In an interview by John-Baptiste Oduor, Francis Fukuyama reflects on the distance between his earlier defense of liberal democratic capitalism and his current description of himself as a classical social democrat. The conversation covers the American right’s turn toward Trump, the attack on professional bureaucracy, executive power, and the Democratic Party’s relationship with working-class voters.

The right and Trump

Fukuyama argues that parts of the Straussian right have abandoned its earlier intellectual commitments and attached themselves to Trump. He describes Trumpism less as a coherent doctrine than as a political project built around Trump’s personal resentments, while Oduor presses him on the longer-running economic and organizational changes behind the Republican Party’s transformation.

Bureaucracy and the state

A central theme is the difference between reforming bureaucracy and dismantling it. Fukuyama defends a politically neutral, professional civil service as necessary for a modern state, while acknowledging that rules can become rigid and costly. He distinguishes that middle position from both an indiscriminate anti-government politics and an uncritical defense of every existing regulation.

  • The Pendleton Act helped replace patronage with a professional civil service.
  • Modern agencies depend on specialized expertise in fields such as public health, aviation, and finance.
  • Procurement and environmental-review rules can become unnecessarily burdensome without eliminating the need for safeguards.
  • Fukuyama connects the current debate to the “abundance” movement and its argument that government should be able to build and deliver again.

Democrats and executive power

Fukuyama says Democrats lost part of their working-class coalition through trade policy, cultural distance, and an inability to prioritize economic equality over competing factional demands. He also warns that progressives should be careful about normalizing expansive executive power: checks and balances constrain authoritarian presidents, but they also limit what a future progressive administration can do unilaterally.

The interview ends with Fukuyama describing himself as a social democrat—supporting a regulated market economy and redistribution—and discussing Zohran Mamdani’s emphasis on delivering concrete results.