Fukuyama made his name as the American neo-conservative who penned the apotheosis of Western triumphalism in the wake of communism’s end just over two decades ago. In The End of History and the Last Man (1992), he proclaimed that liberal democratic systems were the optimal end point of human progress. Two decades on, the author argues in Political Order and Political Decay that the same system should now be moved from the ‘optimal’ to the ‘dysfunctional’ side of the ledger. Fukuyama’s intellectual and ideological turnaround is not entirely unexpected. He has been attempting for years to shake the tag as arch Western apologist by highlighting in a string of books the stress points of post-Cold War Western hegemony. Nonetheless, this latest work represents his most concerted effort to finally nail shut the door on The End of History. The first three quarters of the book are a prelude to answering its fundamental question: why is a political system filled with so much promise now grappling with such profound problems?

The trends are depressingly clear. Trust in democratic governments and their leaders right across the Western world has fallen to record lows over the past two decades. Active membership of political parties has sunk to negligible levels in the same period. Disturbingly, these trends are most pronounced among young people. For many of them, according to opinion surveys, democracy has few compelling features compared to non-democratic systems. All this speaks to a public increasingly disconnected from liberal democratic processes, and vice versa.

To make sense of it all, Fukuyama’s thesis draws heavily on his companion volume The Origins of Political Order (2011). This earlier book delved into the meta-foundations of political systems, dating back to primordial societies, to pinpoint what makes for good governance. The building blocks, according to the author, are threefold: a strong state; a clear system of rule of law; and plenty of democratic accountability.

Fukuyama takes the story – and his framework – from early modern politics through to the early twenty-first century in order to understand the source of liberal democracy’s contemporary problems. Employing his trademark sweep, which brings together history, political philosophy, and sociological insight, Fukuyama arrives at two counter-intuitive conclusions.

The first is that, far from its institutions being endlessly flexible and able to meet new political and policy challenges, Western liberal democracy is now falling into a dangerous state of ‘political decay’. For the author, the main sources of this decay are a combination of institutional inertia and special interests. The latter are the key problem. These include business, unions, and rural lobbies (to name just a few), which try to skew the democratic process in order to extract maximum political and policy spoils. Further, they use their outsized influence to keep the democratic system inert. Allowing the system to renew itself and to function in the public interest would threaten their ongoing access to special privileges.

The book’s second counter-intuitive conclusion is that liberal democracies are less prone to political decay in the twenty-first century if they are built on the foundations of autocracy. Fukuyama reasons that countries with histories of non-democracy are more likely to have put in place a strong state with clear lines of bureaucratic accountability before taking the leap into democracy.

These limits and boundaries restrict from the outset the ability of special interests to extract favours from the political system. Ironically, Germany, with its dark authoritarian past, is seen by Fukuyama as a ‘better’ liberal democracy today precisely because of its pre-democratic traditions of iron rule.

The critical importance of sequencing ‘order before freedom’ for the long-term success of democracy is one of the key arguments of the book. This is nowhere more evident – in the author’s view – than in the United States. In the book’s most obvious reversal of his End of History thesis, Fukuyama now considers the world’s oldest liberal democracy to be the epicentre of twenty-first century political and policy dysfunction. American democracy has constantly struggled to rein in special interests, he argues, because a competent, modern state did not emerge there to corral these interests until the 1930s. Now these historical fault lines have broken wide open as lobby groups and other interests overrun America’s polity with increasingly sophisticated and expensive campaigning tools and techniques.

According to Fukuyama, we need to look at Western liberal democracy as a ‘system’ – not just a set of values and ideals that we all aspire to. The system is a fragile one because it is grounded in historical legacies and imperfections. Its success ultimately depends on striking a delicate balance between political freedom and political order.

Currently, according to Fukuyama’s analysis, the balance in a number of liberal democracies is out of sync. Special interests are free to manipulate and paralyse the system. The result is too much policy and political incoherence and disorder for the rest of us.

Political Order and Political Decay is ambitious in its scope, which is typical of Fukuyama’s work. The content and arguments are thought-provoking and accessible, despite (or perhaps because of) its eclectic and encyclopedic sweep. This makes a refreshing change from the usual political tracts that fall either into the self-congratulatory ‘how I won the campaign’ category or are self-serving attempts by ex-politicians, failed or otherwise, to ‘set the record straight’.

Francis Fukuyama

For all the book’s many conceptual and empirical virtues, there are two important criticisms. First, Fukuyama appears to write about the decay of liberal democracies generically. But the book ultimately centres on asking why the US political system is failing. Sure, the US system is a central part of any democracy story. But this focus provides Fukuyama a platform to speak of other Western democracies, particularly Britain’s, in comparatively positive terms.

This in turn gives way to the book’s unspoken assumption that, while Western liberal democracy is largely struggling, there are enough good points for it to remain, at least potentially, the optimal system for the contemporary world. The reality is that the same deep functional problems that Fukuyama attaches to the US system beset most Western democracies. By and large they are getting worse. So how realistic is it to look beyond the United States for liberal democracy’s possible salvation?

The second criticism has to do with Fukuyama’s core thesis, which blames distant historical legacies for the current problems. The thesis overlooks developments that have arisen in recent times.

The book does not explore the disorienting impact on traditional party politics and parliaments of social media, and the increasingly centrifugal forms of political voice and identity that the digital world is creating. It also makes little mention of globalisation (despite the title) in drastically reducing the capacity of territorially fixed parliaments and political leaders to steer policy in a world that is increasingly out of their reach and control.

Having studied the phenomenon of liberal democratic decay for some time, it is clear to me that it is the last decade or two which is most responsible for the dysfunction we see today. The super-scaling and super-complexity of twenty-first-century political, social, and economic activity created by globalisation and the Internet are producing completely new, often unpredictable configurations and constituencies of political voice.

Derived as it is from the nineteenth-century world of politics and political organisation, liberal democracy is simply not geared to order and organise this new world in a coherent way. The result is an increasingly stranded political system consigned to growing and potentially lasting disorder.

In pursuing a relatively narrow frame of analysis, the author keeps alive, albeit inadvertently, the hope that Western liberal democracy may self-correct for another chance at making The End of History come true. In the process, Fukuyama ignores the real possibility that what we need to consider is a new way of delivering democracy, one that is more aligned with the twenty-first century than the nineteenth.