Political Cynic comments on the Fukuyama Clique and it’s diminutive cadre.
stephenkmacksd.com/
Oct 07, 2025
Editor: In a bleek 2415 words Fukuyama makes his case for a his newley acquired Liberalism?
Ever since the year 2016, when Britain voted for Brexit and Trump was elected president, social scientists, journalists, pundits, and almost everyone else have been trying to explain the rise of global populism. There has been a standard list of causes:
- Economic inequality brought on by globalization and neoliberal policies.
- Racism, nativism, and religious bigotry on the part of populations that have been losing status.
- Broad sociological changes that have sorted people by education and residence, and resentment at the dominance of elites and experts.
- The special talents of individual demagogues like Donald Trump.
- The failures of mainstream political parties to deliver growth, jobs, security, and infrastructure.
- Dislike or hatred of the progressive Left’s cultural agenda.
- Failures of leadership of the progressive Left.
- Human nature and our proclivities towards violence, hatred, and exclusion.
- Social media and the internet.
I myself have contributed to this literature, and like everyone else ticked off cause #9, social media and the internet, as one of the contributing factors. However, after pondering these questions for nearly a decade, I have come to conclude that technology broadly and the internet in particular stand out as the most salient explanations for why global populism has arisen in this particular historical period, and why it has taken the particular form that it has.
I’ve come to this conclusion by process of elimination. It is clear that all nine of the factors above have played some role in the rise of global populism. Populism, however, is a multifaceted phenomenon where certain causal factors are more powerful in explaining particular aspects of the phenomenon, or in explaining why populism manifests itself more powerfully in certain countries than others. For example, while racial resentments obviously play an important role in America, they do not in Poland, which is one of the most ethnically homogeneous societies in the world. And yet the populist Law and Justice Party came to power there for eight years.
Editor: Fukuyama presents his 8 point list:
Cause #1, growing economic disparities, was certainly a powerful driver of working-class voters toward populist parties and figures like Trump. However, around half of all Americans voted for Trump at a time when employment and overall growth were relatively high. We were not in the midst of a depression, as was the case in 1933 when Franklin Roosevelt was elected and the unemployment rate stood at nearly 25%. While economic stresses from inflation certainly drove many Americans to vote for Trump in 2024, inflation was far higher and more persistent in the 1970s.
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Cause #2, the idea that populism is driven by a nativist white backlash, is a plausible one. While countries like Poland and Hungary don’t share America’s troubled racial history, one could argue that fear of immigration and the dilution of the power of those countries’ dominant ethnic groups was a powerful motivator of populist support. But even in America, racial fears are only part of the story. While Trump gets support from overtly racist groups and figures like the Proud Boys or Nick Fuentes, many non-whites, including African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians, decided to vote for him in 2020 and 2024. Indeed, Trump has succeeded in doing what the Democrats once did: assembling a multi-racial working-class coalition.
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Cause #3, the broad sorting that has occurred where Democrats have become the party of educated professionals living in big cities, while Republican voters are less educated and more rural, is replicated in many countries around the world. But sorting is more likely an effect of a deeper sociological change rather than a factor driving that change. Americans were not deciding to move to the countryside because they were conservative; rather, there was something about the conditions of life in rural versus urban areas that engendered different political perspectives.
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Cause #4, the special talents of Donald Trump, is undeniable; he has many imitators but few have demonstrated the demagogic abilities that he has. But the MAGA movement that he has spawned has succeeded in taking over almost completely one of America’s two major parties, something that doesn’t happen purely by one man’s force of will. Becoming a Trump loyalist required many Republicans to abandon long-held beliefs about things like free trade and internationalism that once defined them. The fact that they were susceptible to this conversion is the phenomenon that needs to be explained.
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Cause #5, the failure of Democratic politicians to solve or even address problems of public order, homelessness, drug use, infrastructure, and housing was obviously important to many centrist and independent voters. This was a big factor as well in many down-ballot races, where blue states and cities compiled poor governance records. But honestly, poor governance under left-leaning politicians has been with us for quite a while (recall New York City under Abe Beame and David Dinkins). One could argue that the social consequences of the pandemic triggered special awareness of these weaknesses, but Trumpism existed well before 2020.
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Causes #6 and #7—intense dislike of left-coded cultural issues like DEI, affirmative action, political correctness, LGBTQ policies, immigration, and poor leadership by Democrats—are obviously related. It was poor judgment by Democratic politicians that allowed the party to be defined by these cultural factors, rather than staking out clear positions on economic issues of more general appeal. The problem with seeing cultural issues as central to the rise of populism, however, is that they have been around for quite a while. Feminism and social dysfunctions like drug addiction and family breakdown date back to the late 1960s, while identity politics made its debut in the ‘70s and ‘80s. These social movements engendered backlash and contributed to the elections of conservative presidents like Nixon and Reagan. Yet they did not set off the kind of furious reactions seen in the 2020s.
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Cause #8, human nature, has been raised recently by Bill Galston in his new book Anger, Fear, Domination: Dark Passions and the Power of Political Speech, and celebrated in a recent review by Jonathan Rauch. Galston argues that ugly polarization and partisanship have always been part of human politics; the liberal civility that contemporary democracies have enjoyed in recent decades is an anomaly that needs to be explained, and not the norm of human existence.
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Editor: Fukuyama and his cadre of political experts who guides the readers way to what? William A. Galston, author of Anger, Fear, Domination (Yale University Press, 2025); Robert Tracy McKenzie, author of We the Fallen People (InterVarsity Press, 2021); and James Kimmel Jr., author of The Science of Revenge (Harmony, 2025). The UnPopulist. Reader who can forget ‘Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?’ And other writers, like Fukuyama, who trade upon their expertise that reads like maladroit self-adulation. Some samples are instructive:
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On Human Nature:
The problem with any explanation of a social phenomenon that takes human nature as its starting point is the question of “why now?” Human nature has presumably been constant throughout human history; it does not explain why people’s behavior turned suddenly ugly midway through the second decade of the 21st century.
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On the Rise Of Populism:
Any satisfactory explanation for the rise of populism has to deal with the timing question; that is, why populism has arisen so broadly and in so many different countries in the second decade of the 21st century.
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On Conspiratorial Thinking:
As I wrote in a recent article, the current populist movement differs from previous manifestations of right-wing politics because it is defined not by a clear economic or political ideology, but rather by conspiratorial thinking. The essence of contemporary populism is the belief that the evidence of reality around us is fake, and is being manipulated by shadowy elites pulling strings behind the scenes.
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Conspiracy theories have always been part of right-wing politics in the United States. But today’s conspiracies are incredibly outlandish, like the QAnon belief that the Democrats are operating secret tunnels under Washington, D.C. and drinking the blood of young children.
Cause # 9 appears:
This is what leads me to think that Cause #9, the rise of the internet and social media, is the one factor that stands above the others as the chief explanation of our current problems. Broadly speaking, the internet removed intermediaries, traditional media, publishers, TV and radio networks, newspapers, magazines, and other channels by which people received information in earlier periods.
The Parallel Universe appears:
While previously “truth” was imperfectly certified by institutions like scientific journals, traditional media with standards of journalist accountability, courts and legal discovery, educational institutions and research organizations, the standard for truth began to gravitate instead to the number of likes and shares a particular post got.
Editor: Reader note that Fukuyama posseses no actual literary ability or talent, that will come later. As he will attempt later to burnish his political creather!
Not Yet Finished :
Previously, a major newspaper or magazine could reach perhaps a million readers, usually in a single geographic area; today, an individual influencer can reach hundreds of millions of followers without regard to geography.
The Arrival of Renee DiResta:
Influencers are driven by their audiences to go for sensational content. The currency of the internet is attention, and you don’t get attention by being sober, reflective, informative, or judicious.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
No number of empirical scientific studies could overcome the desire of many people who wanted to believe that there were evil forces in American society pushing things that were harmful to them, and they saw plentiful confirmation of their views on the internet.
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That is what algorithms do: they don’t understand meaning or context, but simply seek to maximize attention by directing people to popular content.
Video Gaming appears:
This connection was brought home by the case of the young man, Tyler Robinson, who allegedly shot Charlie Kirk. Robinson was evidently radicalized on the internet. He was an active gamer who inscribed memes from that world on the shell casings of the bullets he used.
Editor: In the above Fukuyama dons the triple-personas of Edward Jay Epstein, Arlen Specter and The Warren Comission!
Editor: The Final Two Paragraphs of Fukuyama, and its dismal final sentence!
So the advent of the internet can explain both the timing of the rise of populism, as well as the curious conspiratorial character that it has taken. In today’s politics, the red and blue sides of America’s polarization contest not just values and policies, but factual information like who won the 2020 election or whether vaccines are safe. The two sides inhabit completely different information spaces; both can believe that they are involved in an existential struggle for American democracy because they begin with different factual premises as to the nature of the threats to that order.
None of this means that causes 1 through 8 are not important or helpful in leading us to an understanding of our present situation. But in my view, it is only the rise of the internet that can explain how we can be in an existential struggle for liberal democracy, at a time in history when liberal democracy has never been as successful.
Persuasion
It’s the Internet, Stupid
We are delighted to feature Francis Fukuyama in the pages of Persuasion once again. Some of you may not know that he writes a regular column, “Frankly Fukuyama,” which is proudly part of the Persuasion family, and which you need to manually opt in to receive…
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