Danny Buerkli: We are delighted to be tonight with Francis Fukuyama, a man who truly needs no introduction. Thank you very much for being with us.

My name is Danny Buerkli and I‘m here with Alenka Bonnard. We are both co-founders of staatslabor, a not-for-profit government reform lab. We work with government entities across Switzerland, helping them face their challenges.

Now, for those of you who have not entirely kept up with Frank Fukuyama‘s prolific output over the past years, let me remind you that he is not only, of course, the author of „The End of History and The Last Man“.

He has also written the magisterial two-volume series „The Origins of Political Order“ and „Political Order and Political Decay“. His two most recent monographs are „Identity: The Demand for Dignity and The Politics of Resentment“ and „Liberalism and Its Discontents“.

Francis Fukuyama, like with few others, it feels like your collected works are needed to answer the most pressing question of our time, which is: what is going on?

But what is maybe most remarkable, is that you are just as rooted in Hegelian capital-H History as in the finer details of government reform.

You write about what makes for durable institutions, but also about why software needs to be procured differently from an F-35.

And it turns out that when we are trying to understand what President Trump and Elon Musk are attempting to achieve, we should look at the big sweep of history but also at the granular detail of what is happening in the White House, in OMB, in DOGE, and other key institutions.

Alenka Bonnard: You wrote a “letter to Elon Musk” in November, which many in our audience have read ahead of this conversation, and you use a sharp yet humorous tone to highlight the limits of applying Silicon Valley thinking to government. Do you think Musk has taken any of your advice to heart?

Francis Fukuyama: Well, first of all, let me say good evening. It's very nice to be able to talk to you. 

Government reform has been one of my big issues in recent years. And I would say that what is happening in the United States is not government reform. It's government destruction, which is proceeding day by day at a pace that I think absolutely nobody expected. 

I would say that is what has happened in the time since that letter was first published, which was right at the time that DOGE was formed. The effort that they have undertaken is so much more radical than anything anyone expected. It's really pretty breathtaking. 

I was talking about the legal constraints that DOGE and Musk and Trump would face in trying to, for example, fire masses of bureaucrats in the US government. It turns out they don't care about the law. They have been issuing dozens of executive orders. It's like Trump thinks that he is a king and not an elected president in a constitutional republic. He is a king and he can simply make decrees that will fire people, that will close agencies, that will try to absorb new territories outside the United States without any reference to what the law or the constitution actually say. 

Just to give you some examples, the most egregious of these executive orders was his canceling of birthright citizenship, i.e. the ius solis that is the basis of citizenship ever since the 14th amendment passed in the wake of the civil war. It's so blatantly unconstitutional and a federal judge has already told him that it can't go into effect, but that hasn't stopped him. 

American civil servants are protected by a lot of laws. For example, the most important category are civil servants that have what they call for-cause protection, meaning you cannot simply fire them arbitrarily if you come in in a new political administration. They have to be given notice and you actually have to give a reason why you are firing them. They have to have committed a crime or been exposed as corrupt or something of that sort. 

And he simply fired these people or threatened them in such a way that they preemptively resigned. This includes a number of very important non-partisan offices, like the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics that puts out unemployment and inflation numbers, the head of the Internal Revenue Service, these inspector generals that exist in every federal agency to monitor performance, corruption, malfeasance, this sort of thing. And they were simply fired and told not to show up for work. And as a result, there are a mass of lawsuits now that have been launched against these executive orders. 

I should back up a little bit. The most serious weapon that Trump and Musk are wielding is this power over this office in the U.S. Treasury that is designed to disperse funds. This is not an oversight office. It's just like a bank making payments when you write a check. One of the professional civil servants refused to do what Musk wanted and was fired. 

They have said that they have not refused a payment in the entire history of this organization because it's just a pass through for money that has been appropriated by Congress and allocated by an agency. And the treasury is simply the mechanical processing system for making those payments. 

So Musk has stopped payments because he and people like Russ Vought, who is the new head of OMB, realized that cashflow is everything. And so they have cut off money to disfavored agencies. They have done this completely illegally. 

I have a close connection with something called the National Endowment for Democracy. It's a government supported agency that provides small grants to human rights, pro-democracy groups all over the world. They have not challenged its legal status, but they have cut off its bank account. And so they have had to lay off 70% of their employees. 

This is going on throughout the United States. The Agency for International Development supports an even larger number of NGOs, private organizations, and humanitarian aid organizations. And even if they have not announced the closing of these programs, they can't get their money. They can't get the money out of the treasury department. 

A federal judge actually said that they were not allowed to block these payments and they have ignored him. He complained a second time that you are not legally allowed to withhold these kinds of payments, but it's a deliberate strategy on their part for strangling the parts of the government that they don't like. 

I think what is going to happen is these lawsuits will go forward. It will take several months until they are resolved. And then we face a different kind of crisis, which is whether the Trump administration will actually obey a federal judge that rules against him. And there is a lot of speculation that that may not happen.

A few days ago, our vice president, J.D. Vance, complained about judicial interference in the executive branch's functions, which is ridiculous. Ever since Marbury versus Madison established judicial review, the courts have been understood to have authority over judgments as to whether something is legal or constitutional.

They are basically saying, no, the King is the only one that can make a judgment as to legality and the courts have no role in doing this. So there is some fear that in fact, even if the current conservative Supreme Court tells them that they can't do something, that they are just going to ignore it and do it anyway.

So I think that this is authoritarian government, this is what you do in an authoritarian system in which there are no rules governing executive behavior. We have seen this similar kind of erosion in India under Modi, in Hungary under Viktor Orban, but it is happening much more rapidly in the United States. It took Orban ten years to get to the place that Trump is trying to move to very, very quickly. So that's the basic situation.

This is why I think that we are in certainly the most severe constitutional crisis that I have ever experienced in my lifetime. And I would say probably the most serious crisis going all the way back to the U.S. Civil War in the 19th century. 

Alenka Bonnard: What is really interesting is that someone like Elon Musk isn't just proposing policies, but is telling a story about government – and it's resonating with millions. You have written a lot about the power of ideas in shaping political legitimacy. How do you think defenders of liberal democracy should retell the story right now?

Francis Fukuyama: That's a very good question. I think that the conservative critics of the federal bureaucracy have their narrative completely wrong. Ever since the 1930s, when the American administrative state was vastly expanded under Franklin Roosevelt, conservatives have been unhappy. They have charged that the bureaucracy has too much autonomy, that the bureaucrats are constantly making decisions and have escaped the control of their democratically elected masters in Congress. 

That was the original charge made against the administrative state. It's been reframed as the deep state in the first Trump administration. And I think it's completely wrong. This is actually an important point for anyone that wants to do government reform. 

The real problem with the American bureaucracy is almost exactly the opposite, that there are too many controls placed on the bureaucracy by Congress and sometimes by the bureaucracy itself that prevent it from actually doing a job, the job that it was meant to do. Every federal agency operates under a mountain of ex-ante procedural rules.

We have something, for example, called the Federal Acquisitions Regulation. All governments regulate the way they buy goods and services, but ours stretches to several hundred pages of very detailed rules about how you put out something for bid, how you adjudicate results, what the qualifications for bidders are.

A lot of social policy is embedded in these rules, but it means that you can't buy a desk or a computer in a federal government agency without going through this enormously long process of compliance. That then passes to the private sector as well. So the people that sell things to the federal government have big compliance departments to make sure that they are complying with the rules.

I think that one of the big dysfunctions of the government lies in the fact that bureaucrats believe their job is to comply with these rules and not to produce actual results or good outcomes for citizens. They are rewarded or punished for their ability to comply with rules rather than for achieving effective results.

So the real problem in the US government is the opposite of what conservatives argue. We have way too many controls on the government and bureaucrats are not allowed to use their good judgment.

This is not just an American problem. This is a problem in all bureaucracies, right? That you are waiting to get your renewal of your motor vehicle license, and you are at the kiosk at five o'clock, and then the bureaucrat says, no, I'm sorry, it's five o'clock, we are closing the office. And you say, yeah, but I have been waiting here for an hour. And the person will say, I'm sorry, the rule says we close at five o'clock and that's it. This is kind of a universal experience with bureaucracies. 

But what has happened over time in many liberal democracies is that people believe that the road to legitimacy lies in ever more procedures. As a result, you pile on procedures in the hope that this is actually going to make people accept the legitimacy that you have been vetted and you are going to be impartial and you are not going to discriminate and all these different things. But the result is that you don't actually get effective government that can make decisions quickly and can take advantage of the actual expertise that exists in most bureaucracies. 

I started a group last year. We knew that Schedule F, this whole attack on the administrative state, would be coming. We started this group to try to push back against these ideas, because according to Musk and Trump, the entire problem is that bureaucracy is massively overstaffed and bureaucrats are sitting around at home playing video games and not working. And therefore the route to efficiency is to do what he did to Twitter, which is to fire masses of people. As I said in that original letter, that's not true. The government is, if anything, understaffed. 

We have a real capacity problem in the United States because young people don't want to go into the government. Part of the reason they don't want to go into the government is that all they are going to spend their time doing is complying with detailed rules.

And that is not a fun career, but you are not going to get to efficiency simply by firing people. You have to come up with ways of making government service attractive to young people, especially those with technical skills. That is something we have had a great deal of trouble doing. So they have got the completely wrong idea about how to deal with these problems. 

Our hope is that at some point they are going to cut so much capacity that something really bad will happen. They won't have enough air traffic controllers or people to predict hurricanes or other things that the government needs to do. And it will lead to a big crisis and a disaster. I don't want to wish for a disaster, but that is the direction that they are moving in. At a certain point, people will realize that you actually need the government to do something. 

Now, this is one of the most profound differences between America and almost every other democratic society. In America, we are very used to seeing the government as the enemy. This really began with our revolt against the British monarchy in the 18th century. 

Whereas I think in Europe and in the democratic parts of Asia, like Korea or Japan, there is a much longer state tradition in which the state is seen actually as a benign force that actually protects citizens against market forces, against corruption, against security threats and so forth. But in America, it's been the opposite.

This distrust of government is shared both by people on the left who believe the government's captured by big businesses, and then by people on the right that think that it's captured by people on the left. As a result, we don't get a lot of trust in government. But trust is what you need if you are going to have a properly functioning bureaucracy. You have got to believe that the people that are making decisions in the government actually are doing it with public interest in mind, not simply for self-interested, private motives.

This is one of the big advantages that many East Asian countries have, because even more than in Europe, you have this very deep Chinese tradition of meritocratic bureaucracy. They are really the civilization that invented meritocracy.

I have had this experience. I have stopped going to China. In fact, they won't give me a visa to go to China anymore. But when I was there before, well before COVID, I remember talking to Chinese academics, and they would say things like, “well, the people in the government are pretty smart, and so I think that we can trust them to do the right thing”. 

You will never, ever hear an American say anything like that. The Americans are going to say the opposite. “The people in the government are incompetent, they're evil, they're corrupt, and we don't trust them to do anything.” I think that distrust has deepened in the last few years, and that's a big problem.

Danny Buerkli: If we trace the history of ideas of government reform, it seems like the last time around this was salient was in the 1990s when “Reinventing Government” came out, and we had the Clinton and Gore “National Partnership for Reinventing Government”. Recently the interest in government reform has clearly come back. Why now?

Francis Fukuyama: I have to say that the Democrats and the people on the left have not been interested in government reform either. My group was called Protect and Reform Our Civil Service, and we told ourselves a year ago that if Trump was elected, we would try to protect the civil service, but if a Democrat was elected, we would try to reform it. 

But the reform agenda, if Kamala Harris had been elected, would not have gone forward because the Democratic Party is very much beholden to public sector unions, and they have been absolutely adamant against any kind of reform. They are the most powerful on a state and local level. 

Teachers' unions in the United States are very powerful as they are in many other countries, but there's also unions that protect federal workers in federal agencies, and they have not been willing to give an inch in terms of making it easier, for example, to eliminate poorly performing workers. They are always pushing for greater worker protections and this sort of thing. 

So Gore tried this reinventing government idea, and it really, in the end, did not have that much effect because there was so much resistance on the Democratic side to doing something. There is a possibility that the current Trump attack on the bureaucracy will be so extreme that it may scare people into actually becoming a little bit more flexible if the Democrats come back into power. I don't quite know the scenario by which this is going to happen, but it's possible that there will be a greater consensus on the need for reform.

Now, the question, why is this happening now, is a good one, and I don't honestly know an answer to that. I do think that the bureaucracy has gotten caught up in our culture wars that have been very extreme and have been at the basis of a lot of the polarization. 

For example, the conservative narrative about left-wingers taking over the government and running with it is actually true in certain respects. We have Title IX, which was part of an Education Act passed in the early 1970s that forbids gender discrimination, just as the Civil Rights Act had a title that prohibited racial discrimination. What happened over the last decade under Democratic presidents like Obama and Biden is that the Office of Civil Rights in the Education Department began to massively expand the protections. They believe that there was an epidemic of campus rape, and so every university was required to set up a big Title IX office. They demanded a judicial system for prosecuting cases of sexual assault and sexual harassment. 

A few years ago, they started expanding this to cover transgender people as well. These expansions may have been justified substantively, but they were not done procedurally correctly. We have an Administrative Procedure Act that says that if you are going to expand regulation, you actually have to publicize the changes and have comments and respond to the comments and so forth. The Obama administration and the Biden administration didn't do that. 

One of the results is that, I mean, it's this bizarre thing, but transgenderism was actually a big issue in the election campaign. Trump ran a whole bunch of commercials in the final month of the election, bringing up examples of where the Biden administration had promoted transgender rights in reaction to pressure from transgender activist groups.

I know some of these cases, because my son worked for a national lab where some of this had taken place. This issue rose to prominence and reinforced this idea that identity politics is rife in the bureaucracy. The idea that DEI is the chief objective of every federal agency, that they are enforcing all of these rules about race, sex, gender, gender identity and so forth. The problem is that there is enough truth to that, so it became very plausible to people. 

But I also think it's just the internet because 99.9% of Americans aren't affected by this. But because of the internet you get these, in some cases, kind of outrageous cases and it goes all over the internet. And then you have now convinced tens of millions of Americans that the federal government is making these ridiculous rules. I just think that's the kind of world we are living in these days.

Danny Buerkli: What you are also gesturing towards is just how hard it is to get government reform through. So there is a question as to whether gradual reform is possible.

Francis Fukuyama: That is probably the best defense of what is going on right now, that you have got to tear it down before you can rebuild it. The problem with the Trump people is that I don't think they are interested in rebuilding it. 

If you go to someone like Russ Vought, he is a Christian nationalist and he has made statements to the effect that federal bureaucrats hate the American people. And unless you completely get rid of them you are never going to get a government that is democratically accountable. 

I think among ordinary citizens, there is also just a lack of awareness of what the government does. There is this famous quote from somebody that was supporting the repeal of Obamacare, who said something to the effect of “the federal government should keep its hands off my Medicare”, in complete ignorance of the fact that Medicare is a government program.

If people don't understand what it is the government does and the positive role it plays, then it is going to be hard to actually have a kind of sensible conversation about how you can make things better. 

Alenka Bonnard: Yes, the government tends to undercommunicate what it does. This is also something we talk about a lot at staatslabor, the fact that you should “show your work”. You have really brilliant people, often working very hard, but there is a shyness about showing what you are doing. Has it been like that in the U.S. as well?

Francis Fukuyama: Absolutely. There is an organization called the Partnership for Public Service which supports public service. It's a private organization, but it kind of represents bureaucrats. Every year they have this award, the Samuel J. Heyman Awards, in which they pick out about 15 federal bureaucrats that have done really important work, saved billions of dollars, saved thousands of lives. It's very impressive. They have an award ceremony where they show videos of what these people have done. But unfortunately this is just not visible to anybody outside of Washington. These stories really need to be told. 

By the way, there's another issue. I don't know how big a problem this is in Switzerland, but one of the really scary things that's going on right now with DOGE is that Musk has brought in these young engineers. One of them is like just out of high school, but they're in their early 20s, and they have been given access to basically all of the computer systems in the federal government. 

There is a real worry about what they are going to do to it, because almost every computer system in every federal agency is a monstrosity. Some of them are still running on COBOL or FORTRAN or these computer languages that nobody has used for 30 years, and they constantly are being patched, but they are so complex that nobody really understands how they work, and you can just imagine that you unleash these 22-year-old engineers on this system, and they start tinkering with it without understanding any of the complexities of the way that it got to be where it is, and the likelihood that it's going to really screw things up in a major way is high. 

Now, this was an area where it is very hard to see how reform could actually happen because periodically the government itself realizes that their computer systems are outdated and really need to be fixed, and so what they do is they launch a big procurement for some big company like IBM to come and fix them. They spend two years writing the contract, and then the company spends another three, four years actually implementing the contract, and at that point, the new system is full of bugs and it doesn't work, and in any event, the technology has moved on, and so it's already obsolete at the moment that it's launched. 

I think that we need a much more flexible way of using technology where you don't try to buy a system that's going to be good for the next 10 years. You buy a system, and then you have a system of continuous improvement and feedback. 

I teach at Stanford. One of the most famous parts of Stanford University is the design school where everybody in Silicon Valley who wants to be the inventor of the next iPhone, they go to this department, and they teach this method of design thinking where you are constantly getting feedback from the people that are actually using your system.

I don't know whether in Switzerland you have this problem, but in the United States, we have this deeply entrenched view in the bureaucracy that if you are a serious person with high status, you are a policymaker, you're not a policy implementer. 

The implementers can be contractors, and so the policymaker rolls out a new program for subsidies or benefits or something like that, and then they hire a contractor to actually create the website and implement the policy. This has led to huge problems because if you don't have feedback from the implementers and the users, you will never design the proper policy. 

Probably one of the biggest government failures we had was with the rollout of Obamacare. We had this gigantic healthcare.gov website. The problem was a hugely complex one because you have a federal program with very complicated benefits, but then it had to mesh with 50 different state programs where you had a different set of benefits for each state. It was turned over to a contractor who then turned it over to 12 subcontractors, and the system on the first day froze. It didn't work, and it was one of the biggest fiascos, and it really goes to the way that we procure technology, which is very, very defective. 

I think that this is an area where Elon Musk might actually have some positive reforms that he could carry out if they actually design a system in which the policy implementers are able to give feedback to the policy makers and that there is a kind of continuous loop of feedback and improvement in that system. 

Danny Buerkli: This is certainly something that resonates a lot here. I know many people in the audience will have grappled with this exact issue. It has recently gotten better, but we are nowhere near where we should be.

Let’s take a step back and shift back to Trump. One thing many have pointed out is that in “The End of History and the Last Man” you kind of predicted it. You didn’t quite call that he would be president, but you are naming him specifically as a problematic figure. What did you see that so many others didn't?

Francis Fukuyama: Well, I didn't see him as a political figure. What I said in “The End of History and the Last Man” when I referred to Donald Trump was that one of the advantages of a capitalist democracy is that you're always going to have these people with big ambitions and big egos, right? In a capitalist market-based system, they could become wealthy. And so you have Mark Zuckerbergs and Jeff Bezos. At the time I wrote the book, Donald Trump was a big, rich developer, everybody's idea of a rich person. 

I said that one of the good things about that kind of system is that if you have those kinds of ambitions, you don't necessarily have to go into politics. You can simply become a captain of industry. I didn't think that Trump wouldn't be satisfied just with being a rich person, that he would then want political power as well.

I think we have got an extremely dangerous situation. I wrote about this in my blog also. This is the Berlusconi impact on modern government where you have a businessman who acquires a media empire, not because that's a profitable line of business, but because it gives you political power. You then use that media empire to get into political office. And then once you are in politics, you use your political influence to protect your business. 

This is the pattern that Berlusconi pioneered, but also every oligarch in Eastern Europe, Ukraine, Georgia, places like that, that's what they did. They bought up media properties, TV stations, newspapers, legacy media. At that time, nobody wanted these properties because the internet was rising and only old people watch television and so forth. 

But I think these guys figured that this is the way you influence politics. And sure enough, they were able to build that media influence into the political protection of their businesses. That's exactly what Musk has done. He's got huge conflicts of interest. He now has access to information about all of his competitors for Tesla, for Starlink, for the companies that he runs. And he is in a position where he can basically corrupt regulation and tilt it to the benefit of his companies. 

It's very hard to hold him accountable. Even Trump  is going to have difficulty. Right now they see their interests as intertwined. At a certain point, they may have a falling out. But because Musk is as rich as he is, it is very hard to do anything to hold him accountable. I'm not sure how that would even work.

Trump himself actually pointed out that Musk could not be president of the United States because he wasn't born in the US, he was born in South Africa. So that may save us in the end. 

But believe me, once Trump is out of the way, there is going to be a big competition for who is going to lead his political movement. I think Elon Musk is going to be one of the leaders of that because right now he has got a lot of prestige and visibility. Trump's children don't have any of their father's brilliance in terms of being demagogues, but Musk potentially does. 

We are also worried about Trump trying to figure out a way of having a third term, which seems pretty outlandish, but a lot of his followers have been pushing for that. It requires a constitutional amendment, but a lot of these other authoritarian leaders around the world have managed to increase their number of terms and get around their constitutions. Bukele in El Salvador did that. He shouldn't be president now, but he has managed to corrupt the system in a way that allowed him to do that. 

So we are hoping that Trump only lasts another, whatever, three and a half years, but we can't take anything for granted anymore. 

Danny Buerkli: What is Trump’s end game? Is it some kind of authoritarian capitalism where he stays on for another six terms? What can we know now about what the intentions of him and the people around him might be?

Francis Fukuyama: I think you can come up with some positive scenarios for what is going to happen that are mostly rooted in his self-contradictory economic policies. He campaigned on his ability to bring down prices after the inflation that we saw under Biden, but he also wants to cut taxes, shift from income taxes to 25% tariffs against our two biggest trading partners, Canada and Mexico. You Europeans are going to get hit by this pretty soon because he is going to come up with a bunch of tariffs against Europe as well. There is just no way that you can do this without that leading to very severe price inflation. Then he faces a choice of backing off the tariffs or somehow accepting high rates of inflation. 

All the deportations are also going to contribute to inflationary pressures because there simply aren't enough American workers to take their place. So in the labor markets, you are going have a bidding up of wages and so forth. If that gets bad enough, the Democrats could actually retake parts of Congress in 2026. 

Then you have this other big question mark which is foreign policy. Trump was elected basically as an isolationist. He doesn’t like NATO. He doesn't like alliances. He is skeptical about all of our democratic allies. He seems to like Putin and Xi and Kim Jong-un better than his democratically elected counterparts. So everybody expected him to pull back from foreign commitments. Instead what we have is a new kind of imperialism where he wants to retake the Panama Canal. He wants to take Greenland from Denmark. Now he's got this insane idea about running Gaza. Already you are seeing some of his supporters scratching their heads and saying, hey, this is not what we voted for. 

I think that the problem with that kind of neo-imperialism is that there are plenty of other imperialist powers out there, particularly China and Russia. The Russians want to retake Ukraine and the Chinese want to retake Taiwan. This kind of foreign policy gives them permission to do that. We are basically back to a sort of 19th century spheres of influence policy where if you have the military and economic power, you can basically do whatever you want. You don't have to follow international rules or norms.

If I were Taiwan, I would be very, very worried right now because Xi Jinping clearly would like to reincorporate it before he leaves the scene. He has basically been deterred because he is not sure what America is going to do. It is very hard for me to imagine Donald Trump coming to Taiwan's aid if there's an actual military confrontation.

That means that there is a window of opportunity for some very serious instability in East Asia, as well as a continuation to a bad end of the Ukraine war. This could also damage Trump's standing if he presides over a big foreign policy failure. I think that the likelihood of that has gone up very substantially.

That's a kind of long-winded answer to your question that I think, unfortunately, the way to get out of this period lies through further bad stuff happening. Inflation, war, crisis, because I think that American voters have to be made aware that they made a bad choice last November, and that these choices have had big consequences.

Alenka Bonnard: Is there some alternative other than just watching this disaster happen?

Francis Fukuyama: Quite frankly, I think that Europe, first of all, needs to act cohesively. Certainly with regards to Ukraine, there is a lot more that Europe could do to support them in the absence of help from the United States. 

In terms of tariffs, I think that if Trump tries to deal bilaterally with every country, the United States is always going to win those confrontations, because it's so much bigger and trade is a much smaller part of American GDP and so forth. But if, for example, Canada and Mexico were to agree to countervailing tariffs that would push back against the American tariffs, that would be much better than each one of them trying to negotiate a separate deal with the United States to try to satisfy Trump. 

If Europe could come in on this as well and basically say, you target any one of us with really high tariffs, we are going to do the same back to you. Now, that's a really risky policy. And I understand why a lot of America's trade partners have not been willing to jump into something like that because you could get into a really serious trade war.

But I think deterrence matters in trade as well as in nuclear strategy. And right now, one of the big pushbacks against the tariff policy is countervailing tariffs. And these are better done collectively rather than individually.

Danny Buerkli: Is what we are seeing happening in the U.S. a blip, a temporary backsliding, or is this a sign of a structural, long-term crisis of democracy?

Francis Fukuyama: I'm afraid that this backsliding is happening in so many different countries. And it's increasingly deeply rooted in many important countries like the United States. Now it's hitting Italy, Germany, France. 

You could have a much more serious situation after the coming elections in Germany. And I don't see how Macron is going to survive until the end of his presidency. You could see a wave of more populist politicians coming to power in some very important countries. I think it speaks to a deeper problem that is not simply an aberration.

We thought that Trump was an aberration back in 2016, and we would get through the four years of his first administration, then we go back to normal. But in fact, it now looks like Biden was the aberration and that Trumpism is much more deeply rooted. That is one of the things that I find discouraging because there are so many Republicans that should know better, should have resisted a lot of Trump's initiatives, and they didn't.

Some of them were simply intimidated because he goes after his enemies very viciously. But some of them just want power and they figure this is the easiest way to hold onto power, to get power, and therefore they will accept things that ten years ago they never would have accepted. It’s very worrisome when that happens to people you think are actually fairly sensible. 

Danny Buerkli: One of the reasons for all of this that you have given is that we might restart history out of sheer boredom, as it were.

Francis Fukuyama: I actually said this in “End of History and the Last Man” in the final chapters that you can begin to take things for granted. If you live in a democracy that is peaceful, secure, prosperous, you begin to assume that that kind of peace and security and prosperity are just always going to be there. Then you start complaining about other things. In Europe you get people on the right saying that Brussels or the European Union is the new tyranny that is taking away the rights of people. 

There is a certain truth to that in certain respects, but it's just ridiculous if you understand what a real tyranny looks like. I'm especially impressed by this in Eastern Europe where people actually did live under tyrannical communist governments for many decades. But the thing is that the people who actually still remember that are my age. They lived during the Cold War and you have got a whole generation of people like in Poland that have no experience of Polish communism. They are all born after the transition to democracy. And so they are now thinking about the EU as a kind of baseline and they want to go up from there, whereas their parents would have said, if only we can get into the EU, everything's going to be great. 

I think that's one of the results of generational turnover that these things come and go depending on your experience in the early part of your life. That kind of sets your expectations for your later years. 

Alenka Bonnard: Thank you so much Prof. Fukuyama for sharing your insights with more than 150 public servants here in Switzerland and with the staatslabor team, it was an honor.