Quotes from Francis Fukuyama

The current dysfunction and decay of the American political system is

The desire for recognition, and the accompanying emotions of anger, shame, and pride, are parts of the human personality critical to political life.

He created, in the words of historian Hans Rosenberg, "a first-rate army which had to be supported by a country which was third-rate in terms of manpower, natural wealth, capital supply, and economic skills.

At the end of Trump's term, what I've learned is that I really don't understand America well at all.

in some sense, it was the tyranny of cousins that allowed Indians to resist the tyranny of tyrants.

Social democracy, one of the dominant forces shaping Western European politics in the two generations following World War II, has been in retreat.

highly corrupt governments usually have big problems in delivering services, enforcing laws, and representing the public interest.

In societies where most politicians are corrupt, singling one out for punishment is often not a sign of reform but of a power grab.

Sequencing therefore matters enormously. Those countries in which democracy preceded modern state building have had much greater problems achieving high-quality governance than those that inherited modern states from absolutist times.

Russia prior to the Bolshevik Revolution had developed a strongly centralized state, in which executive power was only weakly constrained by either rule of law or accountable legislatures. The nature of the absolutism that was achieved in pre-Bolshevik Russia was qualitatively different from that of either old regime France or Spain, and much closer to the premodern Chinese or Ottoman variants.

When a rural Greek is hospitalized, relatives are in constant attendance to keep a check on the doctor and the treatment he prescribes.

National identity begins with a shared belief in the legitimacy of the country's political system, whether that system is democratic or not. Identity can be embodied in formal laws and institutions that dictate, for example, what the educational system will teach children about their country's past, or what will be considered an official national language.

The same process is unfolding in the early twenty-first century with passage of the Dodd-Frank bill regulating the financial sector: Congress delegated to the regulators the responsibility of writing many of the detailed provisions, which will inevitably be challenged in the courts. Ironically, excessive delegation and vetocracy are intertwined.

Recognition is the central problem of politics because it is the origin of tyranny, imperialism, and the desire to dominate.

The remedy is to define larger and more integrative national identities that take account of the de facto diversity of existing liberal democratic societies.

Kojève, interpreting Hegel in the 1930s, suggested that the idea of the modern state, once unleashed in the world, would eventually universalize itself because it was so powerful: those facing it would either conform to its dictates or be swallowed up.

The policy issue that has raised the greatest challenges to national identity is immigration, and the related issue of refugees. Together, they are the driving force behind the upsurge of populist nationalism in both Europe and the United States.

The left has focused less on broad economic equality and more on promoting the interests of a wide variety of groups perceived as being marginalized—blacks, immigrants, women, Hispanics, the LGBT community, refugees, and the like. The right, meanwhile, is redefining itself as patriots who seek to protect traditional national identity, an identity that is often explicitly connected to race, ethnicity, or religion.

Many of the failures attributed to democracy are in fact failures of state administrations that are unable to deliver on the promises made by newly elected democratic politicians to voters who want not just their political rights but good government as well.

Many modern democratic constitutions thus enshrine the principle of equal dignity. They are drawing on the Christian tradition that sees dignity rooted in human moral agency. But that agency is no longer seen in a religious sense, as the ability to accept God; rather, it is the ability to share in the exercise of power as a member of a democratic political community.

China was the first world civilization to create a modern state. But it created a modern state that was not restrained by a rule of law or by institutions of accountability to limit the power of the sovereign.

an autonomous self that has been detached from all prior loyalties and commitments "is not to conceive of an ideally free and rational agent, but to imagine a person wholly without character, without moral depth":

the real driver of state formation is violence or the threat of violence, making the social contract an efficient rather than a final cause.

Greece thus became one of Europe's first electoral democracies, preceding Britain by a full generation. As in the United States, democracy was established before an indigenous modern state could be created.