The rise and fall of the U.S. government: while other conservatives say that the American state has become too powerful, Francis Fukuyama argues that it has grown too weak.

AuthorDilulio, John J., Jr.
PositionOn political books - Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy - Book review

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

by Francis Fukuyama

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 672 pp.

In 1985, Harvard University hosted a conference celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of political scientist Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America. In that classic book, Hartz explained the virtual absence of European-style socialism in America as resulting from the total absence of European-style feudalism in America. My doctoral dissertation's co-adviser, Samuel Huntington, prodded me to attend the conference, knowing I had read the book in his graduate political development seminar. Hartz, who died the next year, was not present. That was probably fortunate, because, being thirty years younger and at least thirty times brasher than I am today, I proceeded to attack key aspects of Hartz's thesis--noting, among other things, that there were far greater class divisions in eighteenth--and nineteenth-century America than Hartz allowed. A senior Harvard faculty member, visibly perturbed by my take-no-prisoners critique of Hartz's book, grumbled that I was "obviously" mistaken. "You claim to have found fleas on the lion," he intoned, "but there is a lion beneath the fleas."

I recalled that incident while reading Francis Fukuyama's latest work, Political Order and Political Decay. In this book Fukuyama, also a student of Huntington's, updates his mentor's influential 1968 Political Order in Changing Societies, which argued for the importance of political institutions in the ability of developing countries to modernize. While there are many fleas on Fukuyama's nearly 700-page tome, including historical glosses and overgeneralizations, none are even close to being fatal. Fukuyama is a true intellectual lion. (And he shares my take on Hartz.)

In the 1980s, Fukuyama, a Harvard-trained political scientist who worked at the RAND Corporation and in the U.S. State Department, was among the first analysts to foresee the Soviet Union's fall and Germany's reunification. In a 1989 essay in the National Interest, Fukuyama wondered whether we might be witnessing not just "the end of the Cold War" but "the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

In 1992, in the best-selling The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama forecast that liberal democracy's global march would deliver peace, prosperity, and personal security to billions, but he fretted that over time people might become so alienated by liberal democracy's benefits and bounty as to "assert themselves in new and unforeseen ways," and maybe even engage "in bloody prestige battles, this time with modern weapons."

Today, the brilliant and public-spirited Fukuyama, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Spogli Institute for International Studies, wears an older, wiser, and more practical public intellectual's clothes. In his 2011 book, The Origins of Political Order, he meditated for nearly 600 pages on the biological bases of human sociality, the trek from the Neanderthal clan to the Napoleonic Code, and the global transition from tribal cultures to early nation-states.

Now, in the second installment of this two-volume treatise, Political Order and Political Decay, Fukuyama picks up where the French Revolution left off and proceeds to the present. While he stresses that liberal democracy is not "humanly universal," he still believes that there is "a clear directionality to the process of political development" that favors liberal democracy. But, in stark contrast to The End of History and his concern over hypothetical last men and their possible discontents, in his latest book he is worried about liberal democracies not sustaining themselves and not reliably delivering peace, prosperity, and personal security to their peoples. As he writes, if "there has been a single problem facing contemporary democracies, whether aspiring or well established, it has been centered in their failure to provide the substance of what people want from government: personal security, shared economic growth, and quality of basic public services like education, health, and infrastructure that are needed to achieve individual opportunity."

From Africa to Asia to the Americas, he frets, there is a political deficit wrought by a lack of "modern states that are capable, impersonal, well organized, and autonomous" rather than "weak and ineffective" (emphasis in the original).

"Modern" states, as opposed to what the sociologist Max Weber called "patrimonial" ones. In patrimonial states, Fukuyama explains, the ruler "used his family or household, and friends--oftentimes the warriors who helped him conquer the territory in the first place--to staff his administration" and run it almost exclusively for their benefit. By contrast, modern states are staffed by officials chosen on the basis of merit and expertise, and run for the sake of a broad public interest. Modern states succeed patrimonial ones by delegitimizing the tendency to favor family and friends and instituting civil service examinations, merit qualifications, and rules against bribery, corruption, and conflicts of interest.

But differences in history, culture, geography, and leadership produce differences in modern state building from one country or continent to the next. Most African nations, Fukuyama reckons, are badly afflicted by what he terms "neopatrimonialism": each has "the outward form of a modern state, with a constitution ... a legal system, and pretensions of impersonality, but the actual operation of government remains at core a matter of sharing state resources with family and friends." In Turkey, Brazil, and some other nations, the problem is not so much neopatrimonialism as it is political institutions that are proving too rigid to adapt to social change. In the Middle East and elsewhere in the world, political violence remains sadly but stubbornly "integral ... to the creation of modern states."

Today's most vexing governance problems, however, are to be found in well-established liberal democracies that are undergoing "repatrimonialization," a term Fukuyama uses to describe the capture of ostensibly impersonal state institutions by powerful elites. Britain, Japan, and other liberal democracies each face serious challenges, but the United States, the world's first and most advanced liberal democracy, has suffered the most from repatrimonialization. "While the American economy remains a source of miraculous innovation, American government is hardly a source of inspiration around the world at the present moment."

Despite the Kennedys, Bushes, and Clintons, America is safely past overt nepotism and other neopatrimonial practices. Instead, over the last half century, America's political decay has been fueled by what Fukuyama characterizes as a new "tribalism" that authorizes influence peddling at the highest levels of modern politics. American government, Fukuyama declares, is now dominated by "interest groups that are able to effectively buy politicians with campaign contributions and lobbying." This perfectly legal vote buying is an insidious form of "clientelism" practiced with huge sums of money and at a much larger scale than ever before. Congress is now controlled by politicians who raise money and win reelection by granting political favors to their supporters.

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