Fukuyama on Trust

 

Screenshot from Frankly Fukuyama on YouTube

By Frank Filocomo

You may not agree with Francis Fukuyama's politics - I, for one, mostly do not - but his book, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, published in 1996 - is a must-read for anyone interested in how human cooperation and social capital propels civilizations forward, and how the lack thereof stunts their progress. 

Fukuyama has also written additional essays on the topic, notably: Social Capital and Civil Society in 1999. I particularly like this piece because it gets into the nitty-gritty of the term, as well as its positive and negative manifestations in America. 

Thus, Fukuyama's bona fides on the topic are well documented.

In a new 8-minute video for his YouTube channel, Frankly Fukuyama, the End of History author sounds an inauspicious note as it relates to the current state of trust and cooperation in America. He explains that in Trust he characterized the America of the 1990s as being typified by high levels of trust and social capital. In 2026, however, he's not so sanguine: "Now, unfortunately, if I were to rewrite Trust today, I would not characterize the United States any longer as high trust."

For Fukuyama, the main culprit of the erosion of trust in America is political polarization:

We don't accept a common set of facts on issues like vaccine safety or election integrity, and live by a series of conspiracy theories that inform us that things are not what they seem and are being manipulated by hidden elites.

This is certainly true. I've had conversations with a lot of people in my social orbit - most of whom are either Zoomers or late-millennials - who, disaffected with the orthodoxies of elites in academia and the legacy media, no longer trust anyone or anything. 

This disaffection, in turn, relegates them to their own tailor-made internet silos, wherein, increasingly, they begin to inhabit a reality incomprehensible to those who don't share their particular ideological persuasion. 

We no longer see people with whom we disagree as "friends across the aisle," but as evil actors, or, in some cases, as being sub-human. 

In an article for her Substack, How to Human, Lura Forcum writes about the dangers of "infra-humanization," the tamer kin to "dehumanization" 

From the article:

In fact, in laboratory research, while most participants won’t endorse the idea that another person is actually a cockroach or snake (i.e., dehumanization), they will readily agree that another person doesn’t experience as many emotions as they themselves do (i.e., infra-humanization).

Forcum continues: "Any time we suggest, no matter how subtly, that someone lacks the qualities that make humans uniquely human, it’s a steppingstone to full-on dehumanization."

This is a behavior steeped in distrust, and certainly one not conducive to the Tocquevillian spirit of togetherness and cooperation. 

Fukuyama notes that trust doesn't come about easily. "Trust," he remarks in the video, "takes time to build up, through a process of repeated interaction." A trust relationship that took years to cultivate, however, "can be undone in an instant if one of the parties betrays the other."

Our plague of hyper-polarization has, in effect, engendered feelings of betrayal towards our fellow countrymen. How, in other words, can we work and collaborate with those whom we see as "neo-Nazis" or "anti-American Maoists?" The answer, of course, is that we can't. 

Fukuyama is right in identifying political polarization as an impediment to trust and collaboration, but I think there are some other variables that he leaves out, namely, our ethos of hyper-individualism which has manifested itself in the libertarianism of the Right and the libertinism of the Left. That is, both the unbounded economic liberalism promoted by conservatives and the insatiable social liberalism of the Democrats have worked in tandem to erode the backbone of America: family and community. 

The third way, so to speak, is that of communitarianism, a social philosophy that seeks to strike a balance between the excesses of the Left and Right, and restore order, while still maintaining liberalism, in society. 

Communitarianism has made inroads in recent years, but there's still a lot of work to be done if the ultimate goal is to restore the America that preceded its descent into me-centric libertarianism.