Fukuyama Francis. Identity: Contemporary identity politics and the struggle for recognition

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018. — 193 p. — ISBN: 978-0-374-71748-3This book would not have been written had Donald J. Trump not been elected president in November 2016. Like many Americans, I was surprised by this outcome and troubled by its implications for the United States and the world.
It was the second major electoral surprise of that year, the first being Britain’s vote to leave the European Union the previous June.
I had spent much of the last couple decades thinking about the development of modern political institutions: how the state, rule of law, and democratic accountability first came into being, how they evolved and interacted, and, finally, how they could decay. Well before Trump’s election, I had written that American institutions were decaying as the state was progressively captured by powerful interest groups and locked into a rigid structure that was unable to reform itself.
Trump himself was both the product of and a contributor to that decay.
The promise of his candidacy was that, as an outsider, he would use his popular mandate to shake up the system and make it functional again.
Americans were tired of partisan gridlock and yearning for a strong leader who could unite the country again, breaking through what I labeled vetocracy —the ability of interest groups to block collective action. This kind of populist upsurge was what put Franklin D. Roosevelt into the White House in 1932 and reshaped American politics for the next two generations.