On 9 July, Francis Fukuyama sat down with Quillette’s Matt Johnson for a wide-ranging discussion about the return of political patrimonialism, the liberal “abundance” agenda, social capital and trust, wokeness, populist anger, protectionism, the struggle for recognition and the struggle for democracy everywhere.
Quillette: A major theme of your Political Order series is the importance of moving beyond patrimonialism [when political power is distributed according to patronage and loyalty] in the establishment of modern states. Under the Trump administration, a process of repatrimonialisation now appears to be underway on a vast scale. Why is this happening and what do you think the consequences will be?
Francis Fukuyama: This is a case where the democratic part of liberal democracy has triumphed over the liberal part. The liberal part really has to do with the rule of law and constraints on the executive that are reflected in constitutional checks and balances. And I think that populist movements rely on democratic legitimacy to then build power, and they don’t like the constraints that limit the power of the president. So, you hear that in people like Stephen Miller saying, “What are these courts? They have no business telling us we can’t do what we want to do.” And I think that’s been the pattern in Hungary, India, Slovakia, and a lot of other places. You have elections that produce populist leaders who then use their political capital to try to erode the checks and balances that constrain them. And that’s what we’re seeing in the United States right now.
Q: Why is patrimonialism so detrimental to good governance?
FF: The essence of patrimonialism is that the ruler thinks that the government is, in a sense, his own possession, and he can do whatever wants with it, including enrich himself. Over the centuries, you’ve had patrimonial states where the ruler’s main interest is in self-enrichment and just increasing their own personal power. So, this is nothing new. We only broke out of this in the West a couple of hundred years ago. In China, you have a longer history of non-patrimonial government. But it’s actually quite delicate to get a government that seems to be dedicated to a public interest as opposed to the private interest of the ruler.
One of the themes of my Political Order books is that there’s something in a sense unnatural about meritocracy—that we naturally want to reward our friends and family—and it’s only under certain institutional conditions that we’ve been able to create the idea that you should be serving the public interest as opposed to your own interest. And it doesn’t occur to everybody, and it obviously doesn’t occur to Donald Trump. Apart from the erosion of checks and balances that he has been attempting, he’s also running the most corrupt administration in American history as far as I can tell. Just openly using the White House as a means of enriching his family and his family’s businesses.
Q: Do you think the tariffs are a genuine political commitment by Trump? He’s been a protectionist for many years, but tariffs are also a perfect vehicle for patrimony and patronage.
FF: I think it’s both. He was hoping that once he declared these retaliatory tariffs that everybody would come to him begging for exemptions. That’s what happened in his first term. And it turns out that people are on to this game, so it hasn’t quite worked out for him as well as he thought it would. Definitely, a side benefit of having this discretionary power over tariffs is that he can also benefit personally as people come to him. It’s just like pleading with the king—you want an audience with the king so you can get an exemption to some general rule.
Q: How does this era of patrimonialism differ from previous eras?
FF: It’s not clear that it does. In my Political Order books, I argue that with each civilisation—with China, for example, or with the Ottoman Empire in Europe—you had these efforts to get beyond a patrimonial state and establish a modern, impersonal one. But all of them eventually fell back into patrimonialism. I think it’s just this constant pull. You need impersonal government, but it’s hard to maintain because of the temptations of power once you create a government that actually concentrates sufficient power to run a modern state. So, I’m not sure we’re going to get out of this anytime soon.
Q: Do you think Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance agenda is a good first step toward restoring faith in democratic institutions? Could you talk about how their thesis relates to your longstanding concerns over political decay, particularly what you describe as “vetocracy” in the United States?
FF: I’m all aboard with this abundance agenda. There’s a recent book by Marc Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works, that I think explains some of the origins of this. He talks about two trends in American government—one he labels “Jeffersonian” and the other “Hamiltonian.” So, the Hamiltonians believe that the state actually can be used for good purposes—for socially productive, just purposes—if it has sufficient power. The Jeffersonians have always been distrustful of state power, and they want to push power down to the lowest possible level where people can resist the activities of a tyrannical state.
We’ve gone through alternative periods, so most of the 19th century was Jeffersonian—the federal government had very little power. But beginning in the 1880s with the progressive movement, the United States created a modern progressive state that did a lot. They dismantled trusts, they responded to World War I, and then in the 1930s, they built a welfare state. They mobilised American society to fight the Second World War successfully, built an atom bomb, and put a man on the moon. But the problem was that, both on the Left and the Right, you had very powerful counter-movements. The one on the Right we are familiar with, because conservatives never trusted big government and they were always against the welfare state or the administrative state right from the beginning. But the Left also turned away from Hamiltonianism back towards Jeffersonianism sometime in the 1960s with the rise of public-interest law. Today in the United States, it’s still the case that if you’re a young progressive person who wants social justice, your ambition is not to go into the government. What you want to do is be a public-interest lawyer suing the government and trying to stop it from doing things.
The American political system, compared to other liberal democracies, has more opportunities for veto points. Because we spread out power very broadly. We have federalism that devolves power to state and local governments, we have a very powerful judicial branch, and we have a lot of internal checks and balances that prevent power from being exercised effectively. I think what you’ve seen in the last fifty years is a convergence of both the Left and the Right in a Jeffersonian direction where they want to prevent the government from doing things.
It’s ironic, in a way. We just passed this ridiculous budget bill that includes US$170 billion for ICE. It’s going to be larger than the FBI. Conservatives are actually not consistent on this. They don’t like federal power when it’s controlled by people they don’t trust, but when they’re in power they’re perfectly happy to build it up as much as possible.
All that being said, we have arrived at a system which I labelled “vetocracy,” where it’s just easy to stop stuff and it’s not that easy to actually agree on common purposes and use government in a positive way. You see this in infrastructure. In the early 1930s, in the early days of the Depression, the United States built the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Oakland Bay Bridge all in the space of about three years. The atom bomb was built in four years. Then we put so many legal constraints on the government doing anything that it’s really difficult to entertain that kind of project now. Both Obama and Biden promised big infrastructure bills and they delivered very little because of these constraints.
The abundance agenda is simply pointing out that if you actually want to get to progressive aims like having affordable housing for everybody in California, you’ve got to be able to build stuff. If you want clean energy, you’ve got to build transmission lines to get all this wind power from Texas and Oklahoma to California, and we’re just making it impossible to do that sort of thing. Trumpism, in a way, is an extreme reaction to this vetocracy. Both Trump as a builder and Elon Musk as an entrepreneur faced this bureaucracy that prevented them from doing stuff, so they really hate it. Their answer is to just destroy it, just get rid of everything. But we don’t want to do that. You actually want a regulatory state, but you want one that’s a little bit reasonable about the way it tries to balance the need for collective action against the individual interest groups that are affected by it. We haven’t hit that right balance. It could be a bipartisan coalition, but whatever replaces Trumpism, if they adopted something like the abundance agenda, I think that’s a winning ticket.
Q: Beyond making government work better, how can we reform the administrative state to prevent the abuses of power we have witnessed under Trump? How will recent Supreme Court decisions on executive power affect this process of reform?
FF: It’s important to understand that the way to solve this problem is not by empowering a single individual, the president, to be able to do whatever he wants—that’s not what’s at stake here. Decision-making power under our constitutional system remains with Congress. Congress appropriates money, they write statutes, and the president’s job is to implement them. Where you need to streamline the process is in the ability to implement, because a lot of the implementation requires detailed knowledge—you know, how many parts per million constitutes a toxin—and Congress can’t set all those kinds of detailed rules in advance. When it tries to do that, that’s what really bogs the system down. So, you need to be able to make decisions to implement the will of Congress in a more efficient way.
There are so many examples of this. No federal agency can buy a piece of office furniture without being subject to the federal acquisition regulations, which is several thousand pages of detailed rules on how to procure anything. They load it up with all sorts of things—you have to be a minority, small business, women-owned businesses. If they don’t like the result of a decision, they can appeal it, and then you have an adjudicatory process to review the decision. All of this stuff is why the federal government has trouble procuring basic things that are expensive and take forever to approve because we’ve created so many procedural obstacles. You just need to streamline those procedures.
One of the issues that I’ve been really preoccupied with in recent years has to do with public participation. You cannot have modern government without public participation. You have to get input—if you’re going to build a big interstate, you have to get feedback from the people that are going to be affected by it. But we’ve gone overboard, especially in my state of California. We have this law called CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act, which allows all forty million residents of California to anonymously sue any project that they want. It was an environmental law meant to enforce environmental regulations, but only ten percent of CEQA lawsuits are actually launched by environmental groups. The rest are launched by anyone that wants leverage over anything. So, labour unions use it in order to force employers to use unionised labour, people use it to block things that their neighbours are doing because it’s going to obstruct their view. It’s why we don’t have high-speed rail. Every kilometre between LA and San Francisco has been sued by somebody.
It’s not as if you don’t want public input. That’s the Chinese problem: it’s that they don’t care about what people think. After the US Congress passed the IRA [the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act], there was a follow-on bill that was going to streamline permitting. All the alternative energy right now is produced in the middle of the country, in red states like Texas and Oklahoma. The demand is in California, so you need to build transmission lines to get the electricity from one place to the other. This bill was going to speed that permitting process. Among other things, it said public comment on these projects has to be done in two years, and all of the environmental groups said, “No, no, that’s not remotely long enough. We need ten years.”
Q: In Liberalism and Its Discontents, you argued that neoliberalism was harmful for liberalism more broadly, as its excesses culminated in the global financial crisis in 2008–09 and contributed to a breakdown in institutional trust. Has the pendulum swung too far away from neoliberalism with lingering inflation, growing deficits, and what appears to be a new era of protectionism in the United States?