Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - Francis Fukuyama: Is Western Civilization in Decline?

Episode Date: April 13, 2026

Get your copy of Gita Wirjawan’s book, “What It Takes: Southeast Asia”, NOW:https://books.endgame.id/Also available on Amazon:https://sgpp.me/amazon/Leave your review here:www.goodreads.com/book/show/241922036-what-it-takes------------------Francis Fukuyama argues that Western civilization is waning, and America can no longer agree on what it's even defending.In this episode, Professor Fukuyama discusses the deepening crisis within the liberal international order, as well as the symptoms and impact of America’s long-term decline.------------------About the Guest:Francis Fukuyama is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute and one of the most influential political theorists of the past three decades. Best known for “The End of History and the Last Man”, his work spans liberal democracy, political order, and institutional decay.About the host:Gita Wirjawan is an Indonesian entrepreneur and educator. He is the founding partner of Ikhlas Capital and the chairman of Ancora Group. Currently, he is teaching at Stanford as a visiting scholar with Stanford's Precourt Institute for Energy.------------------

People want autonomy because they don't like living under authoritarian governments and they want these basic freedoms. But if you say that autonomy for its own sake is more important than the substance of what you're using your autonomy for, then I think you begin to undermine, you know, the moral purpose. Hi, today we're honored to have Professor Francis Fukuyama, who is a visiting father. at Stanford University's Fremont-Spogley Institute for International Studies. Frank, thank you so much for coming on to our show. I'm delighted to be with you. Okay.

I want to ask you a few questions, but let me start off with how you grew up. You grew up being influenced by a number of thinkers, one of which is Hale. Explain. Why? Well, as an undergraduate, I studied with Alan Bloom, who was a political theorist that introduced me to the whole canon of Western philosophy. And as a result, I actually was a classics major. I spent five years learning Attic Greek, which was the Greek that Plato and Aristotle used in order to be able to read them in the original. But in the course of that, I, you know, I read a lot of philosophy.

It was a basic humanistic education. And, you know, among the philosophers that were important were people like Hegel and Karl Marx that really shaped the way that we think about politics and history today. Wow. I want to jump into so many of your articles. and or books, including the political order, political decay, and of course, the end of history, The Last Man, and most recently your book on liberalism and its discontents. How have you seen liberalism or liberal democracy evolving in the last few decades?

Well, you know, it's been a complicated trajectory. I think that Samuel Huntington, one of my other great mentors, the political scientist, talked about a third wave of democratization that began in southern Europe with Spain and Portugal back in the early 1970s. And it kind of culminated with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1989 to 1991. And so you saw an expansion of the number of democracies around the world from maybe about 30, 35 in the 1970s to well over 100. including Indonesia in that period. In the last 15 years, however, there's been a democratic recession

in which the number has fallen, and you've also had the rise of undemocratic movements in some important countries like India and the United States. So I think we're in a period of regression at the moment, and the question is really, you know, how far do we, you know, does that go? Yeah. You've been, I think, unfairly criticized. for, you know, having written that book, The End of History. And I think a lot of people who criticize you are those that really haven't read the book.

And you've always alluded to the fact that this was more of an evolutionary process as opposed to a point. Explain that. Well, history in the sense I was using it means, you know, the broad evolution of human societies. it's history with a capital H. You could call that development or modernization. Those would be synonyms for the word history. And the end of history didn't signify the termination. The question is, where is that historical progress leading?

To what kind of society are we evolving? And, you know, the argument that Hegel made back in the early 19th century was that it would be a liberal state of the sort established first, during the French Revolution. But, you know, Karl Marx picked up that idea and said, yes, we're living through history, but the evolution is going to lead to a communist utopia. And, you know, the simple argument that I was making back in 1989

was that it looked like we weren't going to get to that stage, that the final stage would look like a liberal democracy tied to a market economy because I didn't see any plausible alternative. to that as a higher form of human civilization. Of course, you can have different, you know, historical stages from the past, theocracy and, you know, authoritarian government of various sorts. But none of those, I would argue, would be superior forms of, you know, human social organization.

And so that was the basic argument. Got it. Hegel has also theorized that, you know, at the rate that the masses are not as well-educated. as the elites, there is a chance or a risk even that, you know, they should not be involved in national politics because it creates a divergence. And we haven't seen that divergence being taken a view off or fixed in the last few decades. Would that be a fair, you know, view? Well, democratic choice does not always lead to. good outcomes. That's clear. I think the big problem, though, is how do you select an alternative

system? I mean, if you say that elites ought to run things, you know, how do you select the elites? Right. And, you know, for the most part, elites are just as self-interested as everyone else in protecting their own privilege and, you know, position. And so, you know, how can you develop a governing elite that actually has a broad public interest in mind as opposed to simply wanting to stay in power to protect themselves and their families. And I think until you answer that question, I think you're going to have to, you know, recognize that the political system needs to be opened up, you know, to broader choice. Now, no democracy ever simply relies on popular will. Right. You know, you have representation in the first place. You know, you have representation in the first

place. The governments that are elected are not simply the result of direct democracy, but you know, you have a delegation of authority to a group of people that have greater expertise in running a democracy. You have bureaucracies that also basically, you know, contain a lot of expertise. And so every democracy is some mixture of popular choice, you know, combined with some degree of elite control. And I think, you know, that's... That's kind of the system that's evolved over the years. I think with the rise of populist politicians like Donald Trump, you know, you can see that Democratic choice sometimes leads to, you know, very poor leaders being elected.

But I think that's kind of the price that you pay. And, you know, really the reason that you have a liberal democracy as opposed to just pure democracy, the liberal part really refers to a system of law of constitutional checks and balances. that prevent a single leader from doing too much damage. And I think you saw that in the case of Trump, that he wanted to do all sorts of things. He wanted to build a border wall against Mexico. You know, he wanted to repeal Obamacare.

He wanted to ban all Muslims from traveling to the United States, and he wasn't allowed to do this because we have a judiciary and we have independent, you know, institutions that make it impossible for a single leader to make really terrible decisions. Would he have been either the disease or a symptom of the democratic recession? Well, he's both. Obviously, polarization has been spreading in American politics for the 20 years preceding his rise, and he wouldn't have risen if you didn't appeal to something in the public.

but I do think that he has made some very malign contributions to the decline of democracy. I mean, for example, his claim that Joe Biden did not win the 2020 election, right? There's no evidence for this at all. It's really his own vanity. He hates the idea that he's a loser and he just couldn't accept the idea that he lost a free and fair election. and so he's now persuaded millions of his followers that the election was fraudulent. And that's something that I think, I can't think of another Republican politician that would have been willing to do something like that.

But Trump, I think, was just uniquely a narcissist, you know, just completely consumed with his own self-interest in a way. And as a result, I think he's really weakened American democratic institutions. What gives you the optimism that we're going to be able to get out of this democratic recession? Well, I don't have an optimism in general about, I can't tell the future any more than anyone else can. However, I think it's important to understand that as a political system, there's some real disadvantages to authoritarian government. You know, both Russia and China in recent years have been putting out the narrative that liberal democracy is in some kind of terminal decline and that they represent the future, that their form of authoritarian decision-making is more effective. It delivers the goods better than democracy does.

But I think that if you have a government that does not have those checks and balances, it's capable of making really huge. huge mistakes. And I think we've seen that in the case of both of these countries. In the case of Russia, Putin has been isolated, especially during COVID. You probably saw these images of him sitting at a long table with his defense minister, his foreign minister, because he's so afraid of any kind of human contact. And he obviously cut himself off from any real knowledge of what was happening in Ukraine, what was happening in his own military. And as a result, he was a result of, I think he made one of the biggest strategic blunders of any leader of a major country that I can think of in, you know, really in my lifetime. And as a result, he's destroyed his own army and, you know, he's vastly weakened Russia itself.

In the case of China, I don't think you have a mistake of similar dimensions, but I think their zero COVID strategy is really crazy. You know, the price that they're paying for keeping the numbers, you know, so low is enormous. It's probably shaving off, you know, one or two points of GDP growth, which, you know, is hundreds of billions of dollars, you know, in the end. And I think that, again, you know, that reflects a decision of one man, Xi Jinping that is not listening to advice or really, especially after the 20th Party Congress, has really stripped that. system of kind of collective wisdom that, you know, was embodied in the China that it existed prior to his rise. You've made some bold predictions about what's going to unfold in Ukraine. You want to share that?

Well, I think that the Russian army is headed to a defeat there, and I think it'll happen by the end of the winter. You know, the Russian army is highly demoralized. It's run out of equipment. they're really scraping the bottom of the barrel with regard to manpower because so many Russians have been killed in the course of this war. You know, they're talking about, you know, getting close to 100,000 casualties there, which is many, many more than they lost in the 10 years that they were in Afghanistan.

And so I think, you know, the difference in motivation and leadership on the two sides is so great that I do expect that they will be driven out of most of the areas that they've occupied, not just since February 24th of this year, but since 2014. If true, and what you alluded to in the context of China, would those then serve as source of optimism for the world to be able to get out of this democratic recession? If it were to be able to get out, do you see it as something that's going to reshape itself in order to be able to get out? Well, history is never linear.

Right. And I think that authoritarian failures sometimes actually lead to even riskier behavior. And so we don't know what Putin's going to do in response to the kind of defeat that he's in the process of suffering. You know, there is a genuine fear that he will resort, for example, to nuclear weapons. Right. He's already begun these horrific attacks on civilians in Ukraine in response to his military setbacks. And that's all as possible. In the case of China, there's speculation that rising powers are the most dangerous, not when they're rising, but when they start to decline.

If China actually does go into a long-term decline, in order to preserve their position, they may be willing to take greater risk. than they would have been on their way up. But we don't know any of this. You know, this is all complete speculation. And so I really hesitate to make any, you know, real predictions about how things will unfold in the coming, you know, years. I want to go into your latest book, liberalism and its discontents. You talked about, or you gave, you know,

a description of the three liberal principles. Go through those. Well, they're not principles. so much as arguments in favor of liberalism. So there's a, the first is really a pragmatic argument. You know, liberalism was established in order to manage diversity in diverse societies. It originated in Europe in the middle of the 17th century after Europe had been fighting wars of religion for 150 years after the Protestant Reformation.

And a lot of early liberal thinkers said it's crazy to base a society on a single religion. doctrine because people aren't going to agree on that. As a result, you know, we need to have a principle of tolerance where people can pursue different visions of the good life. So that's the, you know, pragmatic one. I would say actually that the founders of Indonesia, they're not people I would call liberals. Right. But, you know, the doctrine of Panchasila, you know, was tolerant. I mean, it was built around a principle that Indonesia had multiple religions, you know, And as long as it was monotheistic, you know, we were going to tolerate, you know, people pursuing these different views. And so, you know, that's the pragmatic argument.

The moral argument has to do with individual autonomy because the dignity of human beings that liberalism tries to protect is based on their ability to choose. and the reason that people are given rights is that people want the basic freedom to decide, you know, where to live, what to pursue in terms of their careers, who to marry, you know, what beliefs to have, and they can express them freely because freedom of speech is an important, you know, liberal practice. And so respect for individuals, I think, becomes very important. The final argument is an economic one. Because liberalism protects private property and the right to transact, liberal societies have been among the most prosperous in human history. You really couldn't have the modern economic world if you didn't have a liberal economic order in which people are free to trade with people of different, very different from themselves. if you didn't have the protection of property rights, if you didn't have basic agreement on the rules

under which commerce occurs. So those three arguments, pragmatic, moral, and economic, I think, are the justifications. I want to push on a second and the third. In a couple of chapters of your book, you talked about how autonomy is absolutized, and it serves as a critique towards individualism. Explain that.

Well, I think that people want autonomy because they don't like living under authoritarian governments and they want these basic freedoms. But if you say that autonomy for its own sake is more important than the substance of what you're using your autonomy for, then I think you begin to undermine, you know, the moral purpose. people want to be able to live within a moral framework. And autonomy was usually traditionally understood as the ability to live within a set of rules that are not chosen by yourself but are inherited. And we can illustrate this more concretely. In the United States, the First Amendment protects freedom of religion, not freedom from religion, but freedom of religion. So you can choose to worship, you know, whatever God you want without interference by the state,

as long as you don't interfere in other people's ability to do that. But there's a more radical interpretation that says we want freedom from religion. You know, we don't want people to live according to religious traditions. And that, I think, is a mistake because what people want is a freedom to exist within that kind of pre-established frame. On the third, with respect to the economic right, I want to try to put this in the context of how you try to draw the difference between liberalism from neoliberalism and also from libertarianism. Sure, so neoliberalism is used by some people just to designate capitalism as such, and I think that's a mistake because you can't have a modern society without basic protection. property rights and freedom of commerce. Neo-liberalism, in my view, is more properly used to designate an interpretation of economic

liberalism. That interpretation was associated with politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. It appeared in the late 70s and early 80s saying that the state had become too big and too controlling. It needed to be liberalized, but it was taken to an extreme. that basically saw the state as unnecessary in a certain way and an obstacle to economic growth. And as a result, state sectors were cut back across the board

and you had the growth of a kind of unregulated capitalism that knitted together the world in a global economy that was very efficient but also very disruptive to many existing societies. I think that probably one of the most dramatic effects were the financial crises that hit the world with the liberalization of financial markets. You know, beginning with the sterling crisis in the early 1990s in Sweden, the Asian financial crisis in 1997 was a direct result of the liberalization of capital markets, then followed by

Argentina, Russia, and it culminated in a way in the American subprime crisis in 2003. This was all the direct result of neoliberal efforts to deregulate financial markets that really needed very strict state supervision. So that is what I regard as neoliberalism, and that was the mistake, not the broad belief in the need for markets and market economies. I'm in the same camp in making the observation that markets, I think, should have been democratized. to the point where everybody would have access to capital. But it's just a little too obvious right now that not everybody has access to capital. And I'm not aware of any politics or policymaking

that are being done enough as to fix this. What do you think can be done? Well, there have been a number of efforts to make capital more available. I mean, one is the whole microfinance revolution. that started with Grameen Bank, you know, in Bangladesh that has spread. I think that the promise of that has been oversold a little bit because, you know, you find very few cases where microfinance actually produces, you know,

growing companies that then survive, you know, beyond just that initial stage. You know, the real lack, I think, in many countries is SME finance. I mean, finance for small and medium-sized. enterprises. Large corporations have access to global capital pretty reliably, but it's, you know, the family business that then grows to a size where they want to expand beyond the family. They want to incorporate themselves and, you know, reach broader markets. And that's the place where, you know, there's a real gap, I think, in global financing. It varies from country to country, but I think that that's, you know, an important obstacle.

I mean, even in the developed economies, we're seeing a divergence between the rise of the capital markets versus the rise of the real economy. That in itself, I think, is a manifestation, right, of how money or capital hasn't really democratized to every layer of the pyramid. Well, you know, among the neoliberal initiatives that were undertaken was an attack on antitrust or competition policy. You know, that had been a hallmark of American capitalism ever since the late 19th century. We have very strong antitrust laws like the Sherman Act or the Clayton Act that prevented companies from getting too large. But, you know, one of the arguments that were made by neoliberal economists in the 1980s, Robert Bork and George Stigler, was that we shouldn't worry about size, that companies were growing

large simply because they were more efficient. And therefore, we relaxed our rules against that. And one of the things that's been going on is that these companies, you know, are getting so large that it's impossible to compete against them. If you're a startup that you start threatening their market, they'll buy you and then incorporate you into their empire. And, you know, it's only a regulator. It's only the state that can prevent that from happening. And so that's another consequence that I think has been, you know, very, very problematic. It kind of reinforces the hegemony of very large corporations, big banks, you know, the global finance system that's empowering this. I want to get back to this, but I want to continue on a little bit on

the book. You alluded to the threats towards liberalism that are coming both from the right and the left, but you suggested that they're not symmetrical. Explain that. Well, it depends on the country. I think that right now, the biggest new political movements have been on the right. There have been these populist nationalist movements, which we've seen in Hungary, in Poland, in India, in Turkey, in the United States. You know, many European countries have a right-wing, extreme right, populist party.

They just got into power in Sweden and in Italy. In other parts of the world, the left-wing populists are still the dominant force in Latin America. You've had left-wing governments elected in Bolivia, in Peru, in Colombia, in Chile. You had one right-wing populist, Jair Bolsonaro that was evidently just defeated in the most recent Brazilian election, but by and large, there the populism has remained left-wing. You know, there's a big difference between those two, obviously. The right-wing populists are all pretty uniformly opposed to immigration. They're usually based on wanting to protect the ethnic characteristics of their existing societies

against immigrants that come from other parts of the world. the left-wing populists are still focused on economic inequality and want the state to intervene to redistribute income and wealth more broadly. Let's go back to the economy again. I'm just not convinced that this hegemonic tendencies of the big companies are likely to be healed or remedied, right, for purposes of our reshaping democracies

so that it could be on a path of wisdom again. What do you think could be done at the policymaking body level, at the political level, and at the populist level? Well, I think there have been moves in that direction already. You know, Europe has been much more active on the competition policy than the United States. So the EU Commission has taken a big stand in terms of, like, let's say, the Digital Services Act.

So among the biggest companies in the world are these American tech giants like Google and Facebook. And, you know, Europe, I think, has stepped up in terms of having a privacy law in, you know, trying to go after these large corporations. to prevent them from getting, you know, even more larger and more dominant. President Biden has appointed, you know, people that want to move America in the same direction. Here the problem is that there's less political support for that because you still have a large part of the Republican Party that, you know, owes its financing to these large corporations and they don't want to, you know, move against them. So it's really a question of, you know, populations mobilizing against, you know, the dominance of these, you know, these behemists and using the existing policy tools to limit them.

There is a view, though, that the reason why the Europeans have the world with all to take more stern actions is because they're less of a beneficiary, economic. Yeah, that's true. The very existence of these behemates, right? Whereas the United States, I think, you know, is a much bigger beneficiary, economically speaking, to the point where I think it's probably intuitively going to be somewhat more difficult to act upon. I think that's why you haven't seen a very strong anti-trust policy coming out of the United States. That's true. So how do you deal with that then? Well, you deal with it politically.

I mean, you've got to make the argument that the government needs to be strong enough to master these big corporations. You know, at the moment, the United States can't do anything because its system is so polarized. I mean, we can't even pass budgets, yearly budgets, you know, routinely because of the existing polarization. And it's likely to get worse as the Republicans, you know, take over at least part of Congress. So, you know, it really boils down to the deep problems within the society that are then reflected in the political system, the division, you know, between red and blue in the United States that really prevents any kind of major policy from being enacted. Well, we've touched upon the third argument with respect to economic rights. I want to bring up this point of, you know, I. I've been talking quite a bit about the paradox of the democratization of information versus that of ideas.

They're just not congruent for reasons maybe that social media, I think, has polarized conversations. And you've been very vocal about this also. I'm in a camp that believes that to the extent that the amplification of news, narratives that are thick with hatred, anger, and divisiveness, keep on riding on these algorithms that keep on amplifying these. I think polarization of conversations will continue. And at the rate that they continue, unstoppably, there is not going to be a very rich democratization of ideas.

And to the extent that there's not going to be very rich democratization of ideas, I think liberalism is at risk, right? And I'm sort of like in the camp that's still pessimistic about anybody's being able to do anything meaningful with respect to the amplification of the wrong narratives. You know, I actually don't think that democratization of ideas is the right charge to me. I mean, in a way, that's the problem.

We have democratized ideas. Anybody can say anything they want, including things that are not true, including hate speech, including conspiracy theories. That was all controlled in an earlier age because the access to media was limited. You know, when I was a kid, we had three broadcast channels, TV channels, and they would not have allowed, you know, conspiracy theories about an American election to be, you know, promulgated. but now you've got an internet where anyone can say anything they want, which is the kind of ultimate in democratization. And you're right that the concentration of power in the internet platforms then permits these views to be amplified or silenced in the other direction.

But ultimately, I think that you need more elite control over the promulgation of information. And the trouble is that, you know, nobody has the legitimacy to do this right now. I mean, we, I don't think, would generally trust governments to be the arbiters of what's true and what's false. We wouldn't want, you know, the government to declare, you know, this theory is correct and this one is not, and therefore you can't broadcast it. So we've kind of, in the United States, we've defaulted to letting the platforms be the arbiters, but I don't think that they're particularly good at it. They're not in business to protect democracy. They're in business to make money for themselves. And so they don't have the right incentives to, you know, to do the right thing.

And I think with Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, you know, it kind of indicates what some of the dangers of this are that, you know, a single extremely rich individual can grab hold of one of these platforms and push it in a particular, you know, direction. We'll have to see what he ends up doing with it, but it's not necessarily going to aid, you know, freedom of speech. Even, I'm not trying to defend anybody here, but even if he were to get rid of the bots, you don't think that's a, that's helpful to? Well, Twitter has already been trying to get rid of the bots. You know, they keep coming back and so it's a never-ending struggle.

And I don't think that he's going to necessarily be more effective at this. he has indicated, you know, he's increasingly come out as a kind of right-wing, you know. I mean, he hasn't endorsed Donald Trump, but he certainly said that he'll let Donald Trump back on Twitter. You did mention DeSantis a few months ago. Yeah. So he's got a particular point of view, and I think that, you know, we shouldn't let, you know, single rich individuals dominate the political conversation. Right now, a lot of liberals in the United States haven't worried about this too much because, generally speaking, the platforms, the big platforms have reflected their preferences. And so they've been trying to suppress misinformation about COVID, you know, conspiracy theories coming from the right.

But the big danger, you know, is that you've got this, I mean, my metaphor is that the big platforms are like a look. loaded pistol that's sitting on the table. And we're hoping that a bad person doesn't pick it up and start shooting us with it. But that's kind of the problem that you've really got to disable the pistol rather than simply relying on the good intentions of whoever could pick the pistol up and use it. I was just to clarify, when I was talking about the democratization of ideas, I was trying to make the metaphor where, you know, now we have thousands of pipes. through which we can disseminate information.

Why is it that we only have the guy that on the far right and the guy on the far left? We don't have a spectrum of choices, of ideas like we used to in the old days. That was really what I was alluding to. Well, that's true. I think that part of the problem is that the platforms themselves want viral information, not quality information.

And so they have tended to amplify things that are popular, but not necessarily healthy for democracy. And as long as they are private corporations that are seeking to maximize their own revenues, I think they're going to continue to do things like that. On this topic of virality, I'm a little concerned about the possibility

that in the future we're going to be electing people on the back of more festivalization or sensationalization as opposed to intellectualization in any domain not necessarily just political but non-political domains because that seems to be the

the flavor of the day, the week, the month, the year, the decade. Isn't that worrying? Yeah, I mean, I think that you know, that's helpful to get elected is not having thoughtful policy positions, it's really celebrity.

That's how Donald Trump became president. He was the, he ran a celebrity reality show. And, you know, many politicians have moved from, you know, careers in Hollywood or on TV, including, you know, President Zelensky in Ukraine, who started out as a comedian. Now, he's turned out to be actually a pretty good and effective leader, but, you know, the Philippines, for example, is, you know, a whole succession of presidents that, you know, basically made their name as celebrities rather than, you know, as serious, you know, people interested in public policy. So, yes, I do think that it's a, you know, it's a big problem. You alluded to this in the book also in terms of drawing limits. Moderation is key, right?

fulfillment takes place when limits are put in place, right? This sort of like applies to what you've, you know, how I think information ought to be limited or the dissemination. I want to go through the world with you geographically. You know, right now the biggest democracy in the world is India. Second largest is the United States and Indonesia is the third largest. What do you think each of these three big, democracies should do in the context of what's happening and in the context of what they need to do to be

better. Well, in the case of India, I think that, you know, Prime Minister Modi has been trying to shift its entire national identity to one based on Hindu nationalism. Gandhi and Nehru, who founded the country, really, wanted to make it a liberal society. They said, we're not going to be like Pakistan. We're not going to have a national religion and base our society on a single religion. But that's precisely what Modi is attempting to do. And I think that they need to stop that.

They need to preserve a liberal India in which people of all faiths have an equal opportunity to advance and to practice their beliefs, as long as they don't interfere in other people's practice. But that's not the India that's, you know, being – created at the moment. In the United States, I think it's really important to, you know, keep Trump and other right-wing populists like him out of power in order to preserve the kind of system of constitutional checks and balances and respect for law that the country really has been based on up until, up until this point. Indonesia is actually, you know, in many ways a great success story because you're coming off of many decades of dictatorship. And, you know, in that

respect, India is a democracy whose experience with that form of government is only a couple decades, you know, old. And I think given how difficult it is to establish democratic institutions, you know, there's been a pretty credible job done. I think your problems really have to do with things like corruption, which obviously has been pervasive in Indonesia. And in that case, democracy didn't eliminate corruption. It simply spread it out, you know, in many ways. And, you know, the decentralization of power to, you know, states and localities, you know, has simply, in a way, democratized the nature of corruption rather than eliminating it.

And so that's obviously, you know, a problem that needs to be dealt with. And I think, you know, the final thing is that there are some truly illiberal political forces in Indonesia. You know, you have types of Muslim extremism that really aren't compatible with a liberal society at all because they do want to impose a, you know, a single intolerant version of religion. And that's something that needs to be beaten back because, you know, you can obviously be a Muslim and also be a liberal Democrat at the same time. I mean, you know, I think Indonesia has demonstrated that that's fully possible, but it does mean interpret. the religion in a more tolerant direction. Yeah. I see stuff like that more of an episodic stress. I mean, if I try to put this in the context of what Southeast Asia has gone through

in the last 2,000 years, we've been pretty peaceful and stable, you know, in terms of the number of casualties that we've witnessed, you know, far lower than whatever we've seen in Europe, you know, not to mention. in a span of 30 to 40 years between World War I and World War II, I'm seeing it a little bit differently. I see it more from an economic standpoint. I want to try to draw a picture for you. If we take a look at Southeast Asia, in the last 30 years,

the GDP per capita has grown by about three times, vis-a-vis China in the same period that grew basically by 10 times. And I think there's essentially three to four reasons as to why China has outgrown us in Southeast Asia. The first one is the issue of corruption. Second is basically infrastructure or lack thereof. Third is education. And fourth is really the lack of competition. You know, China, I think, has encouraged its entrepreneurs to be much more entrepreneurial faster.

as opposed to their Southeast Asian counterparts. And when I say Southeast Asia, all this with the exception of Singapore, which basically has been able to check off on each one of the four boxes, right? So to the extent that Southeast Asia can get its act together on its economy, and I say this with optimism by way of the applications of technology or technological innovations. which I think have tangibly boosted productivity, you know, in the last five to ten years. I'm actually quite optimistic in that Southeast Asia will be able to grow more than what we've seen in the last 30 years. In that regard, this could be helpful in our process of democratizing.

By the way, I don't think that China's lead over Southeast Asia is something that's going to remain immutable. I mean, actually, China has now fallen. and below the average for the region in terms of economic growth. I mean, they're claiming 3.7% in the last quarter. Very few people really believe that. You know, it's probably closer to 2.9 or 3. And, you know, as long as zero COVID remains in place, well, it's more than that.

I mean, I think the entire Chinese growth model was really powered by these massive investments where 50% of GDP was being reinvested. but basically in real estate. And I think that that is something that's just completely unsustainable. 30 to 40% of the GDP. Yeah. It's a little too massive.

Okay, we've talked about the three largest democracies in the world and a little bit on Southeast Asia. I want to pick your brains on how democracies have not been able to democratize talent. How do we deal with this? I mean, I'm seeing signs everywhere. developed or even developing, or much more in developing, where talent has been selected more based on patronage and or loyalty as opposed to merit. What's your view on this?

Well, it's a general problem. I think that it's not unique to Southeast Asia. I think all human societies have been based on patronage and clientalism for most of human history. You favor friends and family. And the idea that you should pick somebody based on merit, you should hire a complete stranger rather than your cousin or your brother is not something that comes naturally in any human society. And so you need institutions that work in the opposite direction. So one of the things that China figured out very early on was the need for meritocracy.

So they began, you know, instituting examinations. to select bureaucrats, even before the unification of China, you know, in the Chin dynasty. Right. But probably one of the central characteristics of Chinese civilization is the emphasis on education, which initially was really driven by the need to have bureaucrats, educated bureaucrats, and that was what motivated people to, you know, to seek educations for their children. And so it's a deeply cultural thing. And it's the reason why Chinese and many societies continue to outperform people from other ethnic groups because there's something deeply embedded in Chinese culture that prizes education for its own sake. And so encouraging, you know, a similar cultural emphasis on education, I think, is something, you know, that's very important.

And obviously investing in the institutions that allow people to be educated is important. And opening up access to those institutions to anybody that has the talent is a prerequisite. Well, even developed economies in Western society seem to be selecting talent more based on patronage and or loyalty. right, much less in the developing economies. I'm not sure that that's true. I mean, you look at higher education in the United States and you look at how well Asian immigrants have done. Oh, that's, yeah.

In the University of California system. But if you look at the University of California system, you know, they used to call UCLA, the University of Caucasians lost among Asians because for the system as a whole, you know, population, I mean, the percentage of Asian Americans in the school system was like over 50%, whereas they didn't constitute more than about 10% of the whole population. And so I think meritocracy, you know, is still very powerful. I think the problem is that well-educated people have a lot of economic and social advantages. You know, first of all, just with the family, they tend to have intact families, whereas poor people, you know, a lot of poor children grow up in single-parent households where, you know, the parents really don't devote any time to, you know, educating their kids and instilling them with the right kinds of social values needed to get ahead.

Then they can send their kids to, you know, good schools as they're growing up, which allows them, again, into good universities. And so that class tends to perpetuate itself. You know, I think that's the real threat to meritocracy in the United States. But I think compared to other societies, it still does remain pretty open, you know, to tell. And in fact, one of the big issues right now is kind of the opposite of that. I mean, there's this lawsuit that's going to go before the Supreme Court this year in which actually Asian, primarily Asian parents. are suing Harvard for discriminating against them in favor of...

Today, the hearing. Yeah. In favor of black and Hispanic children. Right. Okay. And there's a counterpart to this in Southeast Asia. You know, the whole Bumi Pucha system in Malaysia, you know, is a kind of reverse discrimination.

So, you know, it's something that's happening in other societies. Nobody's perfect. Nobody's perfect. I want to still touch on geography before we. touch on other things. Singapore, would you regard Singapore as a thriving

democracy? By way of its being able to maintain it's multi-racial, multi-ethnic I think it's a thriving liberal state, but not a democracy. You know, the liberalism

refers to the rule of law and the structures under which the government operates. And they're, know, Singapore scores pretty high, particularly in terms of economic rights, I would say that it's not a democracy because it doesn't permit fully free and fair election. So there's no true freedom of speech where opposition parties can really, you know, campaign and express their views. Criticism of the government, you know, in the media is limited. And so in that respect, I think that it's not, you know, fully either liberal or democratic, but it's more.

liberal than it is democratic. Have you said that in front of the Singaporean? I'm just curious what they would have said to you. Yeah, well, yes, we have this argument all the time in which a lot of Singaporeans, you know, say, well, we are democratic because our government reflects, you know, the wishes of the people. You know, part of this has to do with the procedural nature

of liberal democracy because, and it's true, I mean, the Chinese have a different version of this. that, you know, you should measure democracy substantively regarding the way that the government reflects the view of, you know, most citizens and not whether it follows strict procedures in terms of, you know, free and affair elections and this sort of thing. And I think most of the pushback that I get from Singaporeans is, you know, of that latter. I mean, maybe we're not perfect in terms of, you know, the level playing field, but still our government reflects what our people want.

They get things done though, right? You got to give it to them. I mean, I've always, you know, looked at how the system has worked to the point where they've been able to get money from all over the world. And at the kind of scale, which is orders of magnitude higher than whatever their neighbors could do. You know, I always talk about FDI, right? They've been able to get, you know, FDI at a rate of $19,000 on a per capita per year basis last year,

as compared to their Southeast Asian counterparts who could only get between $100 to $400. Well, but I think that reflects, you know, the liberal rule of law rather than democracy. Okay. People are not investing there because, you know, there's a semi-authoritarian government. They're investing there because they know that their property rights will be resuscary. that there's a legal system that can adjudicate disputes. I think that's really what's driving a lot of the investment, you know, plus which the government, you know, does act in a way that favors, you know, foreign investors and, you know, really

promotes, you know, technology, education, and so forth. Yeah. It boils down to the enforceability of rules and regulations. Okay. What do you think of the role of artificial intelligence on democracy? going forward? Well, look, all technologies are morally neutral. That is to say, they can be used for good purposes and they can be used for bad purposes. And so what's going on in a lot of countries is that artificial intelligence is being used, you know, for example, by police forces to

catch criminals. And it's very effective at that. But that same technology can be used also to control political dissent and to monitor people's behavior. And the country that's obviously the furthest along in that is China. You know, they had put in place a social credit system before the pandemic. And with the pandemic, they now have ways of monitoring kind of the daily behavior of all, you know, 1.3 billion of their citizens, which is a level of surveillance and control that has really never existed in any society previously. you know, in some respects, that's a good thing.

I mean, I've heard Chinese people say, you know, we don't trust other people very readily. And the social credit system allows us to know who we can trust, you know, basically to do a business deal or, you know, even in terms of a romantic partner, you know, you want to know that somebody doesn't have a big history as a swindler, you know, before you marry them. On the other hand, it allows an unprecedented degree of government control over the most intimate aspects of your life. And so, you know, the technology is used, you know, both for good purposes and bad purposes. Well, I mean, I look at it. I mean, one way to look at it would be, you know, being able to augment the intellect of the many, right? because democracy is about the distribution of power into the many. And to the extent that in many countries around the world,

that the intellect is not up to the level where it needs to be artificially, if you could escalate that, it could help democracy. Well, it could. I think that it might actually have the opposite impact, though, because it would relieve individuals from the need to actually educate themselves, right? that you could use, you know, at some point you're going to have machines that will basically, you know, you'll speak into them and out the other side will come the same words in a different language. Right.

And that'll mean that people don't have to learn languages, like themselves, or they don't have to memorize facts because you simply have Wikipedia, you know, perpetually available. But, you know, in a way, that's going to reduce the incentives. that people have to actually develop, you know, their own native intellectual capacities. And so, although it might be a functional substitute in some, you know, respects, I think there's also a big danger that it will actually make people stupider. Would you have the same view in regards to CRISPR or biological science or intelligence? Well, you know, I wrote a whole book about this back in the early 2000s. I actually think that biotech is potentially more dangerous than information technology

because it really does have the possibility of altering human nature itself. CRISPR hasn't really been used to this effect, but certainly we're overusing drugs in the United States to basically control behavior. And I think that that's something that is also potentially very very, politically dangerous. Frank, you have any final comments for many of us in Southeast Asia in the context of how we've been surviving as a democracy and how we need to be surviving going forward as a democracy?

Well, I think that... We're not perfect. There are some flaws in many parts or some parts of Southeast Asia. I'm not going to mention the names, but we could get into very lengthy. the discussion, but yeah, just in terms of what we can do to get better. Well, I think it's important to, first of all, recognize the benefits of living in a liberal democracy like Indonesia is. And, you know, remember back to dictatorship in, you know, your own country's past or in the present of existing countries in the region. And it's not

such a happy, it doesn't produce such happy outcomes. I think that, you know, people need to think about public policy and they need to participate, you know, constantly. They need to mobilize and be aware of what the problems in their society are and then have ways of trying to solve those problems using, you know, the existing mechanisms that democracy gives you. That's really one of the big selling points of democracy is that it can correct itself. Yeah. You know, if you're stuck with a, you know, Kim Jong-un, then there's no way of getting rid of that person, you know, you're just stuck and your only option is try to get out,

which itself is a very dangerous proposition. Whereas in a democracy, you can organize, you can mobilize, you can criticize, you can make suggestions, you can, you know, hope to improve things. And I think that's a very valuable aspect of the democracy. living in a democratic society. Thank you so much, Frank. Okay, thank you. It's been fascinating.

That was Professor Francis Fukuyama. I'm Stanford University. Thank you. Thank you so much, Frank. Okay. I know you're busy. So I'll leave you to it. Yeah, we'll get organized.

Hopefully I can go out for a meal. That trip, I think I was on my way to Timor-Leste. And then after that, we went to Papua New Guinea. Yeah. And on the second trip, I actually went.