The
The Weekend
Weekend Essay
Essay US
US politics
politics && policy
policy
Francis Fukuyama: what Trump unleashed means for
America
The
The Republican
Republican president-elect
president-elect isis inaugurating
inaugurating aa new
new era
era in
in US
US politics
politics and
and perhaps
perhaps
for the world as a whole
for the world as a whole
Francis Fukuyama NOVEMBER 7 2024
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The blowout victory of Donald Trump and the Republican party on Tuesday night will lead to
major changes in important policy areas, from immigration to Ukraine. But the significance of the
election extends way beyond these specific issues, and represents a decisive rejection by American
voters of liberalism and the particular way that the understanding of a “free society” has evolved
since the 1980s.
When Trump was first elected in 2016, it was easy to believe that this event was an aberration. He
was running against a weak opponent who didn’t take him seriously, and in any case Trump didn’t
win the popular vote. When Biden won the White House four years later, it seemed as if things had
snapped back to normal after a disastrous one-term presidency.
Following Tuesday’s vote, it now seems that it was the Biden presidency that was the anomaly, and
that Trump is inaugurating a new era in US politics and perhaps for the world as a whole.
Americans were voting with full knowledge of who Trump was and what he represented. Not only
did he win a majority of votes and is projected to take every single swing state, but the Republicans
retook the Senate and look like holding on to the House of Representatives. Given their existing
dominance of the Supreme Court, they are now set to hold all the major branches of government.
Trump has grown the red vote across the map
Swing between Republicans and Democrats, 2020 to 2024 (% points - hover for details)
Swing towards Democrats Swing towards Republicans
Swing direction: Republican Democrat
Source: Associated Press, FT results • Last updated 18:08:12
But what is the underlying nature of this new phase of American history?
Classical liberalism is a doctrine built around respect for the equal dignity of individuals through a
rule of law that protects their rights, and through constitutional checks on the state’s ability to
interfere with those rights. But over the past half century that basic impulse underwent two great
distortions. The first was the rise of “neoliberalism”, an economic doctrine that sanctified markets
and reduced the ability of governments to protect those hurt by economic change. The world got a
lot richer in the aggregate, while the working class lost jobs and opportunity. Power shifted away
from the places that hosted the original industrial revolution to Asia and other parts of the
developing world.
The second distortion was the rise of identity politics or what one might call “woke liberalism”, in
which progressive concern for the working class was replaced by targeted protections for a
narrower set of marginalised groups: racial minorities, immigrants, sexual minorities and the like.
State power was increasingly used not in the service of impartial justice, but rather to promote
specific social outcomes for these groups.
In the meantime, labour markets were shifting into
an information economy. In a world in which most
The real question at this workers sat in front of a computer screen rather than
point is not the malignity of lifted heavy objects off factory floors, women
his intentions, but rather his experienced a more equal footing. This transformed
ability to actually carry out power within households and led to the perception of
what he threatens a seemingly constant celebration of female
achievement.
The rise of these distorted understandings of
liberalism drove a major shift in the social basis of political power. The working class felt that
leftwing political parties were no longer defending their interests, and began voting for parties of
the right. Thus the Democrats lost touch with their working-class base and became a party
dominated by educated urban professionals. The former chose to vote Republican. In Europe,
Communist party voters in France and Italy defected to Marine Le Pen and Giorgia Meloni.
All of these groups were unhappy with a free-trade system that eliminated their livelihoods even as
it created a new class of super-rich, and were unhappy as well with progressive parties that
seemingly cared more for foreigners and the environment than their own condition.
A supporter wears a hat depicting both US and Mexican flags at a Trump campaign stop in Juneau, Wisconsin, last month © Jamie Kelter Davis/The New York Times/Redux/eyevine
These big sociological changes were reflected in voting patterns on Tuesday. The Republican
victory was built around white working-class voters, but Trump succeeded in peeling off
significantly more Black and Hispanic working-class voters compared with the 2020 election. This
was especially true of the male voters within these groups. For them, class mattered more than race
or ethnicity. There is no particular reason why a working-class Latino, for example, should be
particularly attracted to a woke liberalism that favours recent undocumented immigrants and
focuses on advancing the interests of women.
It is also clear that the vast majority of working-class voters simply did not care about the threat to
the liberal order, both domestic and international, posed specifically by Trump.
Donald Trump not only wants to roll back neoliberalism and woke liberalism, but is a major
threat to classical liberalism itself. This threat is visible across any number of policy issues; a new
Trump presidency will not look anything like his first term. The real question at this point is not
the malignity of his intentions, but rather his ability to actually carry out what he threatens. Many
voters simply don’t take his rhetoric seriously, while mainstream Republicans argue that the checks
and balances of the American system will prevent him from doing his worst. This is a mistake: we
should take his stated intentions very seriously.
Trump is a self-proclaimed protectionist, who says that “tariff” is the most beautiful word in the
English language. He has proposed 10 or 20 per cent tariffs against all goods produced abroad, by
friends and enemies alike, and does not need the authority of Congress to do so.
As a large number of economists have pointed out, this level of protectionism will have extremely
negative effects on inflation, productivity and employment. It will be hugely disruptive of supply
chains, which will lead domestic producers to request exemptions from what amount to heavy
taxes. This then provides the opportunity for high levels of corruption and favouritism as
companies rush to get on the president’s good side. Tariffs on this level also invite equally massive
retaliation by other countries, setting up a situation in which trade (and therefore incomes)
collapse. Perhaps Trump will back off in the face of this; he may also respond as former Argentine
president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner did by corrupting the statistical agency reporting the bad
news.
With regard to immigration, Trump no longer simply wants to close the border; he wants to deport
as many of the 11mn undocumented immigrants already in the country as possible.
Administratively, this is such a huge task that it will require years of investment in the
infrastructure needed to carry it out — detention centres, immigration control agents, courts and
so on.
It will have devastating effects on any number of industries that rely on immigrant labour,
particularly construction and agriculture. It will also be monumentally challenging in moral terms,
as parents are taken away from their citizen children, and would set the scene for civil conflict,
since many of the undocumented live in blue jurisdictions that will do what they can to prevent
Trump from getting his way.
Attendees at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July show their support for Trump’s immigration policies © Joe Raedle/Getty Images
With regard to the rule of law, Trump during this campaign has been singularly focused on seeking
revenge for the injustices he believes he has suffered at the hands of his critics. He has vowed to
use the justice system to go after everyone from Liz Cheney and Joe Biden to former Joint Chiefs of
Staff chair Mark Milley and Barack Obama. He wants to silence media critics by taking away their
licences or imposing penalties on them.
Whether Trump will have the power to do any of this is uncertain: the court system was one of the
most resilient barriers to his excesses during his first term. But the Republicans have been working
steadily to insert sympathetic justices into the system, such as Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida,
who threw out the strong classified documents case against him.
Some of the most important changes will come in
foreign policy and in the nature of the international
There are no European order. Ukraine is by far the biggest loser; its military
champions that can take the struggle against Russia was flagging even before the
place of America as Nato’s election, and Trump can force it to settle on Russia’s
leader, so its future ability terms by withholding weapons, as the Republican
to stand up to Russia and House did for six months last winter. Trump has
China is in grave doubt privately threatened to pull out of Nato, but even if
he doesn’t, he can gravely weaken the alliance by
failing to follow through on its Article 5 mutual
defence guarantee. There are no European champions that can take the place of America as the
alliance’s leader, so its future ability to stand up to Russia and China is in grave doubt. On the
contrary, Trump’s victory will inspire other European populists such as the Alternative for
Germany and the National Rally in France.
East Asian allies and friends of the US are in no better position. While Trump has talked tough on
China, he also greatly admires Xi Jinping for the latter’s strongman characteristics, and might be
willing to make a deal with him over Taiwan. Trump seems congenitally averse to the use of
military power and is easily manipulated, but one exception may be the Middle East, where he is
likely to be wholeheartedly supportive of Benjamin Netanyahu’s wars against Hamas, Hizbollah
and Iran.
There are strong reasons for thinking that Trump will be much more effective in accomplishing this
agenda than he was during his first term. He and the Republicans have recognised that policy
implementation is all about personnel. When he was first elected in 2016, he did not come into
office surrounded by a coterie of policy aides; rather, he had to rely on establishment Republicans.
In many cases, they blocked, deflected or slow-walked his orders. At the end of his term, he issued
an executive order creating a new “Schedule F” that would strip all federal workers of their job
protections and allow him to fire any bureaucrat he wanted. A revival of Schedule F is at the core of
the plans for a second Trump term, and conservatives have been busy compiling lists of potential
officials whose main qualification is personal loyalty to Trump. This is why he is more likely to
carry out his plans this time around.
Prior to the election, critics including Kamala Harris accused Trump of being a fascist. This was
misguided insofar as he was not about to implement a totalitarian regime in the US. Rather, there
would be a gradual decay of liberal institutions, much as occurred in Hungary after Viktor Orbán’s
return to power in 2010.
This decay has already started, and Trump has done substantial damage. He has deepened an
already substantial polarisation within society, and turned the US from a high-trust to a low-trust
society; he has demonised the government and weakened belief that it represents the collective
interests of Americans; he has coarsened political rhetoric and given permission for overt
expressions of bigotry and misogyny; and he has convinced a majority of Republicans that his
predecessor was an illegitimate president who stole the 2020 election.
Trump has increased his support across the electorate
Republican margin over Democrats, change since 2020, by demographic group
Shifted Republican Shifted Democrat
← Republican margin (%) →
-90 -80 -70 -60 -50 -40 -30 -20 -10 0 10 20 30 40
White non-college men
White non-college
women
White
Male
45-64
65+
White college men
Female
30-44
White college women
18-29
Hispanic
Asian
Black
Source: Catalist, Edison Research • Exit poll data is preliminary
The breadth of the Republican victory, extending from the presidency to the Senate and probably
to the House of Representatives as well, will be interpreted as a strong political mandate
confirming these ideas and allowing Trump to act as he pleases. We can only hope that some of the
remaining institutional guardrails will remain in place as he takes office. But it may be that things
will have to get a lot worse before they get better.
Francis Fukuyama is a senior fellow at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the
Rule of Law, and author most recently of ‘Liberalism and Its Discontents’
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