Francis Fukuyama: "There is no American identity anymore"

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Francis Fukuyam, 68, is an American political scientist and political economist. He is a professor at Stanford University. His most recent book, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (2018) argues that the demand for identity cannot be transcended so one must begin to shape identity in a way that supports rather than undermines democracy.

ZEIT ONLINE: The United States survived President Donald Trump, but he left behind a country in shambles. Recently, Republicans ousted Liz Cheney from her party leadership position because she refused to lie about alleged election fraud. Mr. Fukuyama, in what state is the American democracy?

Francis Fukuyama: We are in an unprecedented moment of breakdown in our democratic institutions. One of the most important features of a working democracy is the successful, peaceful transfer of power. For the first time since the Civil War, this didn't happen, due to the attack on the Capitol on January 6th. Many of us had hoped that this event would finally push Republicans to realize that Donald Trump had led them into the abyss.

ZEIT ONLINE: But that didn’t happen.

Fukuyama: No. And many blame the Republican elites for that. But the problem is with the core Republican voters. According to poll data, more than 70 percent of them believe that there was major electoral fraud. They trust Trump more than they trust the courts or other institutions. And the Republican leadership has not yet stood up to parts of its own electorate. A lot of them quietly know that they've chained themselves to this loser. But only Liz Cheney has said so openly.

In the long run, you cannot build a serious party in the United States around a cult of personality.

ZEIT ONLINE: Instead, Republican-led states are enacting new laws, allegedly to make elections more secure. But actually they are trying to prevent people from voting. How dangerous is that?

Fukuyama: Very dangerous. A lot of our politics is going to center around this nonsensical belief that the elections we hold are not fair and that the only way to make them fair is to restrict voting and make it much harder. History repeats itself here: In the days of legal segregation, they didn't have laws that said black people couldn’t vote. What they did was  put all sorts of new qualifications on voting. You had to have an education. You had to pay a poll tax. It didn't explicitly target African-Americans, but in effect, it made it much more difficult for people in their social situation to vote. That's what Texas, Florida, Arizona and all these Republican-led states are doing right now.

ZEIT ONLINE: There's a possible comparison to German history here: the so-called Führerprinzip - the idea that the supreme duty of all party members is to exhibit absolute loyalty to a leader who defines what's right and wrong. Have the Republicans reached that point?

Fukuyama: I don’t think so. Many just like Trump. He was quite brilliant in creating this cult of personality around himself. That’s the hardest to understand for people like me who come out of a different social milieu, because he seems to be such an unpleasant, nasty, selfish, corrupt individual. A lot of his voters trust him and they think that he speaks for them. Some therefore claim that we are in a Weimar situation, where a lot of Americans and the Republicans are turning towards overt authoritarian government.

ZEIT ONLINE: You don’t believe that?

Fukuyama: The Weimar analogy isn't quite correct. In the 1930s, there were conservative Germans - for example business leaders - that did say: "Ok, democracy has led to the rise of all these communists and socialists, let's try some alternative to it." I don't think that many of Trump’s supporters believe that. We would not be in such a situation without Trump. Almost any other Republican would not have done what he did. Trump’s whole life has been focused on cultivating this image of himself as a winner. He just could not stomach the idea that he lost after one term as president.

ZEIT ONLINE: But the Republican Party isn't really doing anything to get rid of him either.

Fukuyama: That is a short-sighted strategy. In the long run, you cannot build a serious party in the United States around a cult of personality. Trump’s popularity ratings have fallen about 10 percent since the election. It used to be somewhere in the low 40s and now it’s in the low 30s. In another three-and-a-half years, if he decides to run for president again, he's just not going to be able to build the kind of momentum that he had in 2016.