Ahundred days after Trump’s second inauguration, the political philosopher Francis Fukuyama published a blistering critique of his rule. The single thread running through all Trump’s policies—‘impossibly large and unpredictable tariffs’, ‘illegally firing thousands of federal employees’, ‘snatching people with legal rights off the streets and deporting them to foreign prisons’, ‘attacking universities and academic research institutions with a meat cleaver’—was his ‘total disregard for law and norms’. Trump’s disregard for legality—and thirst for revenge—meant ‘worse is to come’.footnote1 For Fukuyama, Trump was trying to consolidate executive power by eroding judicial independence, constraining press freedom and curtailing civil liberties—cornerstones of the liberal democracy that had emerged victorious in the 1990s, though now facing challenges.
This was in stark contrast to the triumphalist narrative propagated by the Trump White House. The key word here was ‘win’. Consider these headlines from the White House website: ‘Monday Morning Wins: Call It the “Trump Effect”’; ‘50 wins in 50 days: President Trump Delivers for Americans’; ‘week 15 wins: President Trump’s 100th Day Marked by More Success’; ‘50 Wins in the One Big Beautiful Bill’; ‘President Trump: “Our soldiers fight, fight, fight, and they win, win, win”’.footnote2 The ‘win’ keyword is a linchpin of Trump’s rhetorical strategy, which retroactively frames every policy drawback as a success. These White House headlines sparked a wave of mockery on Chinese social media, where Trump has long been referred to by two nicknames. One is Chuan Jianguo (川建国), meaning ‘Trump the Nation Builder’, though the nation he is inadvertently building is China, not the us. The other is Dong Wang (懂王), or King Know-It-All. Now he is garnering a further reputation, based on jokes about his ‘winnism’ (赢学). But Trump is not the only adept of this art. In The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama famously celebrated liberal democracy as ‘the only competitor’ left standing in the ring, after the other ideologies collapsed.footnote3 Although his tone is nearly always cool and measured, in substance, knock-out victory is Fukuyama’s paradigm, too. Their respective approaches constitute dialectical manifestations of American hegemonic discourse, ostensibly oppositional yet fundamentally serving the same ends.
In one sense, the claim to be winning is an endogenous requirement of hegemony. As Gramsci defined it, this mode of rule comprises both coercion and consent. A famous critique theorized their relationship as analogous to bank reserves (hard power) and paper currency (circulating ideas) in a financial system.footnote4 This raises the question of how a sense of reward can be cashed out for supporters, on the basis of this veiled coercion. Victory discourse emerges as an obvious solution. On the international stage, architects of hegemonic rule tend to rely upon a two-part narrative. First, this posits a teleological direction for history, in which the social model of the leading power is not only the best available option but is bound to win. Second, and concomitantly, alignment with the hegemon is the best way to maximize success, while attempts to forge alternative alliances are doomed to failure.
Hegemonic rule has an intrinsic need for winners’ discourse, then. But the narrative designed for one power may not be suitable for another, and even within the same hegemony, epochal shifts may render previously effective paradigms obsolete. Fukuyama, singled out here as perhaps the subtlest of liberal democracy’s analytical proponents, betrays profound discomfort about the prospects for his ideological brand. His clash with Trump prompts two lines of inquiry. First, how contingent is the decline of Fukuyama’s paradigm—might it regain its commanding position? Second, what novel problematics does Trump’s victory discourse introduce and what systemic implications might they carry? I will begin, though, by examining Fukuyama’s diagnosis of liberal democracy’s dilemmas—and the meaning of Trump as their solution.
Fukuyama first engaged with the question of what Donald Trump might represent as far back as 1992. The current us President is mentioned twice in The End of History and the Last Man, as Fukuyama lays out his philosophy of history. The book famously had its origins in a 1989 essay, ‘The End of History?’, published in The National Interest. Here Fukuyama deployed the Hegelian idea of the quest for recognition as the motor of history, reading it through the lens of Alexandre Kojève, whose work he had studied under Allan Bloom at Cornell.footnote5 The twentieth century was ending with ‘the unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism’, he wrote. ‘The triumph of the West, of the Western idea’ was evident in the exhaustion of viable systemic alternatives. The world was witnessing ‘the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’ Following Kojève, Fukuyama posited that liberal democracy’s institutionalization of mutual recognition, through equal rights and citizenship, would constitute the ultimate resolution of the struggle for recognition, thereby bringing about ‘the end of history’. Crucially, this ‘end’ denoted not temporal cessation but rather the ‘goal’ of history’s recognition struggles.footnote6
This intervention predated the concatenation of geopolitical ruptures that began in the autumn of 1989—the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the ‘Velvet Revolution’ in Czechoslovakia, the dissolution of the Soviet Union—which even American intelligence circles had hardly anticipated. The Cold War victory of the us seemingly validated Fukuyama’s ‘End of History?’ prognosis, catapulting him to intellectual prominence. Three years later in the much-revised book-length version, The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama reworked the ‘struggle for recognition’ argument by tracing it back to the social psychology of Plato’s Republic and Socrates’s hypothesization of the tripartite structure of the soul. Between ‘reason’ (νοῦς) and ‘appetite’ (ἐπιθυμία) lay the quality of thymos (θυμός), which Fukuyama translated as ‘spirit’ or ‘heart’. Thymos, in this reading, expressed the need to place value on things, starting with one’s self, and hence the struggle for recognition.footnote7
However, Fukuyama now pointed out, liberal-democratic institutionalization might create new problems for the drive for recognition. These could arise from radical egalitarian impulses (isothymia), dissatisfied with the residual inequalities of the capitalist division of labour, but also from excessive superiority drives (megalothymia). This is where Fukuyama’s prescient critiques of Trump were introduced. The competition for wealth and fame could provide a productive outlet for megalothymic personalities within liberal democracies, The End of History noted. But they might still be targets for egalitarian resentment: ‘the passion for equal recognition—isothymia—does not necessarily diminish with the achievement of greater de facto equality and material abundance, but may actually be stimulated by it.’ As Tocqueville saw, love of equality could be a deeper and more abiding passion than love of liberty. The ‘arrogant display’ of ‘unbridled megalothymia’ by real-estate dealer Trump, for example, was highly visible and could provoke egalitarian isothymic resentment among the masses.footnote8