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Ever since the year 2016, when Britain voted for Brexit and Trump was elected president, social scientists, journalists, pundits, and almost everyone else have been trying to explain the rise of global populism. There has been a standard list of causes:
Economic inequality brought on by globalization and neoliberal policies.
Racism, nativism, and religious bigotry on the part of populations that have been losing status.
Broad sociological changes that have sorted people by education and residence, and resentment at the dominance of elites and experts.
The special talents of individual demagogues like Donald Trump.
The failures of mainstream political parties to deliver growth, jobs, security, and infrastructure.
Dislike or hatred of the progressive Left’s cultural agenda.
Failures of leadership of the progressive Left.
Human nature and our proclivities towards violence, hatred, and exclusion.
Social media and the internet.
I myself have contributed to this literature, and like everyone else ticked off cause #9, social media and the internet, as one of the contributing factors. However, after pondering these questions for nearly a decade, I have come to conclude that technology broadly and the internet in particular stand out as the most salient explanations for why global populism has arisen in this particular historical period, and why it has taken the particular form that it has.
I’ve come to this conclusion by process of elimination. It is clear that all nine of the factors above have played some role in the rise of global populism. Populism, however, is a multifaceted phenomenon where certain causal factors are more powerful in explaining particular aspects of the phenomenon, or in explaining why populism manifests itself more powerfully in certain countries than others. For example, while racial resentments obviously play an important role in America, they do not in Poland, which is one of the most ethnically homogeneous societies in the world. And yet the populist Law and Justice Party came to power there for eight years.
Let’s go through the weaknesses of explanations 1 through 8.
Cause #1, growing economic disparities, was certainly a powerful driver of working-class voters toward populist parties and figures like Trump. However, around half of all Americans voted for Trump at a time when employment and overall growth were relatively high. We were not in the midst of a depression, as was the case in 1933 when Franklin Roosevelt was elected and the unemployment rate stood at nearly 25%. While economic stresses from inflation certainly drove many Americans to vote for Trump in 2024, inflation was far higher and more persistent in the 1970s.
Cause #2, the idea that populism is driven by a nativist white backlash, is a plausible one. While countries like Poland and Hungary don’t share America’s troubled racial history, one could argue that fear of immigration and the dilution of the power of those countries’ dominant ethnic groups was a powerful motivator of populist support. But even in America, racial fears are only part of the story. While Trump gets support from overtly racist groups and figures like the Proud Boys or Nick Fuentes, many non-whites, including African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians, decided to vote for him in 2020 and 2024. Indeed, Trump has succeeded in doing what the Democrats once did: assembling a multi-racial working-class coalition.
Cause #3, the broad sorting that has occurred where Democrats have become the party of educated professionals living in big cities, while Republican voters are less educated and more rural, is replicated in many countries around the world. But sorting is more likely an effect of a deeper sociological change rather than a factor driving that change. Americans were not deciding to move to the countryside because they were conservative; rather, there was something about the conditions of life in rural versus urban areas that engendered different political perspectives.
Cause #4, the special talents of Donald Trump, is undeniable; he has many imitators but few have demonstrated the demagogic abilities that he has. But the MAGA movement that he has spawned has succeeded in taking over almost completely one of America’s two major parties, something that doesn’t happen purely by one man’s force of will. Becoming a Trump loyalist required many Republicans to abandon long-held beliefs about things like free trade and internationalism that once defined them. The fact that they were susceptible to this conversion is the phenomenon that needs to be explained.
Cause #5, the failure of Democratic politicians to solve or even address problems of public order, homelessness, drug use, infrastructure, and housing was obviously important to many centrist and independent voters. This was a big factor as well in many down-ballot races, where blue states and cities compiled poor governance records. But honestly, poor governance under left-leaning politicians has been with us for quite a while (recall New York City under Abe Beame and David Dinkins). One could argue that the social consequences of the pandemic triggered special awareness of these weaknesses, but Trumpism existed well before 2020.
Causes #6 and #7—intense dislike of left-coded cultural issues like DEI, affirmative action, political correctness, LGBTQ policies, immigration, and poor leadership by Democrats—are obviously related. It was poor judgment by Democratic politicians that allowed the party to be defined by these cultural factors, rather than staking out clear positions on economic issues of more general appeal. The problem with seeing cultural issues as central to the rise of populism, however, is that they have been around for quite a while. Feminism and social dysfunctions like drug addiction and family breakdown date back to the late 1960s, while identity politics made its debut in the ‘70s and ‘80s. These social movements engendered backlash and contributed to the elections of conservative presidents like Nixon and Reagan. Yet they did not set off the kind of furious reactions seen in the 2020s.
Cause #8, human nature, has been raised recently by Bill Galston in his new book Anger, Fear, Domination: Dark Passions and the Power of Political Speech, and celebrated in a recent review by Jonathan Rauch. Galston argues that ugly polarization and partisanship have always been part of human politics; the liberal civility that contemporary democracies have enjoyed in recent decades is an anomaly that needs to be explained, and not the norm of human existence.
The problem with any explanation of a social phenomenon that takes human nature as its starting point is the question of “why now?” Human nature has presumably been constant throughout human history; it does not explain why people’s behavior turned suddenly ugly midway through the second decade of the 21st century. A permanent human nature must be interacting with some other phenomenon that is more transitory and time-bound. In any event, Steven Pinker among others has argued that human behavior has been getting less violent over time, and there is a substantial body of empirical evidence to back him up. It is hard to argue that the sort of political extremism we’ve seen in recent years in the United States is worse than other instances of societal breakdown. Remember the Nazis?
Any satisfactory explanation for the rise of populism has to deal with the timing question; that is, why populism has arisen so broadly and in so many different countries in the second decade of the 21st century. My particular perplexity centers around the fact that, by any objective standard, social and economic conditions in the United States and Europe have been pretty good over the past decade. Indeed, it would be hard to argue that they have been this good at many other points in human history. Yes, we had big financial crises and unresolved wars, yes we had inflation and growing economic inequality, yes we had outsourcing and job loss, and yes we had poor leadership and rapid social change. Yet in the 20th century, advanced societies experienced all of these conditions in much worse forms than in recent years—hyperinflation, sky-high levels of unemployment, mass migration, civil unrest, domestic and international violence. And yet, according to contemporary populists, things have never been worse: crime, migration, and inflation are completely out of control, and they are transforming society beyond recognition, to the point where, in Trump’s words, “you’re not going to have a country any more.” How do you explain a political movement based on assertions so far removed from reality?
As I wrote in a recent article, the current populist movement differs from previous manifestations of right-wing politics because it is defined not by a clear economic or political ideology, but rather by conspiratorial thinking. The essence of contemporary populism is the belief that the evidence of reality around us is fake, and is being manipulated by shadowy elites pulling strings behind the scenes.
Conspiracy theories have always been part of right-wing politics in the United States. But today’s conspiracies are incredibly outlandish, like the QAnon belief that the Democrats are operating secret tunnels under Washington, D.C. and drinking the blood of young children. Educated people would rather criticize Trump’s trade policies than his connections with Jeffrey Epstein, and yet the latter has dogged him relentlessly for several months now (although here we have the case of an actual conspiracy to cover up this connection).
This is what leads me to think that Cause #9, the rise of the internet and social media, is the one factor that stands above the others as the chief explanation of our current problems. Broadly speaking, the internet removed intermediaries, traditional media, publishers, TV and radio networks, newspapers, magazines, and other channels by which people received information in earlier periods. Back in the 1990s, when the internet was first privatized, this was celebrated: anybody could become their own publisher, and say whatever they wanted online. And that is just what they did, as all the filters that previously existed to control the quality of information disappeared. This both precipitated and was an effect of the broad loss of trust in all sorts of institutions that occurred in this period.
Moving online created a parallel universe that bore some relationship to the physically experienced world, but in other cases could exist completely orthogonally to it. While previously “truth” was imperfectly certified by institutions like scientific journals, traditional media with standards of journalist accountability, courts and legal discovery, educational institutions and research organizations, the standard for truth began to gravitate instead to the number of likes and shares a particular post got. The large tech platforms pursuing their own commercial self-interest created an ecosystem that rewarded sensationalism and disruptive content, and their recommendation algorithms, again acting in the interest of profit-maximization, guided people to sources that never would have been taken seriously in earlier times. Moreover, the speed with which memes and low-quality content could travel increased dramatically, as well as the reach of any particular piece of information. Previously, a major newspaper or magazine could reach perhaps a million readers, usually in a single geographic area; today, an individual influencer can reach hundreds of millions of followers without regard to geography.
Finally, as Renee DiResta has explained in her book Invisible Rulers, there is an internal dynamic to online posting that explains the rise of extremist views and materials. Influencers are driven by their audiences to go for sensational content. The currency of the internet is attention, and you don’t get attention by being sober, reflective, informative, or judicious.
Nothing illustrates the central role of the internet more than the spread of the anti-vax movement, and the installation of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy’s various assertions about the dangers of vaccinations are not only untrue; they are actively dangerous, because they convince parents not to give their children life-saving vaccines. It is hard to connect opposition to vaccines to any kind of coherent conservative ideology—indeed, in earlier periods conservatives would have welcomed the innovation and benefits that vaccines conferred. It is the internet that facilitated what grew into a vast network of vaccine skeptics. No number of empirical scientific studies could overcome the desire of many people who wanted to believe that there were evil forces in American society pushing things that were harmful to them, and they saw plentiful confirmation of their views on the internet.
DiResta gives an example of how the internet contributed to this spread directly. There should be no reason why yoga moms should be drawn to QAnon and conspiratorial thinking. There was, however, one prominent yoga guru who urged his followers to look to QAnon for the truth. An algorithm on an internet platform picked up this connection, and in effect decided that if this yoga influencer was into QAnon, other yoga aficionados should also be into conspiracy theories as well, and started recommending conspiratorial content to them. That is what algorithms do: they don’t understand meaning or context, but simply seek to maximize attention by directing people to popular content.
There is another type of internet content that explains the particular character of our politics today, which is video gaming. This connection was brought home by the case of the young man, Tyler Robinson, who allegedly shot Charlie Kirk. Robinson was evidently radicalized on the internet. He was an active gamer who inscribed memes from that world on the shell casings of the bullets he used. This was also true of many of the January 6 participants, who had taken the “red pill” and could see the conspiracy of mainstream forces to steal the election from Donald Trump. And the video gaming world is huge, with worldwide revenues estimates in the range of $280-300 billion.
So the advent of the internet can explain both the timing of the rise of populism, as well as the curious conspiratorial character that it has taken. In today’s politics, the red and blue sides of America’s polarization contest not just values and policies, but factual information like who won the 2020 election or whether vaccines are safe. The two sides inhabit completely different information spaces; both can believe that they are involved in an existential struggle for American democracy because they begin with different factual premises as to the nature of the threats to that order.
None of this means that causes 1 through 8 are not important or helpful in leading us to an understanding of our present situation. But in my view, it is only the rise of the internet that can explain how we can be in an existential struggle for liberal democracy, at a time in history when liberal democracy has never been as successful.
Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University. His latest book is Liberalism and Its Discontents. He is also the author of the “Frankly Fukuyama” column, carried forward from American Purpose, at Persuasion.
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Cause #6 is given far too short a shrift. FF acknowledges that cultural factors played an important role in the Nixon and Reagan ascendencies. That should a clue to be paid attention to, as opposed to written off as not explaining the current more intense cultural counter-reaction.
The Left in the West has pushed much farther to disavow and delegitimize national identity and sovereignty in the past 10 years than in any previous era. Immigration in the US and Europe especially from non-Western countries has reached levels maybe an order of magnitude higher. It’s hard to imagine the British grooming gangs scandal occurring in the 80’s. We get treated every day on X to 15 year old Trump-lite statements about immigration from the Clintons, Schumer and Biden. We hear historically very extremist positions on transgender surgery for children and men playing in women’s sports.
The rise of populism is only in very direct proportion to the level of extremism embedded in our current culture. Progressive control over culture hijacked long standing and accepted national and personal norms in service of its social justice urge, an urge which is profoundly antithetical to long accepted ideals of family nation and God.
Eventually ordinary common sense people (ie populists) say ENOUGH! I am proud of my country, I believe in God and value traditional family centric ideals. And Im tired of being scolded by a bunch of wingnuts.
This explanation is useful because the dynamic and feelings I have described are universal around Western countries.
In many ways we are in a similar spot to Renaissance Europe, after the development of the printing press and before the adoption of widespread censorship. When Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door it was dismissed as an “argument between monks” by Charles V, but within 3 years his message had circulated to millions of people, and the first state-led attempts to regulate media began.
The ultimate Renaissance conspiracy theory was probably the book Malleus Maleficarum or The Hammer of the Witches by Heinrich Kramer. Kramer managed to overturn an elite consensus forbidding the execution of witches that had lasted for a thousand years, arguing that Canon Law forbidding executions didn’t apply to “modern” witches who were responsible for anomalous weather patterns and crop failures. This coincided with the Little Ice Age. The book was a bestseller second only to the Bible for centuries, causing at least 60,000 deaths, 80% of them women.