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can decay over time. They can get too rigid, they can fail to adapt, and if they do, then they’re going to get into trouble, just like authoritarian systems. The other issue, which we’ve already touched on, is contingency in history. So the route to getting into modernity is, I now think, full of a lot of accident, and so it’s not as if there’s this inevitable historical process that driving us toward the present. I think it should make us both more appreciative of the fact that we’ve gotten to the present and also more aware of the fragility of modern institutions.
SHAFFER: A lot of people have related that — your focus on the contingency of political order, and our ability to construct democracies — to your “falling-out” with neoconservatism. Was that “falling out” just local to some of the failures and disappointments of the Bush years or was it a break with the intellectual project as a whole?
FUKUYAMA: It was more a practical dispute over methods. I didn’t think U.S. hard power was an effective method [for advancing liberal democracy], and the Bush administration hadn’t really thought through the implications of invading Iraq. I still think there are ways that the United States can help promote democracy, but it’s a slow and long-term process. For example, I’m on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy, which had an important role in supporting solidarity in Poland in the 1980s, and in Serbia, and the Orange Coalition in Ukraine. So there are ways in which we’ve encouraged democratic forces around the world. I still believe in that mission and project. But I don’t think the Bush administration actually invaded Iraq to promote democracy. They had security objectives in mind, and they added the democracy argument as an
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