What has gone wrong in liberal democracies around the world since the 1990s when they seemed so triumphant? NPR asks Francis Fukuyama (above), Mosbacher director of Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law (and a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy):
FUKUYAMA: Well, there are several things. So one is just the fate of globalization, which actually worked very well in the aggregate. But it didn’t benefit everybody equally. You know, we’re now more than a generation away from the collapse of communism. And in a way, everybody now takes democracy for granted. And they’re very unhappy with the way that their institutions are performing, I think, both in the United States and in Europe.
