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The Good Fight
The Good Fight Club: Trump's Firings, Reinventing Liberalism, and the Rise of AI
00:55:25
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- [00:00]
Sabina Tschudic
Going back to this idea of not so much how, what sense of urgency we feel about the present moment, but also the question is whether we want to go back to what we had right before it, and if not, then to what? And to move away from liberalism of the 90s into a new phase.
- [00:30]
Yasha Monk
And now, the Good Fight with Yasha Monk. Welcome to the first ever live episode of the Good Fight Club, our new format on the podcast in which a panel of our favorite podcast guests discusses the news over last week. And thankfully there isn't really any news these days, so we always have nothing to talk about. Today we are coming to you live from the sidelines of the liberalism for the 21st century conference in Washington, D.C. so thank you very much for our partners at IDSMA for organizing that. And on the panel I have to my left, Sabina Tschudic, who is an MP in the National Parliament of Bosnia Herzegovina. For leaving Liberal Party, standing up for liberal values, we have Steven Pinker, one of the most eminent psychologists in the world, a professor at Harvard University and the author of, among many books, a great new book about which we're going to have a one on one conversation soon of a podcast about common knowledge. And of course, Francis Fukuyama, the founder of American Purpose, which is part of a persuasion family and one of the most distinguished political scientists in the world today. Welcome Frank, Stephen and Sabina. We joked that we need an applause sign, but this applause was all without a sign. Look at that. Very enthusiastic. Thank you very much. So we have great topics that we're going to cover today. I want to say right up front that there's one topic that we would love to cover, but the timing of a podcast makes it difficult. We're recording this on Thursday evening. We're going to be releasing this podcast on Saturday morning and in between, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are meeting in Alaska. So we will have another episode of a podcast about all of whatever may transpire tomorrow. Jesus soon. But I thought we would start with another political event here in the United States, which is the recent firing of the head of the Bureau for Labor Statistics and the nomination of a man by the name of EJ Antoni to take over that job. I don't know very much about EJ but I know two facts. One is that he was spotted in the crowds of January 6, 2001 and the other is that he has given a number of interviews in his office with a picture of a Bismarck, a Nazi era warship. And in the back of the image. So lovely prospect, Frank, to make this topic sound more academic. You love the concept of repatrimonialization. That feels like an apt idea here. What are you thinking about this?
- [03:35]
Francis Fukuyama
Well, there's a lot to think about. A modern government has to have a modern state and it's very difficult to get to a modern state because I think that natural human sociability is really favoritism towards friends and family. And so for the centuries of human history, most governments were basically composed of the friends and family of whatever warlord managed to conquer a particular piece of territory. And it's only very recently, meaning in the last couple hundred years, that you had governments that are based on actual expertise, merit, where people are recruited for their expertise and merit and not just because they're related to the ruler. The United States had a very rocky road to getting to that kind of government, but by the 1880s they had done that with the passage of the Pendleton act, which professionalized the bureaucracy. And the trouble is that there's this constant threat of what repatrimonialization, meaning you, you slide back into friends and family. And this is exactly what has been going on. Donald Trump is all about friends and family. I mean, his literal family, his friends, those are the people that he trusts and can put in positions of power. And the head of the BLS is a professional statistician who was going to report honest empirical facts. And he didn't like that. So he replaces it with somebody that's loyal to him. And so this is a direct. I mean, it's not as if this is the first time this has ever happened in history. I think, unfortunately there are many other governments that tried to be modern and then fell back into this kind of friends and family mode. I didn't think it would happen this easily in the United States, but you know, here we are.
- [05:27]
Yasha Monk
Stephen, you're a psychologist. Does the discipline of psychology have any insights about why somebody would be so thin skinned that they have to fire an official who gives you the wrong statistics about the economy?
- [05:44]
Steven Pinker
I couldn't agree more with Frank's analysis and I think it conforms with my understanding of human social relationships in general. Inspired by an anthropologist named Alan Fisk, who proposed that all natural human social relationships fall in three models. There is kinship, communal sharing, fusion, probably growing out of the shared genes, and the fact that altruism comes naturally to organisms. When it comes to other organisms that share those very genes for helping a relative to dominance, namely, who would prevail if a fight were to take place. And organisms recognize dominance when the outcome of a fight is A foregone conclusion. And so they'd rather avoid the costs of conflict. And then in humans, reciprocity, reciprocal altruism, another route to altruism. Those are the natural means of social organization. Fisk proposed a fourth model, which he called market pricing, but which more generally could be called the rational, logical means of social organization, the term borrowed from Max Weber, which is institutions that are defined by roles, fiduciary duties, guidelines that hem in the perquisites of power. Those have proven to be the most effective way of running an affluent, pleasant country. But I think they go against the grain of human nature and we naturally backslide to reciprocity, dominance and kinship, which is exactly the process that Frank called repatrimonialization. I'd add one element, and that's epistemic dimension to the natural human way of thinking. And where in modern societies we have departed from it for good reasons, but there's always a danger of backsliding, and that is that when it comes to questions outside our immediate experience, is there food in the fridge? Is there gas in the car? Is there a chair in front of me right now? Things that you can verify with your own senses. When it comes to more generic, abstract, almost cosmic questions, what is the cause of fortune and misfortune? What drives history? What is the large scale trend in society? I think most of us like to think that those are questions that can be answered. We have social scientists, we have data sets, we have the scientific method. But this is a very cognitively unnatural way of thinking. I think that the natural human tendency is that for questions outside immediate experience, you can't know. Beliefs are signs of loyalty to a coalition. They are edifying myths, they are moral lessons. And what shocks many of us, like, how could you fire someone whose job is simply to ascertain what is true or false, which ought to be objective guidance, regardless of your politics? I think for me, and I think for most of us, this is almost inconceivable. On the other hand, we are the children of the Enlightenment who think that for any question at least, it's possible to arrive at an answer. Whereas the natural human tendency is no one knows, you can't find out. Beliefs are a question of loyalty, solidarity, tribal fusion.
- [09:34]
Yasha Monk
I think both of us see that when we teach and students instinctively start answers with I feel that. I say, I think that my considered opinion is it's always I feel that. Sabina, you're from a country that has taken its fair share of lectures from Brussels and sometimes Washington dc. Do you see this with Any amount of schadenfreude should we.
- [10:04]
Sabina Tschudic
Hearing. My colleagues and co panelists, I remember this interview between Vogue editors and late Ivana Trump when they asked her what she thought about the return of the 80s in the fashion and she said, oh, but darling, they never left for me. So in that sense, the concepts we are discussing are the concepts that never left the country that I represent, Bosnia and Herzegovina. However, what is particularly concerning is that we liberals that are miracle, I mean, it's a miracle that we exist in a context such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, considering our constitutional structure and so on. What this does is removes the aspirational element of our everyday work. And what we then find ourselves is defending something at the front line and expecting that there is an army behind us. And then when you turn around and that army dissipating, it's kind of disappearing as we speak and as we fight. And you need to recalibrate the narrative towards your voters and the general population. So in that sense, I think that what is happening at the center, at the core, affects the periphery in a way. It removes the aspirational element, but it also springs back to the center and affects back the center and I think in a way damages at the end of the day, again, United States more than the periphery. But speaking of the concept of kind of primordial way of dealing with politics, reverting back to our most kind of pedestrian instincts of how politics is run, I feel like it has made a full circle and in many ways, when we discuss us quite depressingly the prospects of Bosnia and Herzegovina joining the eu, we always say by the time we join, the EU will look more like Bosnia and Herzegovina than Bosnia and Herzegovina will look like the eu. And I am devastated by the fact that it is laughable, but at the same time somewhat realistic.
- [12:19]
Yasha Monk
Well, you know, there's always concerns about the state, the transatlantic relationship, you know, given that Donald Trump comes from a very different family of political parties than Emmanuel Macron France or Friedrich Merz in Germany. But it may be that by the end of Trump's term, they all get along wonderfully because figures like Donald Trump are going to be running France and Britain and Germany and other countries in Europe. How bad is this? If we go to the 10,000 foot view, right? I mean, it's, there's hacks and there's hacks, and this guy seems to be a real hack. Is this sort of a few positions which for whatever reason rise to Trump's level of attention and where he replaces somebody. And by the end of his term. We're going to have a few position where there's hacks and power, but there's still going to be a lot of professionals running the civil service. Is is this something that is going to be righted if Donald Trump's successor loses the elections in 2028? Or is this really a turning point when 10, 20, 30 years, we might look back at this moment and say this is where this hard won tradition of a professionalized bureaucracy started to go out of a window? How much is this part of a broader pattern?
- [13:40]
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- [13:55]
Francis Fukuyama
Well, I mean, Yasha, there's no way of answering that question. You know, I think that the thing that makes me worried about the future is that the alternative to this kind of patrimonialism has not been clearly articulated by any politician that I know of. We're at this conference because we're kind of intellectuals, policy people, and we're trying to articulate that alternative vision. But you know, part of the strength of Trump and Trumpism is the weakness of the liberals that have gone before him. And I unfortunately don't really see any kind of powerful political articulation of what a modern government ought to look like. Why it's important to have professionals whose advice you can rely on. Why it's important not to simply accept this corrupt miasma of personal influence as the way to run a country. And I think we need some of that not spoken by people like us, but people that really can exercise some political power in the future.
- [15:12]
Yasha Monk
Yeah. One of the things that strikes me about countries like Turkey is that when you start seeing the politicization of various institutions, including the key economic ones, that seems like a very abstract concern. It's very easy for people to say, you know, these are just people who are trying to defend their own positions and positions of their friends. And then by the time that it really is far advanced, it does become a top level political concern of people. One of the reasons why Recep Erdogan Turkey has become much less popular is that his economic mismanagement has led to runaway inflation, etc. But by that time, you're really far along the process and it's hard to go back.
- [15:46]
Steven Pinker
Stephen One reason to hope that the future isn't a boot stamping on a human face forever, as Orwell put it, is that there is something that always pushes in the direction of reality. Knowledge, in this case subjective statistics. And that's just reality itself. Reality is that which doesn't go away when you stop believing in it. As Philip K. Dick said, and to give another quote, this time from Orwell, the secret in leadership is to combine a belief in your own infallibility with an ability to learn from your mistakes. So as long as there's some consequence to, to being oblivious to reality, as long as there's some source of potential source of knowledge, there is at least a force pushing back in the other direction of objective assessments of reality. But as you note, the country can go a long way in the direction of pretending reality doesn't exist before the leader wakes up to the fact that they really could use an accurate assessment of the state of affairs.
- [16:51]
Sabina Tschudic
Sabina I fully agree that objective assessment of reality should be our starting point in policy making, in responsible policymaking, ethical policymaking, and so on. However, in politics and being here, the only elected representative is perception matters more than reality, unfortunately. And then there is that challenge of fighting that perception with the objective assessment of reality. And then how do we do it? And the methods that we use sometimes corrupt the very process and the very system in that sense. I'm looking at for example, the dismantling of the USAID, which was in its 64th year of existence, right? So reaching the age of retirement, at least in Europe, and dismantling the more than 5,000 contracts, 10,000 people left without jobs. But I don't actually blame the Trump administration or this administration or the Republicans for dismantling it, because the outcry after it was dismantled was essentially non existent, not only in the United States, but even among the people who literally lived, worked and lived as a result of the work that the USAID had been doing. I blame actually the liberals before that and the governments before that. That didn't entice enough enthusiasm about the concept of foreign aid, why it normatively matters, why it changes the nature of the political system and our understanding of foreign relations and responsibility and so on and so forth. So for me the question is not why aren't people as angry and why aren't we producing the liberal leaders who are rising up and kind of raising awareness among the general population in the sense of urgency. The question is why doesn't the population miss what we had before as much as we miss it, as much as we, the elites, miss it? And I believe it entirely self critically, as a liberal who is facing elections next year and maybe my government may be toppled by the extreme right wing forces, I wonder what will my voters or the general public miss about the system we created? Did we entice enough enthusiasm about liberalism? And not just as a concept, but as a practice.
- [19:32]
Francis Fukuyama
You're teeing up a hobby horse of mine, which is that liberal governments have to not just be prepared procedurally correct. They actually have to deliver real social goods. They have to deliver jobs. They have to deliver economic growth. They have to deliver security. They have to deliver physical things like infrastructure and things that people will associate with a better life. And I think many.
- [19:56]
Sabina Tschudic
And not just that, but also vision of the future, all of that, plus, well, progress.
- [20:01]
Francis Fukuyama
And part of the vision of the future, though, is actually what an actual successful, growing society would look like. And they've not been very good at that. I've been.
- [20:12]
Steven Pinker
At delivering or at delivering people. They've delivered.
- [20:15]
Francis Fukuyama
No, no, at delivering. So this has been a preoccupation of mine over the last few years, which is infrastructure. You know, in the United States, we don't build anything anymore, especially in my home state of California, which has got, you know, it's put so many obstacles in front of doing anything. And I think that unless liberals can actually get to a system where they can actually produce concrete results, then they're not going to see this empirical reality that what they're advocating actually does matter to people. And I think that's been a big failure.
- [20:52]
Sabina Tschudic
With all due respect. I think that there is an element of oversimplification there, because I think overall, statistically, we deliver. Do we formulate it?
- [21:02]
Francis Fukuyama
Do we not living in California?
- [21:06]
Yasha Monk
The government of Bosnia may deliver. The government of California does not.
- [21:10]
Sabina Tschudic
Although, you know, I'm always shocked when I arrive to the United States with a state of public infrastructure compared to Europe. I mean, I can't get used to it. I simply cannot get used to the, you know, the quality or the lack of quality of.
- [21:23]
Yasha Monk
But this is a great fundamental question, and Steve will get the Internet. I mean, is the problem that governments don't deliver and that there is a substantive problem with our political system that people are rationally responding to? That's one position on this. Or it's another position. Is there something about the media landscape, about social media, about the negativity bias of the news that makes people ungrateful for the ways in which the governments do deliver? I'm slightly caricaturing the two positions, but I think there is a fundamental tension between those two different ways of reading the situation. Which do we think comes closer to the truth?
- [22:03]
Steven Pinker
Yeah, I think there's truth in both perceptions. I'VE just recently, Just last week, with a graduate student named Schoenmacher, did a survey of we asked a sample of Internet users four questions about trends since the 1960s, for which we had very good data. There's no dispute about the ground truth. So has poverty gotten better or worse in the United states since the 1960s? Has air pollution gotten better or worse? Has violent crime gotten better or worse? Have accidental deaths gotten better or worse? These are relevant because one of the reasons that we have, say, regulation of auto safety is to drive down car deaths. One of the reasons that we have regulations on pollution is to drive pollution down. So if any of this worked so in all cases there has been improvement objectively. In all four cases, people thought that the objective situation had gotten worse. So people are misinformed, partly because of some inherent biases in journalism. Namely, if journalism is about things that happen, not things that don't happen, or gradual trends, then every crisis attracts news. But incremental improvements, even ones that compound, never get reported but can transform the country or the world, and people are completely unaware of it. Together with the fact that there is a negativity bias both in human nature and among journalists who One journalist told me that negative news is journalism, positive news is advertising. So positive news is like Soviet five year Plan, and we don't want to give government credit for anything so liberal. I think liberalism, in the sense of some degree of redistribution, some degree of regulation, has had effects that people are unaware of. But that is not the only reason that people underappreciate the achievement of, I guess what you could call the default of the liberal democracy of the last 60 years. Because we found, to our surprise, there was no correlation between people's general cynicism about current governance, cynicism about democracy, about capitalism, about the system in general. We asked them that question and their perception of the direction of trends. It isn't only the case that people who have misconceptions about progress are cynical about the same system. They're just kind of disconnected. And so one of the problems is to give people a more accurate perception of what governance has achieved. Another one is to actually connect the discourse of what system we should support based on what it has delivered. Which is, by the way, not to deny Frank's point that in a lot of cases governance has become an impediment to delivering what people want. Infrastructure being an excellent example, of course.
- [25:03]
Francis Fukuyama
So I just As a matter of self Advertisement A colleague of mine at Stanford, Beatriz Magaloni, and I just published an article in the Journal of Democracy looking at aggregate data on whether there's a correlation between delivering concrete goods like security, economic growth, jobs, equality, infrastructure and popular support for democracy. And there is a correlation. You know, a lot of the weaknesses and the backsliding in recent democracies has been due to the fact that governments are not just perceived as not being effective, but they actually haven't, you know, produced those goods.
- [25:47]
Steven Pinker
Is it correlation across countries?
- [25:48]
Francis Fukuyama
Yes, it's a big data set. You know, you're talking about over 100 countries and it's, you know, so I think the data is actually there. So, yeah, I mean, there's certainly this negativity bias and all of that. But okay, here's another.
- [26:05]
Sabina Tschudic
Does that mean that Trump delivered in the first administration?
- [26:08]
Francis Fukuyama
No, no, no, it's not Trump. It's not any of this short term stuff. I would say. Okay, here's an anecdote that should become data. The United States built the Golden Gate Bridge, Hoover Dam and the Oakland Bay Bridge in this period of four years in the early 1930s. Right. It electrified the Tennessee Valley in a similar amount of time. We couldn't possibly do that today. We absolutely could not do any of those things today because there's just too many obstacles that we've created in front of our actually being able to accomplish those sorts of things. One of the troubling things that's going on in the world is what's happening in El Salvador. So El Salvador has been plagued by gangs. The economist before Bukele estimated that the gangs were taking in more in extortion money than the government was collecting in taxes. Right. And so Bukele comes in and he basically jails like 10% of the country. I mean, all the young men, or at least everyone that's got a tattoo, and the crime rate drops by 90%. 90%. And so I have a lot of Salvadorian friends who believe in democracy, believe in rule of law. They're very upset by Bukele's excesses. But they say I can take my family out to the park on a weekend because I don't have to worry about Mara Salvatrucha extorting us anymore. And so I think that this is a real. I mean, I know a lot of my pro democracy friends look at this in horror and it is horrible because the thing is that Bukele is not going to stop at this point. I mean, he's just going to become an outright dictator. He'll never leave power. Right. So a lot of really bad stuff. But I think that it's also a failure to recognize that almost no democratic government in Latin America has succeeded in actually dealing with this really terrible security problem that they've got. And you know, it's a challenge, I think for democracies.
- [28:22]
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- [28:50]
Yasha Monk
I wonder if there's a way to reconcile these two perspectives, which is that when you look at how developed countries economies have changed over the last 50 or 60 years, it is primarily positive. I mean, Stephen has shown very clearly in his work that life 60 years ago in the United States and most of Western Europe was much worse than it is today. And that is true even on the kinds of things that people are very concerned about today, like say accidental deaths or like safety of children, being out in the street playing with each other, et cetera, et cetera. Right. At the same time, I think that people probably rightly intuit, but some of the great achievements of our past governments wouldn't be possible today. But even though we have improved a lot over the course of the last 60 years, there's no reason to think that we're going to improve in the next 20 or 40 or 60 years because some of the things that led to those improvements would not be possible today. We put a man on the moon. Well, NASA is not putting anybody on the moon right now. And that's just one of those examples. I think that speaks to a different segment of this podcast that I was going to put later, but I'm going to pull forward. We're at this liberalism conference, right? And it's wonderful. I've spent the whole day with people I admire and friends and acquaintances, and it feels a little bit like, you know, we've got the gang back together and we all believe in philosophical liberalism. But there's a hard set of questions about why it is that philosophical liberalism is losing around the world, why it is that Donald Trump is not just in office for the second time, but there's not a broad based opposition movement to him at this point and he's doing relatively well in the polls. Why is it that when I look at Western Europe at the moment, right wing populists are ahead in the polls in the United Kingdom, in France, in Germany, in Italy, in Austria and Switzerland and many other countries. And so what would it mean to actually, as the title of this lovely conference promises, reinvent liberalism for the 21st century? I'll start with you this time.
- [30:57]
Sabina Tschudic
Well, going back to this idea of not so much what sense of urgency we feel about the present moment, but also the question is whether we want to go back to what we had right before it, and if not, then to what, and to move away from liberalism of the 90s into a new phase. First of all, I think the cat is out of the hat. It's impossible to put it back. In any case, judging from what we heard today, the changes are so rapid, as you said, in Poland, in Germany, in France, in the United States. Even if we had a swift return of liberals in power throughout these countries, and the question is, are they now inspired by the methods used by the right wing populists and saying, well, we now have the mechanisms to again politicize the public sector and employ our people and so on and so forth, or are we moving into a new direction? I think there is a assumption here of Anglo Saxon kind of shared understanding of liberalism, and I don't think it's there. And I think that there is a remarkable difference that we've been ignoring and that it shows up in different misunderstandings and antagonisms across the pond between Europe and the US And I find myself in a strange position because I'm in a total periphery. My country's not part of the eu, and we always found ourselves between the American ambitious interventionism, which I'm a huge fan of American foreign policy ambition. And if I was gonna be entirely dramatic, I would say that I wouldn't be alive and here with you tonight if it wasn't for the American foreign policy ambition. As a child, I watched NATO intervention in the Sarajevo sky and then I applauded it. However, that ambition has its dark side as well, and its understanding of kind of this exuberant liberalism and optimism and sense of foreign policy possibilities compared to kind of almost retirement home energy of
- [33:10]
Steven Pinker
the EU
- [33:13]
Sabina Tschudic
and kind of debate society where everybody likes to hear their voice, but would not necessarily like to put any of it in action. But at the bottom of it, it's this kind of growth and dynamism on the one side versus development on the other side, interventionism versus non interventionism and regulation versus deregulation. And I think it literally comes from your declaration of independence from, from the UK and In a sense, when you enshrine this pursuit of happiness as deeply individual endeavor versus collective is where the misunderstanding started between us. So in that sense, I think any reckoning both here in the United States and in Brussels, which has its deep, deep issues, has to really come back to the drawing board of those initial kind of original sin differences between us and find a bridge. I feel like a child of divorced parents. And I think we need to absolutely. The future will depend on that transatlantic relationship. And we can also see that from this administration incredible efforts to intervene in politics and elections in Germany, in Romania, I think majority of MAGA voters didn't know about the political landscape in Romania until they heard that it's such a game changer for an ambitious endeavor of your vice president and the president. So in that sense, the responses will have to be transatlantic.
- [34:58]
Steven Pinker
A few years ago, when Trump was first elected, this seems like ancient history. There was a moment where people thought, this is an old man's movement. We are approaching peak woke that we do have young, charismatic, dynamic leaders like Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron, and that was going to be the future of liberalism. Well, it didn't quite work out that way, probably for different reasons. I think in the case of Macron, perhaps because of a failure to deliver or at least policies that just inflamed people, like a too hasty carbon tax without mitigating softeners for the people who would suffer the most from it. In the case of Trudeau, probably, as in the case of Kamala Harris, I suspect that identity politics and wokeness did them in, that they actually did have the potential. But Trudeau, with his confession that Canada was a shameful genocidal state. Harris, whose past intemperate interviews did her in when they were endlessly replayed, when she said the government should pay for bottom surgery for transgender illegal immigrant prisoners. Almost a satire of what a politician should not say. So it could be that some of the energy from the opposition got absorbed by identity politics and wokeness, not a winning combination, and sabotaged what ought to have been a coherent and energetic opposition. Although probably not the case in Macron. I don't think anyone accused him of wokeness, but perhaps a failure to deliver, or at least not enough thought given to the consequences of policies for individual voters.
- [36:47]
Yasha Monk
Just to emphasize the flip side of this for a moment, part of this is that there was a moment when Angela Merkel and Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron were treated as kind of representatives of the free world and the promise of the future, because the other Part of this, which is the implicit premise, is that we all thought that Donald Trump, or a lot of political scientists, said that Donald Trump was the man of the past, right? Make America great again. He's just trying to rally this nostalgic set of, you know, old rural white voters, you know, struggling against the dying of the light. And all we need to do is to wait for years until the demographics continue to shift and the people who've always voted for the Republican Party decline as a share of the population, and the people who are always going to vote for Democrats rise as a share of the population. And that's all we need to do. Then this scary moment is going to be over. And obviously, Donald Trump has actually put together a very different electoral coalition in the last eight years, expanding his share of vote exactly among those segments. I mean, I grew up in Germany with the term for anybody who is skeptical about migration, who. Anybody who is not on the progressive side of politics of Eric Gestrigger, which was those forever of yesterday. And it was a way basically to refer to old Nazis, those who are enamored of the German past, who haven't understood that that is gone forever. And, you know, the question that I've been asking myself at the conference, you know, surrounded by some of the people I most admire in the world, is, are we the force of tomorrow or are we the force of yesterday? That's what's at issue, I think. Right. Frank, what do you think about this?
- [38:25]
Francis Fukuyama
Well, I don't think that you can beat something with nothing, basically just criticizing them. And I think the biggest weakness right now of the Democrats is that they don't have a positive agenda other than rolling back, you know, the stuff they don't like about the Trump administration without admitting to themselves what it is that Trump is doing that makes him popular. And again, I mean, I'm repeating myself here, but I think he is perceived as someone that is not overly constrained by rules, and because he's not constrained by rules, can actually do stuff that, you know, that liberal politicians have not been able to do. And I think that, you know, so the reason I like Ezra Klein's abundance agenda is that he's actually putting forward a positive vision for what a progressive government in the future could do, how the state could be used to actually achieve real social justice objectives in a realistic way. And I just don't think that you can beat Trump's version of that with nothing. I think that you have to have a positive sense of, okay, if you elect us, we're actually going to make this, we're going to make the energy transition real. We're actually going to build stuff that will make your life better.
- [39:49]
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- [40:20]
Yasha Monk
I mean, on the vacuousness I watched with some horror Kamala Harris interview on the Stephen Colbert show, in which she announced the upcoming exciting book 107 days, about her campaign. And Stephen Colbert was as sympathetic an interviewer as anybody can wish for. And Harris was so vacuous in what she said in her reflections about why she lost her significant, incredibly important election, other than complaining that her husband hadn't given her an adequately nice birthday present the month before an election that supposedly was gonna decide whether America is fascist for forever, that by the end of his interview, Colbert was getting impatient. And when he pushed her a little bit one time about whether she should have done more to distance herself from Joe Biden said, well, Stephen, this is a complicated question. We really don't have time to get into this. At which point Stephen turned to the audience and said, anybody in a rush, guys? And that really expresses that. But if we want to make sure that those who stand against right wing populists at future elections are ambiguous in that way, if we want to design liberalism for the 21st century, how do we remodel this ideology? There has been moments of deep crisis for liberalism in the past. I mean, if liberalism is in crisis today, it certainly was in a deeper crisis in 1935. And in some ways it was in a deeper crisis in parts of the 19th century. And at each point, liberals reforged their tradition, reconnected with the basic founding principles of that tradition, and managed to wed those principles to a set of ideas and policies that spoke to their political moment. And that is part of how they were able to claw back to liberal ascendance. So if we're going to tell the story in 25 or 50 years time of how we did that, what are some of the directions that we took? I mean, I buy some of the abandoned agenda, but I don't think just building high speed rail Between San Francisco and LA can be the extent of it that's going to be a part of it. There's got to be more on top
- [42:28]
Steven Pinker
of it than that, Stephen, although increasing the housing stock might, and bringing housing prices down, which is part of the same problem, to tie it into one of my current obsessions, namely viewpoint diversity and academic freedom, I do wonder whether the organized political left has shut itself off in its own bubble of ideas and only recently has been kind of attentive to ideas coming from conservatives and libertarians that it perhaps ought to have opened itself up to earlier. So in the case of abundance, and I'm speaking with Ezra Klein's other half, Derek Thompson, tomorrow, the closing keynote, I might ask him that. But the whole abundance agenda, the YIMBY agenda, a lot of that is kind of libertarian ideas from the 1980s, if not before, namely that if you pile on regulations and community input, you're going to get less of stuff like transportation and housing and the price is going to rise, and that's actually going to hurt people. Or in the case of Bukele's popularity, probably in any country, Russia after Yeltsin, United states after the 1960s, if crime soars, people are going to be really unhappy and they're going to support authoritarian measures that bring it down. And if you have the universe of liberal ideas just doesn't include the idea that policing can bring down crime, lower crime, improves quality of life, people will support governments that bring down crime. But if instead the idea is police are bad, policing are bad, defund the police, abolish the police, no more prisons and so on, isolated from data showing that policing actually can bring down crime, then you're going to have the organized political left kind of isolated from ideas that could rescue it by being in a bubble and punishing and demonizing any dissent from a fixed set of ideas that it's grown up with.
- [44:43]
Francis Fukuyama
Well, yeah, I think the problem is that the progressive left has forgotten actually that the government can actually be a force for good. And this was the dominant idea from the beginning of the Progressive era, in the 1880s up through the end of the Second World War. The government actually did a lot of stuff. It got the trust under control, right? It created these regulatory commissions, it helped get us out of the Depression, then it won World War II. Ever since that point, since the 1960s, the way that the left has thought about government is completely different. It's been very negative that the government has been captured by corporate interests. And the main thing, if you're a young, ambitious Progressive, you don't want to go into the government to make the government do things well, you want to stop the government. So you become a lawyer, a public interest lawyer, and you sue the government to stop it from doing stuff. And that's part of the reason that it's very hard for the government to actually do things effectively. And so I think a new conceptualization of liberalism has to recognize that we basically have too much law. We fundamentally have encumbered ourselves with so many procedures, procedural constraints on our abilities to do things. And unless we, you know, basically. And actually, I think the first thing that needs to be deregulated is not the private sector, it's actually the government itself. Because the government, if you work in a government agency, everything is about this, you know, layers after layers of detailed rules that any government bureaucrat has to, you know, follow. And I think that mindset needs to be changed. And you can have a very different vision of the government if you free it from this legacy that has accumulated over the last 50, 60 years.
- [46:38]
Yasha Monk
It strikes me that one of the founding promises of liberalism was to provide a better way of dealing with deep and fundamental disagreements of worldview and particularly religion that is its origin in Western Europe and the early modern period. Today in the United States, some post liberal thinkers are arguing that liberalism can't provide that, that it's somehow so biased against religion that you can't be a religious person in the United States in 2025, which seems to be belied by all the facts. But I wonder whether thinking about this from a context where the division of a country into different religious and ethno religious blocs is very, very present and where you are fighting for these liberal principles can teach us a little bit about how to speak to those values and the importance of those ideas and what we have. Something to learn from how you're making that case in your country.
- [47:35]
Sabina Tschudic
Sabina, I wish not to be patronizing and I'm not in even a position to do so, but I'm probably one of the rare politicians in the room and policymakers. And I think the biggest threat revelation for me coming from academia into politics was that what I feel sense of urgency about and what a closed circle of people such as yourselves in this room feel a sense of urgency about is not necessarily shared by the general public. I am severely jet lagged. So I spent my mornings here from 4am one morning from 4am till 7am watching American television.
- [48:17]
Yasha Monk
I'm sorry.
- [48:20]
Sabina Tschudic
And it's a fascinating combination of casual use of word fascism in description of what is going on in the country, interjected by cheerful news about Mets winning so many home runs that they didn't have enough fireworks to celebrate it. And then combined again with antidepressant commercials with a long list of side effects.
- [48:44]
Yasha Monk
Those are very necessary right now.
- [48:46]
Sabina Tschudic
In many ways, things haven't changed since the last time I seriously watched American television, quarter of a century ago. But once I left my hotel room at 7am and went to Georgetown to have a $9 coffee, I saw a completely different reality. The people jogging, the gorgeous people walking their beautiful dogs in front of amazing yards. I did not sense what I saw on television, that sense that we are on the brink of something terrible, even though I think you are. But what I'm saying, as a policymaker, as a policymaker, it's a challenge to find the balance between being hysterical about what is going on and whether, even if you wish to be hysterical, whether that's an effective way of dealing things. And finally, what I've been waiting to do for the 43 years of my life, to tell Americans how to defend and democracy because you've been teaching me. And now look how the tables have turned. One lesson I can offer is a lesson in radical empathy with the people that you disagree with. I come from a country that's now less than 3 million people. We are number two in the world in the percentage of diaspora or number of people outside of the country. And we live next door to perpetrators of genocide, people who kill our family members. I have friends whose family members killed my family members. We find ways to. And you know, the term Balkanization is obviously a well known term, but I find the division in this country actually quite more aggressive than division in Bosnia and Herzegovina. And I know it's a controversial thing to say, but I think we are more resigned to our divisions and you're more energetic about your divisions in that sense. I think leadership, and particularly going back to liberalism is emancipatory exercise in essentially finding a balance between representing and also emancipating. And to me, it was life changing. Visiting, actually Belfast, it was completely mind blowing to understand that the one conflict that you're not emotionally invested in seems ridiculous to an outsider, right? I'm thinking you're a developed country. You're all Christians, Protestants and Catholics. Come on, how hard can it be, right? But then you realize that it runs deep. And what they enshrined in the constitution in Northern Ireland, this concept of shared education wasn't about integrating schools, but it was about sharing resources and taking it incrementally. So incremental progress, recognizing that we are irrational to a point where we can't overcome our irrationality, but we can exercise our empathy and kind of rationality to a certain degree. Let's work with what we have. So in that sense, I think liberalism is a necessary kind of starting point, but a liberalism that understands understands that elite thinking is not necessarily representative and the progress that we are absolutely experiencing is not necessarily perceived as such. And we need to inspire and explain and emancipate.
- [52:13]
Yasha Monk
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 Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter. And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com
- [52:40]
Sabina Tschudic
this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License. Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces. It.