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The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Francis Fukuyama on whether America's democracy is decaying

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Vox Media Podcast Network

Politics, News, News Commentary, Philosophy, Society & Culture

4.511.1K Ratings

🗓️ 11 October 2016

⏱️ 68 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Francis Fukuyama is a political scientist, a public intellectual, and progenitor of the famed "End of History" thesis. But his recent work is his most important yet. Over two volumes, he's been studying how societies become safe, pluralistic liberal democracies — and then how those advanced democracies descend, and decay, into chaos.Sound familiar?This is a scary conversation that comes at just the right time. We discussed:-How American became a “vetocracy”-Why the representative democracy we have has calcified-Why the internet may be overwhelming our ability for government agencies to deal efficiently with public comment-What he thinks is stoking Trump supporters in the way we talk about diversity and pluralism-Why conversations about class are important-What he thinks about different models of government around the world, especially Denmark’s-How we overcompensate for what we’ve learned through past wars-How polarization is disrupting the way the public views government agencies like the Fed and NOAA-What he's learned from Samuel Huntington, from the Iraq War, and from the Black Lives Matter movement-What an agenda to reverse America's political decay would look likeEnjoy!We want you to tell us about the podcasts you enjoy, and how often you listen to them. So we created a survey that takes just a couple of minutes to complete. If you fill it out, you'll help Panoply to make great podcasts about the things you love. And things you didn’t even know you loved. To fill out the survey, just go to www.megaphone.fm/survey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

The following podcast contains explicit language.

0:03.3

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ezra Client Show.

0:14.9

I have a guest today who many of you have been emailing me saying you wanted to hear

0:18.8

really since I launched the program.

0:20.8

Francis Fukuyama, a legendary political scientist who's at Stanford now, he's known for the

0:26.7

end of history in the last man which argued that liberal democracy was such a dominant

0:33.4

model that had tried to completely overcome the communism that we had moved past the point

0:38.1

of these great clash of civilization like political conflicts.

0:42.2

More recently he's been writing about the origins of liberal democracies, how they

0:46.3

emerge, how they develop, and also how they decay.

0:49.8

So more recently he's written two really tremendous books, the origins of political order

0:53.8

and also political order and political decay.

0:56.9

And both of them try to track a thesis that is very connected to the end of history.

1:01.2

How do liberal democracies emerge, how do societies become stable democracies, and also

1:06.2

how do they begin to die?

1:07.8

What kinds of forces rot them from within?

1:10.9

It is very, very relevant work right now and we talk about it in some detail, we talk

1:15.3

about why he uses Denmark as the example of a very high functioning liberal democratic society.

1:21.1

We talk about whether what is happening now in America with Trump accords to his thesis

1:25.9

or is another kind of problem.

1:27.6

We talk about what is motivating white working class distrust and anger at the political

1:32.0

system.

...

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