Our onetime and hopefully future pomocon contributor John Presnall recently called my attention to a you-tube video of Francis Fukuyama (and Harvey Mansfield) talking about his latest book Political Order and Political Decay: from the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy. John also has an excellent critique of Fukuyama’s main thesis, which perhaps we can convince him to share here, either as a comment or a post.

I’d gotten about a third of the way through the book’s comparative political science feast before other reading projects got in the way–perhaps this will prod me to back to it. All in all, it’s very impressive, as a browse of the table of contents will reveal. I’ll mainly leave you to form your judgment based on the video, but here’s a quote from the book that gives you a feeling for its more troubling and questionable aspects:

It also reflects the greater capacity of the British Westminster system for decisive action than America’s system of checks and balances. The United States to the present day has never succeeded in establishing the kind of high-quality state that exists in certain other rich democracies, particularly those coming out of the absolutist traditions such as Germany and Sweden.

Very Wilsonian, that.

However, Fukuyama, even if he is a statist, and as our Peter Lawler once put it, “A Teacher of Evil,” has sensible lessons to convey about American efforts at nation-building efforts abroad.