I'm Dan Kurtz-Valen and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview.
What a lot of people that supported Harris were surprised by was the power of economic discontents to overwhelm anything like support for global democracy.
Donald Trump's victory comes at a moment of turbulence for global democracy.
It's been a year of almost universal backlash against incumbent leaders,
by voters apparently eager to express their anger with a status quo,
and also an era when liberalism has been in retreat, if not in crisis.
Francis Fukuyama, a political scientist now at Stanford University,
has done as much as anyone to elucidate the currents shaping and reshaping global politics.
He published The End of History more than three decades ago, and in the years since,
he has written a series of influential essays for foreign affairs and other publications.
So I wanted to speak to Fukuyama to understand what Trump's return to the presidency might mean for liberal democracy,
and whether its future in the United States and around the world is truly at stake.
Frank,
thanks so much for joining me
as we start to attempt to make sense of what Donald Trump's return to the presidency means for global democracy and also for America's role in the world going forward.
Well, that's a big question that we're going to be thinking about a lot in the next few weeks.
That's right.
So let me start by going back to a piece you wrote in foreign affairs a few months ago called the year of elections has been good for democracy.
You were taking stock.
of the first part of a year in which something like half the global population was voting for new leadership and that was from the UK and France to India and Indonesia and Mexico and many others.