I haven’t posted a piece for Frankly Fukuyama in a few weeks because I was involved in an accident at the end of November that put me out of commission for a few weeks, but I’m hopefully now on the mend. There are a lot of issues out there I’ve been meaning to discuss—for example, expanding on my observations about the impact of scale economies, and the return of Schedule F—but I want to talk about the state of global democracy in 2023 and as we look ahead to 2024. I discussed this issue recently with American Purpose fellow editorial board member Larry Diamond on my Frankly Fukuyama YouTube channel (be sure to subscribe!) which you can see here:

A year ago I felt reasonably confident that events were moving in the right direction. The Ukrainians had just liberated much of Kharkiv Oblast and the city of Kherson, and were preparing to move further south. At home, the 2022 midterms had seen election deniers lose in virtually every swing state race, while the Democrats avoided a massive loss of House seats as would normally happen in their first midterm election. We were finally free of the pandemic, and though inflation had returned, the U.S. economy was doing better than one might have expected.

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