How will US President Donald J. Trump be depicted in history books 100 years from now? (Yes, there’ll be books, even if there isn’t a USA.) A brutal man, wielding brute force, could have only been elected by brutes (even if his 2024 opponent won by 70.6 lakh votes), thanks to an electoral system designed with foresight for a time when it became the only way a White man could win. Maybe his chapter will be named after Francis Fukuyama’s famous 27-page essay in 1989, in the realist conservative journal The National Interest: “The End of History and the Last Man”. Though his chapter might be modified to “The Last White Man”.

In the 1990s (when his essay became a book), Fukuyama was derided for positing that liberal democracy was politics’ final stage. Today he is experiencing a second renaissance, as the wise old man of Stanford University—traditionally the academic focus of conservatism—who may have had a point in wondering if there was a teleology to the politics of mankind.

Fukuyama still believes that liberal democracy will triumph, if only because, historically, authoritarians can’t run an economy. Or put another way, people who advocate demolishing government cannot, paradoxically, run it.

No one doubts that Trump is nowadays in trouble and was doomed from the start. His achievements will not include long, hard negotiations on war and peace—trying........

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