Political Theory for the Institutional Left Part 1

Francis Fukuyama and the War Against DOGE

Francis Fukuyama has been writing about philosophy for decades. What makes the current moment belong to him is that his ideas meet the moment. Many aspects of Fukuyama’s ideology are ascendant within the anti-Trump resistance. People within the Democratic Party are turning to Fukuyama’s theory of institutions to explain everything from Musk’s DOGE to Trump’s new foreign policy.

Fukuyama is most known for declaring The End of History in 1992. In Fukuyama’s telling, liberal democracy is the final form of political order and the grand conflict between different political systems (capital H-History) is simply over. Fast forward to the present day, and Fukuyama has become the most vociferous defender of an idea known as ‘the democracy of institutions’.

‘The democracy of institutions’ is the idea that a liberal democracy must have electoral power balanced by mediating institutions.

These mediating institutions both shape public opinion directly and filter public opinion and the decisions of elected officials through institutions. Implicit in the democracy of institutions is an assumption about human nature — people will have unruly, chaotic, populist sentiments which must be tempered by education and journalism.

This refined public opinion then is processed by elections after which elected officials go through another layer of mediating institutions. Their power is further mediated by independent agencies, career civil servants, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) before they become law. Each layer of mediating institutions is central to the function of the democracy of institutions.

Reactionaries might be pleasantly surprised at how much Fukuyama’s political theory shares with Curtis Yarvin. I would love to have Francis Fukuyama and Curtis Yarvin sit down and talk about in terms of pure amoral descriptions of how things work. Not in terms of good and bad, but purely describing how things happen in the American political system. What do Francis Fukuyama and Curtis Yarvin actually disagree on?