Sargent: You write that Russia’s invasion has already done huge damage to the world’s right-wing authoritarian populists. Can you expand on that?

Fukuyama: A moral clarity has been imposed on populist politics. Many of these populists, including Donald Trump, have been able to pretend they’re really tribunes of the people, that they’re channeling a democratic urge.

But they’re also flirting with an open kind of authoritarianism. That authoritarianism has now been translated into horrible slaughter, where everybody can see that kind of politics leads to military aggression, the loss of innocent lives, and so forth. ...

...

Fukuyama: I have a general theory about this populist moment. It has to do with generational turnover. People really like being in liberal societies after they’ve gone through either horrible nationalist conflict (as in the two world wars of the 20th century) or they’ve had to live under authoritarian dictatorship (as people in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union did under communism).

This generational cycle has turned, and you’ve got this whole generation of people who don’t appreciate liberal democracy because they haven’t really experienced the alternative.

That is a very general theory. So once the Greatest Generation died out none of its native-born successors appreciated liberal democracy. ...(?) Man. I don't know. On the one hand, that would explain why immigrants are so invigorating of liberal democracy. On multiple other hands that doesn't explain 1) China. Russia. Egypt. Virtually the entire world except Europe and North America. 2) Cuban immigrants to the U.S., who are not invigorating of liberal democracy. 3) Previous white American populist pimples bursting. George Wallace was of the Greatest Generation; Huey Long, Fukuyama would classify him a WWI generation type; Andrew Jackson, that's a long way back. 4) How much “experience" with world war or dictatorship do you have to "go through" before getting liberal democratic itch? Like is it proportional? Like Russia experienced a lot of WWII so post-war Russians would have been expected by theory to have embraced liberal democracy the most ardently? Or does an earlier generation have to have experienced liberal democracy first so that there is some inter-generational memory transference to the current generation? That sounds bullshit, all of this generational theory sounds bullshit. No native-born American ever has had to "live under" dictatorship, in any generation. 5) Once we baby boomers die out, then what? What happens to generations x, y, z and all that came after. Did our late-age flirtation with authoritarianism provide the necessary "experience"? Does it act like an inoculation, like you get a shot of the weakened authoritarian virus when you're young and you're good to go on your liberal democratic way?

...

Sargent: I’d like to talk about another idea in “The End of History,” that the victory of Western liberalism would create a kind of “boredom” with a world in which great questions are resolved, and a “nostalgia” for a world in which you had to pick a side in a grand battle of ideas.

I wonder whether we’re seeing something like this in the extraordinary outpouring of support for Ukraine across the West: There’s a mass embrace of this opportunity to stand tall again on one side of an ideological struggle.

Fukuyama: I think that’s right. There’s a lot of pent-up idealism. The spirit of 1989 went to sleep, and now it’s being reawakened. I do think people like the idea of struggling for a just cause, and they really haven’t had anything other than consumerism and mindless middle-class pursuits in the last 30 years.

By the way, I think a lot of that right-wing populism is driven by that same boredom.

I have had the same thought as that last at times since 2016. I have never been able to wrap my brain around the American white middle class having grievances. And I remember after the first GOP presidential debate in 2015 or '16, which I watched, writing that there was not one plausible potential president on that stage. My brother-the-klansman however emailed me that it was the most exciting thing he had experienced since he tried to suck the energy out of a live electrical cord to get his radio to work.

...

Fukuyama: Liberalism is a doctrine that deliberately says, "because we can’t agree on [what an ideal life is] we’ll agree to tolerate people that are very different from us.”

It means that every liberal society therefore has a weaker sense of community than one based on a single religion or single ethno-nationalist tradition. Liberalism by design doesn’t give people this tightly bound sense of brotherhood or sisterhood with their fellow citizens.

...

Fukuyama: Taking a very long-term historical perspective, liberalism has been around in some form or other since the middle of the 17th century, when it arose in response to the Wars of Religion in Europe.

It got beaten back in the 19th and early 20th centuries with the rise of European nationalism. Again, there’s a series of wars that were horrible. In 1945, everybody looked up from their foxholes and said, “Hey, maybe liberalism is not such a bad thing, after all. [Objection: "everybody".] Because nationalism is pretty awful.”

Maybe we’ll have to go through another cycle like this, where the alternatives to liberalism are explored and then lead to disaster.

What, so we have to have another World War as a refresher course? World War III would be "The End of History"!

Sometimes that’s the way history works. It’s not a linear process. You do have to go through these struggles before people appreciate what they’ve got.

Sargent: It sounds like you harbor at least some optimism that a defeat of Russia could achieve the goal of avoiding the type of cataclysmic cycle that we’ve seen in the past.

Fukuyama: It might be a sufficient reminder of what the alternatives to liberalism are. Let’s hope that we will avoid having to go through the full cycle like we did during the 20th century, which would be really terrible.

Ah, so the "defeat of Russia" would be the vaccine. What about if we got the full virus, Russia victory? 

I give Fukuyama credit, his theses really make you think. That he's still theorizing--the man has got BALLS.