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- [00:01]
Yascha Mounk
Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or
- [00:07]
Francis Fukuyama
crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money
- [00:10]
Yascha Mounk
side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now@bloomberg.com
- [00:19]
Francis Fukuyama
There's a lot of things that make liberal societies attractive. You know, that they are more innovative, they're richer, they're more culturally rich. You think of all of the things that have come out of classically lib societies over the centuries. And you know, that's basically the modern world in many respects. And I think that we need to kind of constantly remind ourselves that that's really what we're fighting to preserve. And now the good fight with Jascha Monk.
- [00:53]
Yascha Mounk
Believe me, I am as tired as you are of thinking about yet another story in which parts of American academia have gone mad, yet another story in which somebody was, quote, unquote, canceled for their political views. But what has happened at mit, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology over the last weeks is, I think, something more than just another campus cancel story. Dorian Abbott is a geophysicist at University of Chicago. He was meant to give a big public lecture on climate change at mit, and then the campaign to cancel him began. The reason is that he had written a piece in Newsweek, in a big national magazine, advocating for what he calls a merit, fairness and equality framework. He opposes affirmative action, but he also opposes legacy and athletic admissions, which, as he points out, significantly favor white applicants. Whether or not his beliefs are right, they are widely held in the American population. According to a recent poll by Pew, for example, 74% of Americans believe that in making hiring decisions, companies and organizations should only take qualifications into account, even if it results in less diversity. Only 24% believe I should also take race and ethnicity into account in order to increase diversity. And yet these views, and a admittedly unfortunate analogy to the Germany of the 1930s, were enough to rile up a social media mob and make MIT chicken out. Make MIT disinvite Abbott. Now, how is this different from other recent stories? Why is it worth me talking about this? Well, in a lot of the cases in the last years in which people were disinvited from campus, the reason was that they held controversial views which they were likely to express in one way or another in the lecture. When the far right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was invited to speak at Berkeley, students there had every reason to think that he would try to be a far right provocateur during his lecture at Berkeley. Even when people try to Cancel lectures by somebody like Charles Murray on unrelated topics to his most controversial statements about race and iq. They can make an argument that his social scientific views on race and disqualify him as a social scientist on other topics. Now, I strongly disagree with Morris views on race, and I find Yiannopoulos to be a trollish provocateur. Even so, I think that they should be allowed to speak on campus if invited. As Nicholas Christakis put it on Twitter, there's no right to be invited to speak at a college. But once a person is invited, a college should never yield to demands to withdraw an invitation. Abbott's case is worse than those of either Yiannopoulos or more. And that's not just because his views are much more mild. It's because they have nothing to do with the topic that he was going to lecture about. And if we establish the principle that the political views you might have expressed in some public forum disqualify you from kinds of other work, from talking about your research, natural sciences, from leading a business, from doing any number of things that Americans in public positions might do, that I think is really, really dangerous. It goes even beyond being unwilling to give uncomfortable ideas a hearing. It basically creates a kind of blacklist which says that anybody who has expressed controversial ideas about any topic may no longer be able to exercise their profession. That's why MIT's decision is not just another in a long series of controversies. It sets a precedent that will, unless it's forcefully resisted, pose a serious threat to the maintenance of a free society. My guest today needs no introduction. It is Frances Fukuyama. Frank teaches at Stanford University. He is the author of many important books, including Identity, the Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment that was published in 2018, and a really important two volume history of political development and how modern democracies evolved. But I'm really excited to speak to him about his next book called Liberalism and Its Discontents. After many years of people trying to write books that explain and defend liberalism, this is the one that I have found to be most persuasive. And so we have a wide ranging conversation about the nature of liberalism, some of the ways in which it has gone wrong over the past decades, but also how to rejuvenate it and why it remains such a vital political ideal. Frank Fukuyama, welcome back to the podcast.
- [06:52]
Francis Fukuyama
Thanks very much, Yascha. It's great to be on again.
- [06:55]
Yascha Mounk
Well, it's always a pleasure and a privilege to speak to you and I'm especially excited about this conversation because I've just read a draft of your next book and there's been many defenses of liberalism over the last few years. There haven't been any so far that I found to be really satisfying and I felt made the thoughtful but also full throated defense of it that we need. And in my opinion, your book is that. So I'm excited to talk about it. I actually found your discussion of what liberalism is to be really clarifying. So what is this tradition that we like to talk about? We like to worry that it's embattled, but we often have trouble putting into words.
- [07:37]
Francis Fukuyama
Sure. So it's a really old doctrine and I think there's several reasons that it's been around for such a long time. I mean, there's a pragmatic political reason, I think there's a moral reason, and then there's a very powerful economic one. The practical one, I think is one that we've kind of lost sight of, which is that liberalism is really a doctrine meant to deal with diversity. When people really don't agree on some fundamental issues, but they live in the same society, how do you get them to live peacefully with one another? And that's related to its origin. It came out of the wars of religion in Europe following the Protestant Reformation when Protestants and Catholics spent 150 years killing each other. And I think that the founders of liberalism basically said, look, if we're going to base a society on some religious doctrine of some particular sect, we're never going to live in peace because nobody agrees on those. And so let's detune politics and agree that we all need to live together and push religion, religion into a kind of private sphere. So you can worship whatever you want, but you're not going to impose it on anyone else. And I think that over the years that's really been one of the most powerful selling points, is that you have real diversity in societies. I mean, a couple hundred years later it wasn't religion, it was nation Germans versus Poles or Russians versus other people. And I think for the same reason, liberalism after 1945 became the dominant doctrine. Because if you base society on one particular ethnicity and one particular culture, you can't deal with people that aren't of that ethnicity and culture. And we live in a pretty mixed world. And so right now, when you use the word diversity, I think a lot of the left has captured that and may have only a very limited understanding of diversity. It's really things related to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, but there's political diversity as well. And you need liberalism because people really don't agree about a lot of things in politics. So that's a starting point, at least.
- [09:47]
Yascha Mounk
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- [11:52]
Francis Fukuyama
No, that's absolutely right. I think that if you look at any real world liberal society, like the United States, like France, like Germany, there are actually all sorts of groups. It's not as if everybody's living in the little private world, disconnected with their families and friends and people that think like they do. The problem, I think, is that the doctrine that's based on individualism was picked up, I think, especially by modern economics and turned into a kind of dogma where for the economists, you know, there is no such thing as society, that everybody's just a selfish individual. And the only way you get to society is by them calculating that it's more in my interest to cooperate with another person than it is to, you know, do things on my own. And that leads to, I think, first of all, fundamental misunderstanding of human nature. Because we are selfish individuals. Nobody would say that we don't respond to incentives and that sort of thing. But, you know, I think the pandemic above all has shown how intensely social we are as human beings, that if we are isolated in our individualism, we feel terrible. And the moment that we can actually get together with other people and re establish connections, we flock to it, just the way people have been doing the moment these social distancing rules have been relaxed. But it seems to me in a real world liberal society, and certainly in the proper understanding of liberalism, you take both of those sides seriously, that we are both defined by the groups that we choose to be members of, and we're also individuals that don't have to accept those choices. I mean, obviously the difficulties come in because some of the groups that we are parts of are not ones that we've chosen. And I do think that there is a little bit of a liberal tendency to try to pretend that every single group we're a member of is one that we voluntarily accepted, which is, I think, the ideal. But, you know, the fact is that there are these characteristics like race and gender and so forth that actually define us as members of groups. And I think that's what a lot of the current fight is about, you know, when you talk about things like identity.
- [14:12]
Yascha Mounk
So what is the right conception of how to deal with that tension? I mean, in one kind of valence, it is the fight that liberal political philosophers have of communitarian political philosophers, or sometimes called multiculturalist political philosophers, or in the French sense, communitarist, in which liberals say the individual is the basic unit of society. And so if you grow up as a member of a group, that's all fine and well, but if you want to leave that group, then the state needs to step in and ensure that you're able to leave that group, even against the will of your religious elder, whoever else it may be. Whereas there's an alternative tradition that criticizes liberalism that tends to say that it's actually the groups that have a constitutive unit of society or of a state. And at that point, it seems to be difficult to explain why the state might have a right or even an obligation to step in to help these individuals escape. So how do liberals think through that? And what do you think the nature of this fight you're describing is today?
- [15:16]
Francis Fukuyama
Well, I think one important distinction is between what sociologists call ascriptive and voluntary groups. So an ascripted group is one that you're born into simply because of biology, because of your sex, your race. And I realize that these are to some degree socially constructed categories, but as you yourself say in your forthcoming book, not entirely. There is a kind of biological basis to them. And I think that it becomes particularly problematic when that biological group that you are assigned to becomes essential. And when you start to believe and the state begins to believe that that's the most important thing that they can know about you, as opposed to what you as an individual with your own experiences and upbringing and moral priors and so forth, believe. And that's, I think, where that kind of focus on groupishness really begins to go wrong, because it really den individual agency that I think is critical to all of us. I think that, on the other hand, I've been always very sympathetic to the more communitarian critics of really strict liberals like John Rawls, because I do think that sociability is such a deeply ingrained aspect of human nature that you need to give due respect to people's desire to be with other people in groups. But to the extent that those can be ones that they have voluntarily, I think that liberalism certainly not only doesn't have a problem with it, it actually encourages that. I mean, the freedom of association is one of the most fundamental liberal rights that a liberal state gives you. So I do think that there's a way to sort out what kind of communitarian belongings are healthier and more legitimate and which ones really do serve as a real constraint on your individual choice.
- [17:20]
Yascha Mounk
So you mentioned your criticism of John Rawls. This is an internal fight within liberalism, and it seems to me that you're making the argument that John Rawls was actually a false path within liberalism. Explain a little bit more why you feel that Rawls is too individualist or individualist in the wrong way and what the alternative tradition within liberalism is.
- [17:41]
Francis Fukuyama
So I think that, you know, one of the other big arguments in favor of liberalism has to do with the concept of dignity. And at least in the kind of Western civilization that we've grown up in, that really has a lot to do with choice and the possibility of essentially moral choice. In a lot of my writings, I've kind of traced the intellectual history of this. I really do think that it comes out of this Judeo Christian tradition. You know, Adam and Eve are cast out of the Garden of Eden because they make the wrong choice. But the fact that they can choose also gives them a moral status that's higher than plants and animals and the rest of created nature. And I think over the centuries that has really evolved into our understanding of what gives all of us dignity. So, you know, Martin Luther King in his famous 1964 speech says, you know, I look forward to the day when Americans will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their characters. Meaning it's that ability to make right moral choices that really gives us dignity, and that's what the state needs to accept. So, you know, choice is very important, but traditionally it's been understood choice within a pre existing moral framework. You don't get to make up the framework that's not a component of your choice. But in Western philosophy, by the time you get to the late 19th century and writers like Friedrich Nietzsche, that's exactly what he was talking about. He said the freest person is his character, Zarathustra, that not only can obey the law, but makes the law himself. And so choice becomes detached from any of the moral frameworks that previously had defined how societies understood themselves. And choice itself, just for its own sake, detached from any of the other goods that people may pursue is what is valuable. And Rawls is just the culmination of this. I mean, he takes us to an extreme. I mean, there's a formulation that theorists use. He says justice is prior to the good and translated into normal English. What that means is that the preservation of your right to choose is more important than the substance of whatever it is you choose. And I think it's a kind of absolutization of choice over the things that people in the real world want to choose. I mean, some of us actually want to live in a religious tradition and we don't want to be able to say, you know, that we're God and we're deciding what's right and wrong. We want to live within a moral framework that has been pre established, that gives coherence and meaning because it's a very large and complex body of thought that lies behind it. We don't want to be able to make stuff up on our own. So I think that Rawls absolutizes choice and downplays the other aspects of moral behavior that I think are very important to when we think of ourselves as people with dignity that have an ability to choose.
- [20:46]
Yascha Mounk
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- [21:59]
Francis Fukuyama
Well, I think the answer to that is actually contained in the US First Amendment, which protects the right to the free exercise of religion and that the state cannot prevent the free exercise. And by free exercise, in First Amendment law it means several things. First of all, the state cannot prescribe what religious views you need to follow, but you yourself cannot impose those religious views on other people. You can try to persuade them and convert them and argue with them, but ultimately if you hold any kind of power over people, you're not allowed to use that to force them to believe the same things that you do. I think that that's been the American understanding right from the beginning. In contrast to the kind of anti clerical French or Kemalist in Turkey understandings where the target was religion itself. I think in the United States we've always understood that one of the basic freedoms that we enjoy is the freedom to choose our set of religious beliefs. But that's limited by an injunction that we cannot impose that on other people. And that's how I would interpret the tradition of liberalism. Prior to Rawls, that actually that ability to exercise religious belief freely was one of the most basic freedoms that we enjoyed in a liberal society.
- [23:19]
Yascha Mounk
You chronicled two different ways in which liberalism has gone astray for the last few decades. And that may help to explain why it is that the critics of liberalism now seem to be in the ascendance in so many countries. The first of those is economic a sort of transformation of liberalism into a form of neoliberalism. Tell us more about that.
- [23:42]
Francis Fukuyama
So this is my opportunity to piss off people both on the right and on the left. But yes, I think that there are two versions of liberalism that have been carried to extremes that are really not supportable. And a lot of the unhappiness with contemporary liberalism is because of that carrying to extreme. So on the right, it really has to do with the evolution of economic liberalism into what's been labeled neoliberalism. Some people think of neoliberalism just as a synonym for capitalism. But I have a much more specific definition that neoliberalism is the version that was associated with the Chicago School of economics, with people like Milton Friedman or George Stigler that were in a way market fundamentalist and really became intellectually ascendant in the Reagan Thatcher years as a guide to public policy, where one of the things that held that group together was a pervasive hostility to the state. In their account, markets really were such efficient allocators of goods and resources, the state almost always got in the way of that efficient allocation. And therefore minimization of state action became the single guiding principle that led to the policies that they tried to enact. And that's something that took place all across the rich world from the 1980s on. It wasn't just in Britain and the United States. Now, there was something to that, because I think by the 1970s there was too much regulation, there was a lot of stagnation due to inefficient state owned enterprises in Britain and France and a lot of other countries. So there was a point to that critique, but it became a religion where the state was simply opposed whether or not there was actually something useful that it was doing. And I think that simply went too far. And a lot of the populist backlash that you've been writing about so much over the last several years is actually due to this neoliberal economic world that was created where if you could squeeze the slightest couple of cents out of a supply chain by moving your production out of North America into some Asian country, you would immediately do that. And not only that if you could squeeze your workers, you could insist that they not join a union and then nibble away at their benefits and so forth. You were justified in doing this because there was an economist that said, well, that's what makes capitalism efficient, is this ruthless focus on efficiency. And so that was one of the versions. Neoliberalism in that sense, was one of the versions that I think has made a lot of young people really dislike capitalism per se. I mean, today they kind of associate capitalism with this extremely ruthless and competitive version of it. And that has had a lot of, I think, dire political consequences for all of us.
- [26:44]
Yascha Mounk
How universal phenomenon do you think that is? What you were saying about young people disliking capitalism because they associated with this form of neoliberalism seems plausible in the United States and perhaps to some extent in the United Kingdom. The same claim is often made about countries in continental Europe. And of course, they have suffered from the euro crisis and the years of starting that followed from that. But neoliberalism doesn't seem to really accurately describe the state of France or Germany or Sweden or even a country like Italy today. So how do you think that applies in those countries?
- [27:23]
Francis Fukuyama
Well, I think that's right. The reason hostility to neoliberalism isn't such a big issue in continental Europe because neoliberalism was never that big a movement.
- [27:34]
Yascha Mounk
Well, but it seems to me that the hostility to neoliberalism exists, but the underlying neoliberalism is much less some of these countries than it is in Britain or the United States.
- [27:43]
Francis Fukuyama
Yeah, well, I think the underlying hostility to neoliberalism meant that neoliberalism never got as big a start in much of Europe as it did in Britain and the United States and these other Anglo Saxon offshoots like Australia and New Zealand and so forth. I think that there's always much more respect for the state in Germany or France that have very long, deep bureaucratic traditions. You never really had a French politician like Ronald Reagan whose main focus was cutting back the state sector. They did cut it back. They were forced to by the eu. And indeed, I think that it was actually the EU commission that had absorbed probably to the greatest extent neoliberal ideas. And a lot of their regulations were along those lines to open up markets and to reduce levels of regulation. And I think part of the hostility to the EU is a result of their pushing those kinds of policies. But it simply never got off the ground in continental Europe the way it did in the Anglo Saxon world. And therefore the reaction has not been nearly as Great Britain and the United States were the two countries that got out of Brexit and elected Donald Trump. These were the most neoliberal countries anywhere. And I don't think that's an accident.
- [29:05]
Yascha Mounk
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- [30:10]
Francis Fukuyama
Well, I think that it led to what we were discussing when we were talking about John Rawls. It's kind of the raising up of choice itself and making that a superior moral value than any of the moral frameworks, the pre existing moral frameworks within which choice had been limited previously. And so it leads to things like kind of innate hostility to religion because any kind of religious framework becomes a cage. It's an iron constraint that is preventing the actualization of one's inner self. And there is this revaluation of that inner self, you know, this idea that all of us has a kind of Rousseau in natural man or woman residing deep within each one of us. And it's really society that is the evil prison within which the self is contained. And you know, that's a very familiar trope to any teenager, that it's really society that's the big problem. And this leads to two seemingly contradictory outcomes. One is a kind of hyper individualism where kind of opposing constraint in itself opposing any kind of conformism becomes, you know, the primary moral value. And you know, what's wrong with that is, you know, they're innocent versions of this. But it also means that collective action becomes a lot less possible. And in a certain Way you're seeing a version of it right now in the United States with the hostility to vaccines and health mandates, like mask wearing, where, you know, you've actually got a collective good that the state is trying to impose. And this view that individuals shouldn't accept the slightest diminution of their individual choice, even in cases when that is going to affect the health of their family members or their friends or so forth, is an example, I think, of this absolutization of choice over any kind of collective good. But I think that a lot of the examples of this also are on the left, where there's a lot of exploration of self actualization that leads to a kind of moral incoherence. That's one reaction. But the other reaction I think is more powerful and one that is more concerning right now, which is that the other response is to say, well, actually, we are not these suppressed individuals, we're actually members of suppressed groups. We are marginalized because of our race, our ethnicity, our gender, our sexual orientation. And what is the real us is that group membership that is based on a fixed characteristic that we were simply born with, and that is really what defines us. And I think that modern identity politics then springs from this particular source where it's felt that liberal individualism is a kind of fairy tale that's told by elites that has convinced everybody that they've got individual freedom, but in fact they're living in a racist, sexist hierarchy. Then there's a further extension of this view, which is also an attack on modern natural science that says that these elites that are putting you into these categories have lulled you into obedience because they control your cognitive processes and are telling you what's objectively true. And that's not true either. This is, I think, what's led to the left wing version of identity politics that leads to an equally pervasive critique of liberalism itself. And that's the point at which I think liberalism ended up turning on itself.
- [33:54]
Yascha Mounk
The attack on science and the scientific method originated in the academy and politically speaking, on the left, from structuralism to post structuralism to postmodernism to the emphasis on subjective truth today, but that actually it has found a strange home on big parts of the political right, and that it in many ways is now used most effectively by right wing populists. How did that migration happen? How should we think about that?
- [34:26]
Francis Fukuyama
Well, I think the evil genius that lies behind a lot of this is actually Michel Foucault, who really wrote some very brilliant books. And like many other phenomena in recent years, Starts out with a correct observation that a lot of times science has been used to maintain an existing hierarchy. His chief example of that is sexuality, where homosexuality was criminalized and it was regarded as a mental disorder by respectable scientists, which was just reflecting certain value. So that part of it was quite legitimate. But then it broadens into this bigger argument about what he called biopower, in which he basically saw every debate that was held in every use of language to be an exercise of power rather than a reflection of a kind of real empirical world about which people needed to gather information and come to some kind of consensus as to what that world was really about and how it worked. And so it led to this great skepticism on the left as to whether science was actually something objective or not, and it has moved over to the right. I did a blog post where I said that I doubted that anyone in the Trump world had actually read Foucault, and that they were just kind of coming to the similar kind of conclusion because it was politically useful. And a professor wrote me and said that there are at least three people in the Trump White House that have explicitly written about Foucault. I had no idea that this was the case. But, yes, indeed, those arguments were there to be picked up, that essentially, the elites want you to believe that science is objective, but it's really not. It serves their interest. And that's exactly the argument that Trump and his followers wanted to make during the COVID epidemic to undermine the credibility of all of the public health measures. So there does appear to be some connection there between the extreme left and the extreme right intellectually.
- [36:36]
Yascha Mounk
So I'm trying to think through the strange tension here between individualism and groupism, for lack of a better word. So the individual element of this you can think of in the context of something like, you know, this is my truth, or, you know, go tell your truth, or, you know, I feel that right, which is the standard way in which American college students now start any actions. But then the nature of those individual truths often turn out to be not. You know, I, Yashamung, see the world in a particular kind of way because of a particular kind of experiences I have had and the way that my brain happens to work. But it often is, you know, my truth ends up being the truth of some identity group with which I identify. And so there's sort of an odd way where there is a hyper individualism or relativism about certain objective truths, because everybody just has their own perspective. But what ends up filling the individual perspective with content is just the Ascript of identity into which that individual was born. And I can't quite, you know, put my finger on the relationship between these two things.
- [37:49]
Francis Fukuyama
It seems very contradictory. I think that what's really happened is that, you know, the truth of the matter is that our deeply buried, unrecognized selves are not these creative, highly individualistic inner selves, you know, the way that expressive individualism imagines or Jean Jacques Rousseau imagined. But they are these group identities. So the classic case of this is a gay teenager who is told by his parents and friends, you know, that he should date girls, and he kind of realizes that his sexuality is pushing him in another direction. I mean, that's one individual version of it. But he comes out of the closet and then realizes that his experience is actually not so individual, that there's a lot of people that are like him. The Internet, in that respect, has been, you know, a great boon for people like this. And this is actually something where it's played a very useful role, that it suddenly connects you to a social category that you didn't even realize existed previously. And I think that that's the experience that many people have gone through where, you know, they're searching for that unique individualism, and they realize what they see underneath the surface is just these social identities that they've been forced into, but they've devalued, and they want to have that revalued. So the two kind of play off of each other.
- [39:17]
Yascha Mounk
One of the main criticisms that people have of liberalism is that it has never lived up to its own ideals. Now, that's true of any kind of political ideology or of any set of values, but the chart goes beyond that. It is that it's not a coincidence that liberalism was the ideology of states that colonized other countries, of states that had, you know, blatant and terrible racial injustices within their own borders, of states that denied the vote to women and oppressed them in important ways, but rather that that actually is inherent in liberalism, that it's impossible to avoid those injustices for liberal society because they actually flow from liberal principles. How convincing do you find that critique?
- [40:07]
Francis Fukuyama
Well, I find it very unconvincing for a number of reasons. I mean, there's no question that liberal societies have not lived up to their promise. And that begins with the United States. And I think that the criticisms of our racial politics over the centuries has been very justified. And no one would teach American history today without going through the terrible history of slavery and Jim Crow and all of those injustices. But I think that as an empirical matter, the charge that somehow this flows from the liberal principles themselves is completely wrong, because it's actually those liberal principles that led to the big political events that improved things and made things better for exactly those marginalized categories of people. I think the central case in point would be actually the Civil War, because in the prelude to the Civil War, the famous Lincoln Douglas debates revolved around the question of democracy, where Stephen Douglas said, well, if people in the south vote for slavery, I care not whether they voted up or down, but if they vote for it, democracy is the dominant principle that we need to respect. And Lincoln said, no, that's not right. And he pointed to the Declaration of Independence's statement that all men are created equal. Now, many people have criticized that statement, saying it didn't say women. Jefferson was a slave owner, the author of that particular sentence, and so forth. But in his argument with Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln could point to that principle that was clearly articulated in the founding document of the United States and say, no, democratic will cannot trump this fundamental equality that was the basis of our own independence. And so, you know, that's a case actually of the liberal principle in practice being an extremely important weapon in the hands of people that wanted the liberal society to actually live up to its ideals. And nobody needs to explain how that promise really didn't get fulfilled for the next century and so forth. And, you know, there's a lot of reason to be very angry and more morally upset about that. But I do think that, you know, if you just look at the historical record and look at what the United States looked like in the 1850s compared to, you know, what it looks like now in terms of race, gender, ethnicity, you know, a whole lot of things. Very hard to say that we haven't made a lot of progress. The other big problem I have with people that say that this is somehow inherent in liberalism is to ask, what's the alternative? What kind of society? What principle? If you're going to say, well, a society based on the principle that all men are created equal doesn't cut it. What's your alternative principle? All men are not created equal? Or that certain people have more privileges and ought to be treated differently, I don't think that's going to end up in such a happy society either. I think for both of those reasons, I'm really not persuaded by those kinds of arguments.
- [43:18]
Yascha Mounk
There's a lot in that that I want to pick up on. I think about the arguments that I've had in my life with communists right And I would say to them, look, communism has been tried in all of these different contexts and every time it has led to, you know, extreme state oppression. And so perhaps it tells you something about your theory. Now they of course respond, well, communism has never been tried under the right circumstances. And these problems don't flow from communism itself. It flows from external circumstances. And so if only we finally could get the real communism, it would all be wonderful. Right now I'm very skeptical of that because I think, no, it does flow from the principles of communism in important ways and it's been tried in lots of cases. So I'm conscious that I don't want to end up sounding as a defender of liberalism like those defenders of communism for whom I didn't have very much patience in the end, even though my grandparents, who were very decent people, were convinced communists. So I for how decent people might end up in that position. But I don't agree with them. And it seems to me that the answer you're giving is something like, well, look, but in the case of liberalism, societies have actually been able to improve over the course of their lifetime. So unlike communist regimes that often went into worse kinds of dictatorships over, over the course of a lifetime, the injustices that liberal society that characters many liberal societies as well as non liberal societies at the time were ameliorated, and they're ameliorated in good part because of reference to liberal principles, because people were able to use the founding ideals of that society as a cudgel to say, well, you say man are created equal, but as Frederick Douglass might have said in his famous fourth of July speech, look at what hypocrites you are. You need to remedy this. Is that roughly the strategy or how can we make sure that our response as liberals to those who point out historical failings of liberalism is stronger than the response that communists give when the failings of communism are pointed out to them?
- [45:28]
Francis Fukuyama
Well, I think there's just a historical record of the way that people live. You know, there is an argument made by some of the illiberal identitarians or proponents of a certain kind of identity politics that basically nothing has changed. You know, that there's no difference between police beatings of African American men and lynchings back in the 1920s. I think that if you actually had a good historical understanding of what it was like in that period when the Ku Klux Klan could actually hold a huge, well attended rally on the National Mall, you know, you'd see that that wasn't correct and that then Forces, I think people that want to maintain this narrative that nothing has changed to then shift the ground of argument, to say that cognitively we're somehow not seeing things correctly, that liberalism has kind of duped us into, you know, this belief in a kind of rational history, and we got to get rid of that and turn to a more subjective understanding of what the actual historical truth is. And I think that's also pretty problematic. You know, I quoted in my book Herbert Marcuse in his One Dimensional Man. I mean, that was, in a way, one of the reference texts for the way that the progressive left evolved in the years since the 19. But his basic argument is, well, you may think that you're living in a liberal society in which workers have washing machines and cars and nice suburban homes, but that's false consciousness. That actually, that's a big illusion that big corporations have created to make you love your chains. But that's actually not true. And I think you've got to go to some version. In fact, I was just in a discussion group a couple of weeks ago in which one of my fellow Stanford professors just repeated that Marcuse argument verbatim. He said, we don't live in a liberal society. The things you think are freedoms are really not freedoms. So I think you've got to go through these mental gymnastics, really, to convince yourself that there hasn't been any improvement in the conditions of minorities and women, or that change is somehow not possible in a liberal society.
- [47:43]
Yascha Mounk
Yeah. One of the things that always strikes me about those arguments is how insulting it is to the actual victims of American history. To say that nothing has improved in the lives of African Americans, you know, over the last 50 or over the last hundred years is to be incredibly blithe about the people who fought for civil rights and had to pay with their lives, or the people who were sharecroppers in the south with incredibly limited rights 100 years ago and so on. You know, for all of the very legitimate concerns and criticisms about the opportunities and so on available to African Americans today, to deny that difference is actually to really, in a pretty morally repellent way, underplay what it was like to be black in this country in the 1950s or in the 1900s, let alone the 1850s.
- [48:37]
Francis Fukuyama
Look, in the 1960s, before the Civil rights movement, if you were an African American, there are many parts of downtown Washington, D.C. you could not walk in. It was a segregated city. I think you're exactly right that it requires this incredible historical forgetting to make that kind of projection and very ahistorical
- [49:00]
Yascha Mounk
the other bit that I wanted to double click on is the question you started to pose about what would be alternatives to liberalism. Actually, be. I'm trying to think through what, quote, unquote, wokeness, what this identitarian political movement that is getting very strong on the left would put in its place. And my sense is that there's a few sort of fundamental postulates there. One is that the way to think about the motto of history is through terms of identity, and particularly ascriptive identity, as opposed to, say, class. The second is that liberalism, and perhaps universal or neutral standards more broadly, are always discriminatory, that they always sort of lead you in the wrong direction. But the third seems to me to be something like, so what do we need to do? In that case? It is to structure society explicitly as an effort to remedy historical injustices by distinguishing between our citizens on the basis of identity groups. Except for the fact that we're in 1850 in the United States or effectively in the south in 1960 in the United States, the kinds of rights and responsibilities you had were better if you were white. Now we want to have a system where we sort of explicitly help the historical victims of oppression by designing policies in such a way that their condition improves. So it is a way of rejecting the neutrality of universalism that has traditionally characterized liberal societies in this sort of attempt at overcoming historical injustices through preferential treatment for historical oppressed groups. Something like that. Do you think that's an accurate description? And why should we reject that?
- [50:58]
Francis Fukuyama
Yeah, I think that that is pretty much what would happen. It's really just an intensification of trends that you see today where in every college admissions, club membership, hiring and promotion, decision made by a private company, the first question that you'd ask is, what's the race, gender, so forth of the candidate? And then once you'd satisfied those criteria, then you could say, well, is this person qualified? Or, you know, what's the background and the CV look like otherwise? And there are countries that do that. I mean, you know, if you look at the Balkans or you look at Iraq or even India, you know, in many ways, which has had extremely extensive affirmative action programs, or Malaysia, you know, there are countries that we still more or less count as democracy that do have these very powerful affirmative action programs going. And I think that the real problem, of course, the theoretical one, is that, yes, we are defined to some extent by these descriptive identities, but we are also individuals and we also have choice, and we also bring things that we alone possess to the table. That Other people don't. And so it means a great devaluing of those characteristics. But then you run into these other political problems. That politics then becomes simply this fight over division of the pie between these fixed groups, and you essentially end up like Lebanon right now, where everything is allocated according to what religious sect you're a member of and leads to a great deal of rigidity. And when the demographics no longer fit that particular division, your society is stuck because you've committed yourself to dividing the pie in this rigid, fixed way. And that's not a good outcome either.
- [52:53]
Yascha Mounk
So we're in an odd predicament, I think, which is to say that there are reasons why a lot of people are rebelling against liberalism. It has been perverted in these two different ways that you've talked about, and yet the alternatives to it are unpalatable. So you believe, and I believe, that the answer is to renew and rejuvenate liberalism. I have two questions about that. I'll ask them in order, one at a time. The first is, well, what does a rejuvenation like that look like? What does a liberalism look like that avoids the traps of neoliberalism or the trap of an exaggerated version of personal autonomy that starts to undermine the very foundations of it? And then the second question, which I'll spare you for the moment, is about the prospects of that actually succeeding. But what would it look like for liberalism to rejuvenate itself in that way, and what principles would guide it?
- [53:46]
Francis Fukuyama
Well, I think that the first thing is that you need to not be apologetic about liberalism. You know, in a way, that's why I've written this book, is to try to remind people why they should be liberals. You know, say it now and say it loud. I'm a liberal, and I'm proud. Obviously, in the United States, it has a very specific connotation. So you might want to say I'm a classical liberal, and I'm proud. There needs to be a slightly different branding there, but people have to understand that being a classical liberal has these very powerful arguments standing in its favor. But the other part is much more difficult, and it's one that you, Yasha, have talked about in the past, which is that the pragmatic argument for liberalism, that it's a way of governing over diversity, is powerful. But it doesn't get you out of bed in the morning. You don't say, oh, am I grateful that we're not in a civil war with people that don't look like me today? I think that you need a Kind of more positive understanding of why you want to live in a liberal society. And that partly has to do with national identity, where a lot of progressives, not classical liberals, but that contemporary progressives have downplayed the nation state or even attacked the nation as a kind of reactionary vessel for exclusion, for racial intolerance, for aggression internationally. And I think it's really important to recapture that high ground and come up with a sense of national identity that people are not just not embarrassed by, but are actually proud of, and to define that. And for that, you know, you need things, you need to have borders, you need to have a kind of shared narrative about what that identity is built around. And there are some real obstacles, both on the left and the right, to creating that. But I think that's part of what it is. And then finally, I would just say that there's a lot of other things that make liberal societies attractive. You know, that they are more innovative, they're richer, they're more culturally rich. You think of all of the things that have come out of classically liberal societies over the centuries. And, you know, that's basically the modern world in many respects. And I think that we need to kind of constantly remind ourselves that that's really what we're fighting to preserve. I mean, you just think of something like jazz. I mean, I guess this is a generational thing, that young people don't listen to jazz anymore, the Great American Songbook. But, you know, you couldn't have done that in a homogeneous, kind of racially exclusive society. This is something that really did flow from the fact that even back in the 1930s and 40s, when you did have Jim Crow and so forth, there still was this multiracial culture that could be created in the semi liberal America of that time.
- [56:39]
Yascha Mounk
And also, by the way, one of the many examples for why one of the attacks in liberalism today, that to me is just most apparent is the idea of problematizing mutual cultural influence, that we should put some kind of general poll of suspicion on ways in which members of one culture might be inspired by art forms or cultural artifacts that have their historical origins in a different cultural community.
- [57:10]
Francis Fukuyama
Right. I mean, you'd have to tear down the Doge's palace In Venice, in St. Louis, the Piazza San Marco, because all of the columns are Islamic, influenced by Venice's extensive dealings in the Ottoman Empire. You're right. I mean, it's an absurd idea that cultures can't borrow from one another.
- [57:29]
Yascha Mounk
So I've asked you about what some of the Rejuvenation might look like we were chatting before the podcast about the views of the American elite today. You mentioned that you listened to a previous episode of, of a podcast with Caitlin Flanagan where she says the sense she has. And but I think I share that a lot of American elites that perhaps think of themselves in some broad sense as philosophical liberals, classical liberals, who certainly operated on the basis of Those liberal assumptions 10 or 20 years ago, seem so willing to go along with alternatives to it, whether it be the authoritarian populism of Donald Trump, when you look at a lot of the Republican Party, or whether it be some of the leftist attacks on classical liberalism that we see in the academy and other parts of the sort of higher echelons of intellectual life that you really have to ask yourselves, do they actually believe in anything, or at least do they in any meaningful sense believe in classical liberalism? So how strong a tradition, how alive a tradition do you think classical liberalism is in the United States today? And what does that tell us about the prospects for success over the coming decades?
- [58:39]
Francis Fukuyama
Well, so first of all, I think the much bigger current threat right now is the one that's coming from the Trumpian right, because I actually agree with Bob Kagan that we're already in a constitutional crisis created by this narrative about the election. And so that's an immediate one that we need to deal with. On the question of whether non maga people more in the mainstream actually believe in anything, I'm not quite sure how to answer that, except to say that part of it is a matter of kind of herd psychology and that because there haven't been a lot of voices that have stood up and very firmly argued, let's say, in favor of free speech, speech, and said that, you know, like the president of the University of Chicago, that, you know, this is something that we're here to protect. And everybody kind of looks around them and they say, well, you know, nobody else is jumping on this bandwagon. So I'm not going to do that either. And I think the reason you and I are in this business, you know, is to try to shift opinion on these kinds of issues and say, yeah, it's okay to come out and say I am classical liberal. And I believe it in very strongly for the following reasons. And I do think that it's a battle that's winnable, that there's some assertions that are made on the progressive left that are so out of sync with reality. But also I think with any strategy for actually holding political power in this country that it isn't going to be hard to imagine a moment in which people all of a sudden say, hey, you know, this stuff that we've been saying or just letting slip by is actually ridiculous. And I actually don't believe this stuff. And we need to return to some older understanding about what the country is about and what are the principles that guide me. So that's my hopeful gloss on your question. So it doesn't require actually people believing in things deeply. And I'm not sure that in previous generations they actually did believe so deeply or the belief was based on other things. For example, in American history, belief in Christianity was very much tied up with belief in the American project. That is something that theoretically is a little bit questionable whether it ought to rest on that religious basis. But that's certainly something that's never going to come back. We're never going to go back to a moment where people say, well, this is a Christian country and that's why I love America. That's just never going to be, I think, ever again a majority opinion in this country. In that sense, you're right that we have a problem, but I'm also not sure that that's something we want to go back to.
- [61:32]
Yascha Mounk
So we both believe that liberalism and democracy go together, that we need both of them, but also that there can easily be a tension between them, that a majority of the people can favor deeply illiberal policies, and that there can be somewhat liberal states, but aren't democratic. Correct me if I misrepresent your position.
- [61:51]
Francis Fukuyama
Yes, correct.
- [61:52]
Yascha Mounk
I wonder for whether in this case democracy is truly our friend, which is to say that when I look at some of the opinions of the American elite, and I know this sounds a little bit populist, but I mean, the people who I went to graduate school with, the people who I know when the United States government. I'm not talking about the elite over there. I'm very conscious of the fact that through strange accidents of life, I have myself ended up joining a kind of American elite. But the people who I know don't seem to believe in all that many things in a way that really does worry and concern me. But I wonder whether there's an opportunity in the fact that there is actually an incoherent liberal instinct that a lot of ordinary Americans have, who would not call themselves classical liberals, who would not be able to articulate the core tenets of liberalism, but who do share many of its moral instincts, and who activated when they see blatant cases in which liberal precepts are violated, I think that's one of the reasons why public opinion moved to the left rather than to the right under Donald Trump's presidency. It's one of the reasons why Americans became more pro rather than anti immigration over those four terrible years because they did not want to have any track with the cruelty of the government and Trump's rhetoric. But I think it also makes me more optimistic about the ability of liberals to push back against some of the sort of rising liberalism on the left. So I guess my question is, what's the role for rousing articulations of liberalism? And I'm so wonderfully glad that we finally have one with your forthcoming book. And what's the role of more popular and democratic defense of liberalism?
- [63:39]
Francis Fukuyama
Well, I think the two are actually linked to one another because I do think that, you know, intellectuals actually do establish kind of the overton window for acceptable rhetoric. And both on the left and the right, they've been pushing that window to greater and greater extremes. And I do think that there can be some effort to close it again, to exile certain views as really not being acceptable in a liberal society. The other thing is that there are a lot of elite decisions that need to be taken. Like right now, I think the Democratic Party has really, in a sense, gone crazy. I mean, they're kind of imagining that this is 1932 and they've got this gigantic majority super majority in Congress and that the real struggle is to pass this monumental change in the social protections of the United States rather than being in this very precarious moment where they stand a good chance of losing the elections in 2022 and more importantly, in 2024, unless they kind of except the reality that, as you say, a lot of Americans in the middle who are precisely the ones who are going to determine the outcome of those elections, really do not have any truck with the stuff that's coming out of the left wing of the Democratic Party. And so I think that in that respect, in terms of who the party puts up as a candidate, the way they speak about things, actually, Ross Douthat had a piece in the Times recently where he gave some examples of this. So it's not just a question of not advocating defunding the police or something, but somebody's got to get up and say it's stupid to use the word Latinx referring to a Hispanic person, because a first of all, Latinos and Latinos don't refer to themselves that way. I mean, it's a marker that you're a certain kind of progressive when you use that sort of language, but it's also a way of connecting with, I think, ordinary voters who will be the ones that will determine the next couple of elections. And they're not demanding that we use that kind of language. So I think that this inter elite discussion still does have an impact on how the rest of the country will react.
- [66:01]
Yascha Mounk
I'm very glad that we mostly spoke about big and important philosophical topics. But as a final question, I do want to ask you where you think we're at in the United States in terms of a threat to democracy from Donald Trump and battalion populace more broadly. We're coming up to the first anniversary of the election in which Joe Biden did once all the votes were in, defeat Trump quite decisively. But at this point, Biden is significantly underwater in his approval ratings in some polls. It seems as though Trump at this point might be a smidgen more popular than Joe Biden. It's very clear that Trump owns the Republican Party, but large parts of the Republican Party have not accepted the outcome of a 2020 election, or at least pretend to do so publicly pretend that they don't believe it was accurate and that they're passing quite concerning legislation at the state level that might allow them not to certify the election in a proper way in 2024. So, you know, how worried are you about Republicans stealing the 2024 elections? How worried are you about Donald Trump or Trumpist political candidate winning fair and square? And just to ladle one more impossible question to something that I'm expecting a free minute answer on, would American democracy be able to contain the damage the next time around, or would the damage end up being much worse than what we've experienced over the last four or so years?
- [67:30]
Francis Fukuyama
Well, I think right now we're in extremely perilous condition in this country for exactly the reasons that you just articulated, that it's not just Donald Trump, but most of the Republican Party has been trying to change the institutional rules to guarantee that even if they lose the popular vote in the coming elections that they will still remain in power. I think that poses such a fundamental challenge to our institutions that that really ought to be the single focus of everybody that cares about American democracy right now. And it trumps any other policy issue that is currently on the table. Which is why I find it a little bit upsetting that Democrats can't just agree to get past the part of Biden's agenda that they can actually pass and then focus on reversing some of these state level laws that will ultimately award the electoral count to whoever controls the state legislature. I think that's the single biggest threat to American democracy right now. Well, first of all, I think it's very unlikely that Republicans will actually do better in the popular vote, either for president or collectively for Congress. But they can certainly be in a position where they will get a minority of both votes and they'll still be in control of all three branches of the elected government. And that's very dangerous because then people on the left are going to explode. And I do think that there's a real possibility for violence, given how much Americans love arming themselves and whether American democracy survives that, I don't know. I think that we really want to avoid putting ourselves in that position where we have to test those institutions. But I do think it's going to be different from last November because I think that Trump and the Republicans have been also chewing over those lessons that they want to make sure that there's no Brad Raffensperger in power the next time around that's going to actually not be willing to throw an election to them if it comes down to it. So yeah, we're in a lot of trouble right now.
- [69:42]
Yascha Mounk
Well, on that cheerful note, Frankl Amer, thank you so much for being on the podcast.
- [69:47]
Francis Fukuyama
Thanks very much, Yasha.
- [69:57]
Yascha Mounk
Thank you so much for listening to the good fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about this show. If you two have been enjoying the podcast, please be like them. Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter. And finally, please make suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com
- [70:25]
Francis Fukuyama
this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License. Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.
- [70:40]
Yascha Mounk
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for 15amonth plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month Required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees, extra fee, full terms@mintmobile.com.