Pushkin.

It's hard to read the news these days without asking yourself, how did we get here?

Fiasco is a history podcast for the co-creators of Slow Burn.

In our first season, Bush v. Gore, we examine an unmistakable turning point in American politics, the 2000 election, which resulted in a high-stakes stalemate, ended with one of the most controversial rulings in Supreme Court history.

So if you're trying to make sense at the present moment, check out Fiasco, Bush v. Gore. Listen on theHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

From Pushkin Industries, this is Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news.

I'm Noah Feldman. This week, we're in the middle of a deep background mini-series on international power and the people who shape it.

In this episode, we're fortunate to have one of the world's best-known public intellectuals to help us explore important aspects of these questions.

Francis Fukuyama is a scholar based at Stanford University, where he's a professor of political

science and a senior fellow at the Spoli Institute for International Studies. For 30 years now,

he's been writing fascinating, influential books about democracy, political order,

how it develops, how it changes, and how it can decay.

He first came to global attention with an essay and book, The End of History and The Last

Man, published just at the point that the Cold War was beginning to come to an end.

Since then, he's published, among other things, two massive 650-page books on the nature of political

order, from pre-human times to the French Revolution, and then on political order and political

decay from the Industrial Revolution to the globalization of democracy.

Most recently, he published a fascinating book on identity and contemporary politics.

Today, we're going to delve deep into the question of what decay is, whether the United States

is entering a period of decay that is going to affect its global standing,

its relationship with other countries in the world, and particularly China.

Sometimes controversial, always provocative, and frequently extraordinarily deep.

...