India, Oct. 17 -- Francis Fukuyama, who will turn 74 this October, begins In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir on January 20, 2025, the day Donald Trump was sworn in as President of the United States. His second term, the American political-scientist writes in the Preface, marked "a major shift in global politics". Fukuyama accuses Trump of bypassing Congress through executive orders, issuing unconstitutional diktats, siding with Russia against liberal democracies, and imposing arbitrary tariffs on friendly countries. Only months into the presidency, he writes, "It is hard not to recognize that he is trying to turn the United States into an authoritarian country". It is a revealing opening for the memoir of a man whose best-known work has haunted him for nearly four decades, as accusation, joke and supposed proof of intellectual folly. Since his 1989 essay, The End of History? and the 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, every war and democratic collapse has been presented as evidence against him. "None of the individuals asking have read more than the title of my essay or book," he writes. They missed the five concluding chapters, where he considered how liberal democracy might fail and suggested that "History, rather than ending, had simply paused on its way to an uncertain future". His original claim was narrower than its popular version. Fukuyama argued that liberal democracy might represent the "end point of mankind's ideological evolution" and the "final form of human government". History meant the development of political ideas. Events would continue and countries could return to dictatorship. No rival to democracy, he maintained, had offered a better answer to the demand for liberty, equality and dignity. The second half of the 1992 title mattered just as much. Fukuyama's Last Man, taken from Nietzsche, is the person produced by a secure and prosperous liberal society. Fukuyama describes him as "a creature without pride... content with petty pleasures and material well-being". Peace has removed the causes for which earlier generations fought, leaving him restless and short of purpose. At the centre of this argument is the struggle for recognition. People want their equal dignity acknowledged, a desire known as isothymia. Democratic rights answer it by giving citizens a voice and a share of political power. Equality does not satisfy everyone. Some seek superior recognition, or "megalothymia". This can drive achievement and can also feed narcissists and tyrants. Fukuyama sees populism as a revolt against the "flattened horizons" of liberal life. Material hardship exists, he says, but anger also grows from humiliation and the suspicion that educated elites look down on ordinary citizens. The man who appears to have everything may still want a battle. Fukuyama ended his 1989 essay with a line that now reads like forewarning: "Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again." There is an element of self-defence in this reading. If every authoritarian reversal can be described as a pause, the end-of-history thesis becomes difficult to disprove. Liberal democracy can fail repeatedly while remaining humanity's theoretical destination. The thesis shifts from historical prediction towards political conviction: no other system is more desirable. Fukuyama's claim that his critics failed to read him also dismisses serious objections from those who did. Early in the memoir, Fukuyama writes briefly about his family. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, his relatives were interned, regardless of their American citizenship. The family lost property and savings. Fukuyama's defence of liberal rights grew in a family that had seen the state suspend those rights when fear made injustice convenient. Fukuyama believes the lesson was never fully absorbed. In 2025, he writes, the government returned to mistreating suspected undocumented migrants whose rights should have been protected. In the Realm of the Last Man is an intellectual self-portrait rather than the traditional autobiography some readers may expect. That reserve keeps the book fixed on the argument Fukuyama wants to settle. He does not recant the end of history theory. Liberal democracy is now presented as a hard-won arrangement that can be weakened from within, even by the country that once claimed to lead the liberal world. The certainty surrounding 1989 is gone. What remains is his belief that equal rights and accountable government have no better replacement, and his fear that too many people have grown restive regardless....