In 1992, Francis Fukuyama was so confident that Soviet Communism's defeat had left the Capitalism and Democracy as the last social theory standing, that he wrote an infamous book declaring "The End of History".

But by 2018, Mr. Fukuyama told New Statesman magazine that it was time to bring back many important elements of Socialism, such as public ownership of utilities and smoothing out inequality.

“If you mean redistributive programmes that try to redress this big imbalance in both incomes and wealth that has emerged then, yes, I think not only can it come back, it ought to come back," Fukuyama said.  "This extended period, which started with Reagan and Thatcher, in which a certain set of ideas about the benefits of unregulated markets took hold, in many ways it's had a disastrous effect."

The Chicago-born Fukuyama was a key figure in developing the Reagan Doctrine in the 1980s, supporting tax cuts for corporations, privatisation, and deregulation.  As the SSRs fell like dominoes in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the political scientist and theorist was caught up in the exuberance of his conservative colleagues; after all, the Soviets lost and Liberal Democracy and Capitalism won.  He took a victory lap with his book "The End of History and the Last Man", which posited that the competition of ideologies was at and end, with the world joining his team.  He played a role in the rise of the Neo-Conservative movement in the late 1990s.

But things started to go off the rails.  The Neo-Cons pushed for war in Iraq and they got it, to disastrous effect.  The threat of Islamic extremism was overstated.  Already the most unequal of the advanced economies, America's gap between rich and poor grew worse.  Growing nationalism pushed distrust in international institutions.  By 2008, the intellectual who worked for Ronald Reagan and both presidents named George Bush was endorsing Barack Obama for the presidency.

Now in 2018, Liberal Democracy is under threat from illiberalism, with far-right populists on the march from Poland and Hungary, Italy, the Philippines, Brazil, and beyond.  Fukuyama warned liberals not to overreact and assume that illiberal democracy is the new end of history.

“I think people should calm down a little bit."