Welcome to Downstream Heroin of Our Immediate, my name is Aaron Pastani.

This week's guest is Francis Fukuyama, who memorably declared in his book The End of

History and the Last Man written in 1992 that liberalism was the ideological end point

of human history, and that would the fall of the Berlin Wall, Western capitalism, at

one.

The book rapidly gained cult status and served as a kind of intellectual handbook for the

post-Cold War era, it's thinking shorthand for now Trump from West.

Like anyone, Fukuyama's thinking has developed since then, but one of the primary investigations

of that work, liberalism as a political and economic orthodoxy, takes center stage

in his new book, Liberalism and its discontents.

Francis Fukuyama, welcome to Downstream.

Thank you very much.

Before we go any further, people are very familiar with your name.

It was in my book, it was in my PhD, it was probably in my masters, I mean, it's the curse

of your sort of celebrity, but despite that, I think people probably don't know that much

about you sort of personally, so I thought I'd ask some questions, also sort of political

questions to delve a little bit deeper.

What film best captures the end of history, because there was a zeitgeist you caught

in your book, where is that in popular culture, we think, that was the moment.

Well, I think film that captured the end of history would actually be pretty boring, because

it would be just, you know, kind of ordinary life in a liberal democracy.

I actually really like dystopian science fiction movies, my favorite one for a long time

...