched the great leap forward and the Cultural Revolution that were unbelievable catastrophes for the society. And because you're relying basically on the goodwill of one individual, your chances of getting good outcomes at the other end over an extended period of time are low.

Ian Bremmer:

I saw before this last comment, you were casting some aspersions on Somalia, which has been, of course, one of the worst governed countries, one of the poorest countries in the world. But the IMF has just unlocked a big slug of cash for them, radically bringing down their debt, not because they're any more democratic or representative of the people, but rather because they've done a better job economically. Is that appropriate?

Francis Fukuyama:

Unfortunately, for those of us that normatively like democracy, there's no necessary connection between democracy and good economic performance. China's the best example of that. It's never been a democracy. It's never really had a rule of law, and yet it's been the most... For a large country, it's just set world records for economic growth. Singapore, I mean, many other cases, both Taiwan and South Korea blossomed economically while they were under dictatorships.

And so democracy is something that tends to work better at higher levels of income. But in itself, it's not necessarily an engine of economic growth. Actually Somalia is one place. Somaliland, next door, is an even better success story because they've actually been stable and prosperous for a good long time, and they're basically still a tribally governed non-democracy.

Ian Bremmer:

Xi Jinping, you said, not doing as well at this point. Now certainly economically he's not doing as well. The political consolidation seems very high. Put your crystal ball on right now. Where do you think the Chinese leadership and the political system is likely heading? We've had 40 years of this unprecedented human development under the China model, but we now have a much stronger leader than at any point since when that model started, since Mao. And he's also no more term limits. So if he wants, he can be in charge for life. Where do you think that's going?

Francis Fukuyama:

Well, I think it leads to a potentially dangerous situation. I think that we probably hit peak China maybe five years ago before the pandemic started. And the pandemic has simply underlined the degree of economic decline because they're simply never going to go back to the kinds of growth levels that they experienced as recently as 2019. But they're still big and powerful and they've got a lot of assets.

And I think that one thing a lot of strategists worry about is that a great power that's past its peak and sees that it is going into a long-term decline may actually become more aggressive than one that's secure in its thinking about its future. That's not a prediction because I don't know how the Chinese leadership is interpreting their current situation, but certainly they have not backed off this rather forward and aggressive kind of foreign policy that they've been running for the past...

Well, really through much of Xi Jinping's leadership period. And that worries me a lot. It worries me particularly if you look at the balance of power because the US isn't doing well right now. I think we've been severely weakened by our internal divisions. And I think that there may come a point where China feels that if they're going to ever move to reincorporate Taiwan, that this might be the point where they're maximally strong and we're maximally weak. And that might set up a very risky decision on Xi Jinping's part.

Ian Bremmer:

Well, certainly the US is not maximally weak economically, militarily, or technologically, but politically and political will is a different story. And people I'm sure have been waiting for when we're going to turn to the United States. You've been outspoken. You are personally concerned about the state of democracy right now and certainly don't want people thinking it can never happen here. What can happen here? I mean, how worried should the Americans be proximately in the near term, in other words, after the next election, about the "end of democracy in the US?"

Francis Fukuyama:

Well, I think they should be very, very worried. And this is not reading tea leaves. If you listen carefully to what Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican candidate in 2024, has been saying, he's been pretty explicit. He wants to pull a Bukele-type move. He was saying the way you deal with shoplifters is you just shoot him dead as they come out of the store. No due process.

He has explicitly said that he wants to turn the Justice Department against his personal enemies, not just the so-called Biden crime family, but all of the people in his own first administration that have criticized him and turned against him. And the other thing that's quite worrisome is that he was limited in what he could do in his first term by incompetence, unfamiliarity with the way government worked.

He didn't come in with a big cadre of loyalists to help him. And so for the first three years, he really had to rely on the advice of so-called normie Republicans. This time around, they are busy compiling lists of people whose primary qualification is going to be loyalty to the Trump agenda, and they want to hit the ground running in terms of accomplishing things that they couldn't accomplish.

So it's not just the border wall, but increasing the weaponization of the Justice Department. They want to clear out the civil service and be able to fire tens of thousands of ordinary civil servants and replace them with people that will listen to the president and not to the Constitution or to the rule of law. And so I think that this is really what's happened in other countries that have slipped into dictatorship.

The problem is that I think a lot of people on the left have been crying wolf for a long time. They have accused many Republicans over the years, people like Mitt Romney, who now looks like a saint for his willingness to criticize Trump. I mean, all of these Republicans made mistakes and they had policy differences that were quite serious with people on the left, but they were never threats to democratic institutions in themselves. And I think that's really the choice that we're going to face in the upcoming presidential election.

Ian Bremmer:

So if Trump wins, I mean, clearly he will almost certainly have the House of Representatives with mostly loyal members. He will very likely have the Senate with somewhat less loyal, but still reasonably loyal members. The judiciary is different, of course. It remains independent. And when Trump did his damnedest to overturn the outcomes of the 2020 election, all of those cases went against them.

It didn't matter if they were conservative appointed or liberal appointed judges. The military remains professionalized and independent. Those seem fairly significant repositories of democratic resilience in a country like the US. Tell me why they won't matter as much as they should.

Francis Fukuyama:

Well, they will matter, but I think that we may be facing a really unprecedented situation. So for example, the courts in this country don't have any independent power. They don't have their own police or their own enforcement mechanism. And if the Supreme Court says, "You cannot ban all Muslims from entering the country. You can't impose a religious test," as Trump has suggested he might, what's going to happen if a future court, even a Republican dominant or a conservative Supreme Court says, "No, no, Mr. President, you can't do that," and he simply disregards that.

I think that's entirely within the realm of possibility, given the direction that he has been going. The military, he is not going to have yes men at the senior ranks, but he can replace them as he finds people that are loyalists. And from what I hear from some of my friends in the military, the senior leadership is still normal. They really do believe in the Constitution and the rule of law, but there's a lot of support for Trump in the enlisted ranks and people further down.

And so I think that it may take a little bit longer to subdue an institution like that, but I think that in four years it could happen. And then there are shortcuts like the Insurrection Act, which Trump threatened to use at the time of the George Floyd protests. He didn't follow through on that. But again, the law there is poorly written, and it's not clear that he wouldn't be able to actually call on the US military on day one to actually put down a protest against him.

Ian Bremmer:

So you're a pretty outspoken guy. You don't pull punches. If this were to come to pass, what do you do? Do you stay in the country? Do you change your behavior? Do you leave? What do you do?

Francis Fukuyama:

Well, I certainly wouldn't leave. I think that you would need to resist. I mean, you have had these interesting cases in Israel, in Poland where you had a populist leader that was elected and you had this enormous outpouring of civil society. And in Israel's case, it really stopped Netanyahu's effort to undermine the role of the Israeli Supreme Court. We'll see what happens in the long...

Ian Bremmer:

He had to back down. He had to water down significantly.

Francis Fukuyama:

However, in the case of the United States...

Ian Bremmer:

But that was like 10% of the entire population that turned out in demonstrations. It was quite remarkable.

Francis Fukuyama:

And the Poles did something similar to protest against...

Ian Bremmer:

And voted him out and then just voted out due to government.

Francis Fukuyama:

The problem in the United States, however, is that it's a big country and you can't call 10% of the American people out to the streets of Washington. But the other thing that is very, very worrisome is that in a way Trump is preparing for this moment when there's massive protests. And he's got a lot of supporters, many of them are armed. And I think that on January 6th, he showed that he was completely comfortable with calling on his friends to use violence to support his ends.

And so he might be able to get police and military to help him out this time and he may use his own armed supporters. And that really sets up a scenario for serious violence. It is kind of remarkable that we have had a lot of threats of violence in the last several years, but we've not actually seen assassinations or overt gun battles between different armed groups. But that's something that we may unfortunately see down the road in the United States if things keep going in this direction.

Ian Bremmer:

I mean, to what extent is the problem that the United States hasn't really faced in internal crisis? I mean, January 6th at the end of the day, it looked horrible, but that evening majority of Republicans in the House could go back in and vote to refuse to certify the election because they were complacent, because they said, "Well, there's no real threat to the democracy."

Francis Fukuyama:

Well, look, ever since 2016, we have imagined that there are all these red lines. That once they're crossed, that certainly Trump's supporters will start deserting him because they'll realize this time he really has gone too far, and that moment has just never arrived. And January 6th is the clearest example of that. I spent the whole day glued to my computer screen watching those events, and I said to myself, "This is it. They can't possibly continue to support them."

And yet here we are three years later and they're all busy trying to normalize what happened on that day. So I'm really very worried about the guard rails and whether they're really going to be in place when we really need them.

Ian Bremmer:

Frank Fukuyama, he's concerned, maybe you should be too. Thanks for joining us today.

Francis Fukuyama:

Thanks very much, Ian.

Ian Bremmer:

That's it for today's edition of the GZERO World Podcast. Do you like what you heard? Of course, you did. Why don't you check us out at gzeromedia.com and take a moment to sign up for our newsletter? It's called GZERO Daily.

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The GZERO World Podcast is brought to you by our lead sponsor Prologis. Prologis helps businesses across the globe scale their supply chains with an expansive portfolio of logistics real estate, and the only end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today. Learn more at Prologis.com.

This GZERO Podcast is brought to you by Bleecker Street and LD Entertainment. Presenting I.S.S. When war breaks out on earth between the US and Russia, astronauts aboard the International Space Station fight each other for control. This sci-fi thriller is only in theaters January 19th.

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