Bob Bauer interviews Francis Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and author of The End of History and the Last Man. They discuss his new memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man, which, among other things, seeks to address misconceptions about the argument for which he is best known and to depict his intellectual arc; how excessive proceduralism fetters American government and drives voters toward populist candidates; whether reform would take a crisis; why Fukuyama posits that the post-Trump years may bring civil service and permitting reforms that were previously out of reach; and the necessity of educating young people on liberal values. Bauer and Fukuyama close by discussing changing one’s mind: the psychological barriers to it (particularly in an insular group setting), the liberation that expressing it can bring, and the interpersonal costs it involved in the case of Fukuyama’s departure from the neoconservative movement.
Mentioned:
Francis Fukuyama, In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 8, 2026)
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press, 1992)
Daryl Levinson and Richard Pildes, “Separation of Parties, Not Powers,” Harvard Law Review (2006)
Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (Simon & Schuster, 1987)
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012)
This is an edited transcript of an episode of “Executive Functions Chat.” You can listen to the full conversation by following or subscribing to the show on Substack, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Bob Bauer: Hello, this is Bob Bauer from Executive Functions, and I am pleased today to invite Professor Francis Fukuyama to talk about his recent book, In the Realm of the Last Man, which is a memoir and so much more. But before I do, let me first greet you, Professor Fukuyama, and thank you very much for joining us today.
Francis Fukuyama: Sure, thanks for having me.
I’m going to be very brief with the intro because I am quite confident everybody listening to this program or watching it is well familiar with your background and your scholarship. Professor Fukuyama is Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford. He’s on the faculty of its Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and he directs its Ford Dorsey Master’s Program in International Policy. He is well known for an array of books, both domestically and internationally: The End of History and the Last Man, The Origins of Political Order, Liberalism and Its Discontents, just to name a few. And now we’ll discuss the memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man.
It is a reflection on your life, on your professional pursuits, on your writings. Some reviewers have said that you’re also using it as an occasion to bring together your complex thinking on these issues, clarify some misunderstandings. And I suppose the question I would put to you, somewhat to the same point, is: If someone were to ask you what you would most want them to take away from this book—about, I suppose, in particular, contemporary American politics, the function of the contemporary American political system—could you say what that might be?
Well, one immediate objective I had was to try to once and for all clarify the meaning of the end of history, and to remind people that the original book that I wrote was entitled The End of History and the Last Man—the “last man” part being the part where I was talking about the ways that democracy could fall apart. I’ve tried to state this over and over, over the last 30 years, but I figured if I stick it in a memoir towards the end of my career, maybe it would stick a little bit better.
But the major part of my intellectual development that I don’t think I talked about explicitly is something that actually began on September 11th, with those attacks and then the subsequent American interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq that collapsed both of the governments there. The United States foreign policy depended on actually having a state that could keep order over its territory, and it didn’t have that. And it struck me that Americans are very ill-prepared to do state building. They worry about the state, the government, all the time as something powerful that will take away their rights, but they don’t really think about creating state capacity in places where it doesn’t exist.
And so this set me on a long intellectual journey. The political order books were part of that, where it seemed to me, even in political science, my home discipline, people just assume the state exists, but they didn’t really ask where it came from and how it’s strengthened. So that was one of the big issues that I thought about.
And then, as we got closer to 2016 and the present moment, it struck me that the American state was also problematic. It was not nearly as professional, or it didn’t have the capacity of many states and its fellow democracies. And now it’s come under direct attack as the deep state that the current administration wants to dismantle. So that’s how I’ve kind of ended up in American politics, thinking about how to strengthen our state capacity.
(3:39) Let me follow up on the state capacity point. So there are some who would say that in theory, it makes sense for us to attend to what the requirements would be for a strong, competent state and strong, competent state institutions, but that the complexity of the problems facing the country—a vast country with vast interests and steadily more involved issues that it has to master—really tests people’s confidence that the state is really up to the task, that we could imagine a state that performs significantly better in this context, under these pressures. And how would you respond to that?
Well, our state did perform much better than it has been in recent years. I think if you go back to the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, the state built Hoover Dam, TVA electrified the Upper South, it built the interstate highway system, and then it put a man on the moon in eight years. Those are all pretty amazing accomplishments. So there was a point at which the American government could actually undertake these kinds of ambitious projects and complete them in a reasonable amount of time. But that just hasn’t been happening since about the 1970s. And one of the issues that I’ve been particularly preoccupied with is why that state capacity seems to actually be going backwards.
The construction sector in the United States is the only economic sector that has registered lower productivity over the years rather than higher. Everything else has gotten much more efficient. So there’s something going on.
And I think a lot of it is not intrinsic to American government. It’s really, I think, a legal turn, actually, that was taken beginning in the late ’60s, that has put more and more procedural requirements on the government when it tries to do something, in ways that make it just extremely difficult to do things like build transmission lines to get alternative electricity from where it’s generated to where it’s needed. So I think, like I said, it’s not intrinsic to American government, but I do think that it’s the result of things we’ve done to ourselves that could be reversed in theory, but you’ve got to build a case for reversing them.
Given what you said about state capacity in the past—and it strikes me that some of this is state mobilization under emergency conditions, to respond to the Depression, to respond to the Cold War—would we not see reversal take place pretty much only, predictably, when there is an exigent situation upon which there is general agreement?
Well, I think that a crisis might help, although I’d point out that we’ve had two big crises. We had the financial crisis of 2008, and we had COVID, and COVID did produce Operation Warp Speed. And that was actually a pretty impressive demonstration of state capacity. But I would say COVID, in other respects, really weakened our ability to deal with public health emergencies. I think if we had another pandemic, we’d be less prepared than we were prior to COVID, just because it got mixed up with all of our partisan polarization and so forth.
I do think that there have been periods in American history where we’ve made these big changes in the way we thought about government that didn’t require a crisis; it just required capacity. So one of those was the beginning of the Progressive Era, when we passed the Pendleton Act and created a more modern bureaucracy. And then, I mean, I suppose you could say the whole of the Depression was an emergency, but certainly the building of the American administrative state in that period was quite impressive, and I would imagine could happen again in the future.
(7:36) In your memoirs and elsewhere in your writing, you’ve talked about the fundamental pillars, the foundation of liberal democracy resting on a strong modern state, the rule of law, and democratic accountability. But you have also said that there are sometimes tensions between these different foundational pillars, and that they have to be maintained in balance for a liberal democracy to succeed. How do we achieve that balance? I mean, what governance reform, what other steps could be taken to prevent the kind of conflict, the crashing into each other, that you indicate could well take place?
So the way I imagine the world is, you have a continuum. At one end is a dictatorship like China, where you have almost no checks and balances on the power of the Communist Party, or at least the leader of the Communist Party, to do whatever he wants. And at the other end, I’d put my state of California, where we really can’t build anything, because we’ve got so many constraints on public decision-making.
And I would say that if you think about the balance, you certainly do not want to go to the Chinese end of it. I think that’s part of the problem with the Trump administration and Elon Musk. I mean, they just say, “Damn all the rules. We’re just going to do discretionary decision-making, and we’ll just be judged by our results.” And you can’t do that in a rule-of-law society like the United States.
So I think what you’ve got to do is move away from California by staying within the law, but streamlining the law such that it doesn’t get in the way of actual outcomes. I hesitate to say this on a legal show like yours, but it does seem to me that lawyers really prize procedure, and they don’t pay that much attention to outcomes, whereas voters care about outcomes. And if they’re not getting the outcomes because there are too many laws, they’re going to get angry, and they’re going to vote for a populist who just says, “Well, damn the laws, we’ll just move ahead.” So I think the right balance is to stay within the law. I think a lot of this involves returning power—not concentrating in the executive, but returning it to the legislature that really ought to determine what policies need to be done, and then delegate, in limited but clear ways, the ability to actually implement those policies to the executive branch.
Let’s talk about the Congress for a second. A lot of observers shake their heads over Congress’s either fecklessness or passivity in the face of what we think its role should be. And this is part of a larger question of what could be done. Again, speaking of governance reform, can you imagine [reforms] that would nudge us toward the balance that you’re talking about here, that would help, for example, revive Congress to play a more active and constructive role?
I think it would take an election. Quite frankly, with Congress being as evenly divided as it’s been over the past couple of decades, it’s actually very difficult for it to accomplish things. And I think that’s where a lot of our problems come from, because with Congress unable to do basic things like pass budgets, other parts of the government then try to step in. The executive branch says, “Okay, we’ll just take over.” The courts try to fill that vacuum. And neither of those is a good solution.
So you have to imagine a period in which the polarization in Congress is overcome as a result of the will of the voters, who actually want members of Congress to do their constitutionally mandated jobs and agree on compromise outcomes that would clearly direct the other parts of government to enact those policies. And I don’t think it’s impossible to see that moment coming, because people are probably a little bit tired of that dysfunctionality that leads to government shutdowns every fiscal year.
So there would have to be—and you think it’s possible we would see it—some abatement in the depth or the intensity of polarization that would, for example—to use a phrase that two of my colleagues at NYU coined—that we would have less in the Congress of a separation of parties and more attention to separation of powers. You think that that corner could be turned, potentially, because of voter dissatisfaction with the way government functions in our polarized politics?
How likely is that to happen? I would say there is a chance. I do think that every now and then you do have these realigning elections, like the election of 1896, that really paved the way for the Progressive Era, in the wake of a period where you had a very evenly divided Congress between the two parties. So that might be pie-in-the-sky thinking, but it’s hard to imagine solving some of these governance problems without imagining an outcome something like that.
(12:32) Let’s talk about current governance and what it means for the future. And this, again, goes to whether we think things could get better or they would get worse. Some have said that Donald Trump’s presidency is transformative in many ways, and that he has changed how we think about politics, how politics is conducted, how politics is discussed. And there are different opinions about whether Trumpism will continue to survive, but some might argue we’ll never snap back completely to the pre-Trump era. What is your view of that? In what ways has Trump changed things for the foreseeable future? In what ways might what he has done be susceptible to a change in control of the Congress and the presidency, eventually, through elections?
Yeah, well, I agree with the view that we’ll never snap back to the situation as it was in 2016. And I don’t think we should want to, because it’s not as if the government was working perfectly in the pre-Trump era. I’ve been running a little group called Reform for Results. It’s a combination of administrative lawyers and public administration experts. And what we’re trying to look forward to is a post-Trump period that will actually provide more opportunities for genuine reform of the way government functions than we’ve been able to achieve up to now.
So, for example, on removals—executive branch removals—Democratic administrations in the past were completely hobbled by the public sector unions that really didn’t want anyone to be fired. And so it was very difficult to actually remove poorly performing employees. I think that one of the results of the Trump earthquake is that that’s not going to be true in the future. If there’s a Democrat elected president, that president is not going to want to go back to the inability to get rid of recalcitrant employees. They’re probably going to use that power. And so I think that there may be a beneficial side to Trumpism.
I used in a couple of my books this term “vetocracy,” meaning that our system of checks and balances had metastasized such that we had so many individual points where collective decision-making could be checked that it was very difficult to do anything good. Now, we’re happy that those checks and balances exist when you have a bad president. It stops him from doing all sorts of things. But when you do get a good progressive president that actually wants to do things like build infrastructure and transmission lines and new housing and this sort of thing, you want actually a little bit more authority to be able to carry out these kinds of policies. And I think that Trump has at least shaken things up such that I can imagine a future where some of that sludge will be cleared away.
And like right now, there’s a bill in Congress that would really reform NEPA, the National Environmental [Policy] Act. That’s been kind of the model for a lot of the sludge that exists in the U.S. government right now. And I think before Trump, you couldn’t have even broached that subject. And there might be actually a sufficient bipartisan group that would be willing to embrace a reform—a more fundamental reform—to be able to undertake policies like building transmission lines more easily.
(15:55) Let’s talk about another element of state capacity, and that is who we bring in as our leaders, both at the legislative and executive branch level, although I think we’ve been focused largely on the executive branch. In your book, you talk very briefly about the role of education in the recruitment and the development of leadership. Do we have anything like that in the United States? You referred specifically, for example, to moral education: sensitizing people who would be leaders to moral dilemmas and how to define them, how to frame them, how to resolve them. It seems to me a very important issue—certainly is to me. And yet I don’t know where that would come from in our system. Can you talk about that for a minute?
Yeah, well, ultimately, I think it would have to come from a restoration of liberal education in universities. I was a student of Allan Bloom, who back in the late 1980s published this bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind. And there was a kind of progressive attack on liberal education as being overly Eurocentric and too dominated by dead white men.
But I think that actually having training in philosophical reason that tries to apply human reason to big questions: What is justice? What’s the nature of justice? What is the best way to live? These were questions that Plato and Aristotle broached. My own education was very much steeped in that. I was a classics major as an undergraduate at Cornell. And so I think that, in a sense, understanding our own Western tradition a little bit better would help people in coming to terms with the kind of moral questions that we now face in public policy.
Beyond that, I think that just professional education is important, because one of the things that a true profession teaches you is that you are not simply in the business of making money, that you do have a calling, that there are standards that exist outside of your personal self-interest that you as a lawyer or a doctor or an accountant have to live up to—or an engineer. And I think that’s really about the only other place that you’re going to get that kind of moral training. A kind of technocratic education has got limits, obviously, but it does provide a certain moral framework for how you see public interest versus your own interest.
As an educator, though, would you say you’re encouraged or discouraged by the potential of education, particularly at the liberal arts education level, to actually do the tasks that we’re talking about? It seems that those curricula are being slimmed down. Students are choosing STEM over the humanities. It seems like an enormous hole is opening up there, precisely where we might want to see more activity, more dedicated thinking and scholarship.
Stanford was one of the first elite universities to abolish its core curriculum. They used to have a Western Culture core that was actually pretty good in the 1980s, and then it fell victim to the first generation of what we would now call wokeism. And there have been efforts to try to restore it. It’s voluntary, so not every student is required to learn that sort of thing. But I do think that that’s a big agenda, especially for the elite schools. You actually get this kind of training, I think, in second- and third-tier schools. But for some reason, the Harvards, Yales, Princetons, and Stanfords were the first to really go after this kind of traditional liberal education. But that’s another area where I think opinion may shift.
Two questions about that. Are students responding, to the extent that these curricular changes are being made? Are they responding and signing up for it? And secondly, to what extent are they thinking about taking that education with them into public service, rather than into Wall Street?
Yeah. Well, that’s a fight that I have constantly. You do find a core of students that actually do want to get a serious education and do want to broach some of these more important philosophical ideas. And I certainly, in my teaching, try to discourage them from just thinking about their careers as money machines, and to think more seriously about the kinds of values that should shape their role as citizens in a democratic republic. And I would say I find students that respond to that.
(20:38) That’s good to hear. There’s one other topic I wanted to briefly touch on here, and that is, you have a chapter about changing your mind in your memoir. And there you go back to the period of the Iraq War, and you broke with the neoconservative movement over the war. And you said that for a period of time before you did that, you stayed much in place, largely because those were your colleagues, those were people you knew. And you think psychology—that kind of psychology—plays a significant part in keeping people in a certain place in their thinking. But then you broke with that. And in fact, it was a difficult personal experience, because some of the people that you worked with closely—you were, at least for some period of time, barely on speaking terms or not on speaking terms at all. At a time when people are siloed in their thinking, tend to flock to people who think the same thing they do; all of this, obviously, facets of the way polarization expresses itself and plays out in the political process. Can you talk a little bit about changing one’s mind?
Sure. So there’s a classic Enlightenment theory of human cognition, which is that we smart human beings take in factual information, we infer causal relationships from that factual information, and then we make policy. We decide to do things based on these mental models that we’ve created that are steeped in empirical knowledge.
So Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist, wrote a book a few years ago saying that’s actually not the way we think. We practice what he calls motivated reasoning, where we start with the conclusions that we want to believe in, and we use our cognitive abilities to marshal facts to support that. And watching American politics over the last few years, you’ve got to think that he’s right about that, because you just look at the way that people have completely abandoned earlier intellectual frameworks simply because the new trend, the power sources within the party, are now thinking differently. And they don’t want to be cast out of that group. And so they adjust their thinking in sometimes kind of comical ways, explaining now that white used to be white, but now it’s black.
So I think that that’s certainly something I experienced. I had a group of friends that I grew up with that were in this neocon movement. And it was really just hard to break with them, because it also meant breaking a lot of old friendships. But when I did this, I was at a point in my life where I could say, I don’t give a damn. I’m settled. I’ve got a tenured teaching post. And I’ll get a bunch of new friends. And so that’s enabled me to do what I did.
And last question on this point, because it’s something people experience in fights among friends, within families, office mates, or whatever: Were you surprised at the time that disagreement had such a bitter personal aftereffect, that it couldn’t be treated just as disagreement, but it actually threatened ongoing personal relationships?
Yeah, I was surprised. The depth of passion that people held to views about the Iraq War, for example, was, I just thought, extraordinary. If you disagreed with somebody, they virtually thought of you as a traitor. I remember one person telling me, when I expressed skepticism about something the administration was doing in Iraq, this person said, “Oh, so you don’t care about your children and your family”—this sort of thing. And that was—yes, that was very surprising, to see that kind of depth of emotional investment in people’s political positions.
Well, I want to thank you very much for joining me today for this conversation. And thank you for your ongoing contributions to the important debate on these issues that’s taking place in the United States and around the world. Again, thank you very much, Professor Fukuyama.
Okay, well, thank you for Executive Functions.
Appreciate that very much.
