Thank you very much. And so now without further ado, today I'm very excited to welcome Francis Fukuyama, celebrating the release of liberalism and its discontents. Francis is an Olivier Nomelli Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He has previously taught at the Paul H. Nietzsche School of Advanced International Studies of John Hopkins University. and at the George Mason University School of Public Policy.
He was a researcher at the Rand Corporation and served as the Deputy Director in the State Department's Policy Planning Staff. He is the author of Identity, Political Order and Political Decay, The Origins of Political Order, The End of History and The Last Man, Trust, and America at the Crossroads, Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy. He lives with his wife in California.
And so now, please join me in welcoming to Politics and Prose, Francis Fukuyama. So, thanks very much. It's really great to be back in a real bookstore. It reminds me how much I like bookstores in general. I also like being back in this neighborhood.
You know, the first time I lived in Washington working at the State Department, I just lived down the street at 4849 Connecticut Avenue. So this is, I consider this, you know, my old stomping ground. But it's very nice that you came out today.
I'm going to talk to you about the book on liberalism which I think is under very severe threat but to do that I need to define what I mean by liberalism because it's not the way that it's used by many I use it in a way that's not the same as the way other people do I do not mean liberalism in the sense of American politics of people that are progressive or left of center because I think actually a lot of them have become illiberal in many ways which I'll explain In Europe, if you use the term liberal, it usually refers to a center-right political position like the Free Democrats in Germany that's kind of pro-market but socially progressive. I don't mean liberalism in the sense of libertarianism, which I regard as a kind of bizarre American idea that's just hostile to the state sort of across the board, and that's certainly not my position. The kind of liberalism I am referring to is what you might call a classical form of liberalism.
It began in the middle of the 17th century actually. At that point Europe had been fighting wars of religion for 150 years following the Protestant Reformation and a number of liberal writers. at that point began to say, hey, maybe if we base our political system on a particular religion, a particular vision of the good life, we're going to do nothing but fight each other.
And maybe we should have a political system in which we lower the horizons of politics. We agree that we want life itself rather than the good life. and we learn to tolerate people that have other visions of what the highest goods are.
And that's the basic idea that's animated liberalism since then. It developed into a doctrine that asserts that all human beings may differ culturally, racially, by gender, by all of these characteristics, external characteristics, but they have a certain basic human dignity. that is shared not just by members of a particular ethnic or national group but universally and so all human beings have this dignity and all human beings deserve to have that dignity protected the institutions associated with liberalism are primarily a rule of law that does protect individuals from the power of governments and of the state by constitutions that try to limit government power by checks and balances And it's also been associated with a certain cognitive style, modern natural science. And this doctrine that came into being around the same time as liberalism was being invented asserts that there is an objective world beyond our subjective consciousnesses, that we can perceive this world through the experimental method and then manipulate it. And that's what produces modern technology, which in turn produces the kind of economic...
growth and productivity that the world has seen really since that period. So that's basically the kind of liberalism that I'm concerned with, whose most fundamental characteristics are the rule of law. It's compatible with a lot of different economic... policies.
So I think social democratic Sweden and Denmark are liberal states because they protect individual rights, as is, you know, the United States or Japan that have smaller welfare states, but nonetheless protect those rights through law. All right, so that's what liberalism is. So let me give you three reasons for wanting to be a liberal or for wanting to live in a liberal society.
And I think one of the problems is that there's been A lot of attacks on liberalism from both the right and the left in recent years. You now have a whole group of so-called post-liberal conservatives who think that liberalism is at fault for the ills of contemporary society. And you have a lot of progressives, you know, a lot of Gen Z types that think that liberalism is something that their parents, baby boomers, or grandparents believed in, but it's not relevant.
to the present and I think it still is and so there's basically three reasons. So the first is a practical one or pragmatic one which is that liberalism is fundamentally a means of governing diverse societies. Back in the 17th century the diversity was religious diversity.
Protestants Catholics, different sects of Protestants were fighting and killing each other and so liberalism said we're not going to kill each other over these kinds of issues. In the 19th and 20th centuries you had the rise of a very aggressive nationalism. that similarly led to the violence of the two world wars.
And then once again in 1945 at the conclusion of those wars, you had the return of a liberal world order and liberalism within the countries, at least of Western Europe, that said different nations need to be able to get along. And the European Union, in a sense, was set up as a liberal international structure to manage. the peaceful relationship of these different nations, right? So that's the pragmatic virtue of liberalism.
You can see this, by the way, in a country like India. India was founded by Gandhi and Nehru in the late 1940s on liberal principles, and it's almost impossible to imagine how that country can be governed. Other than that, I mean, India is, you know, is religiously diverse. It's diverse by caste, by region, by language.
There's multiple languages spoken in India. And if you didn't have a basically liberal framework for that, you would be having communal violence, you know, constantly. And the liberal order in India, I think, has preserved that nation.
up to the present. And right now, one of the big problems in India is that Prime Minister Modi and his BJP Hindu Nationalist Party is trying to shift India's national identity away from a liberal one to one that's based on Hindu nationalism, which is then stripping, you know, citizen rights from Muslims and, you know. Taking away the status, independent status of Kashmir and a lot of other things that inevitably are going to lead to violence, just as he experienced when he was the chief minister in Gujarat and you had a lot of communal rioting between these groups. And so that's the pragmatic argument. Now the second argument is basically a moral one.
liberalism protects human autonomy. I think that there's a very deep tradition in the Judeo-Christian tradition that what gives dignity to human beings is their ability to make moral choices. So if you think about why all people would be considered equal, certainly not equal in terms of intelligence, skin color, gender, lots of other characteristics. But there is a belief that really begins, you know, it's articulated first, I would say, in the book of Genesis, where Adam and Eve are told not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They do it anyway, and they're cast out of the garden.
And what that does is indicate that human beings actually can distinguish between right and wrong. In that particular case, they chose wrongly. They disobeyed God's word, but they were able to choose. And I think that that has been the grounds on which... Many people have believed that human beings are moral beings, different from a plant or a rock or any other part of created nature, that you can make moral choices.
And that's what gives people that essential equality because everybody has that capacity for moral choice. That's what liberalism protects. It's our autonomy, our ability to decide what to do in life, where to live, who to marry, what beliefs to profess.
that, you know, really make us human beings. That's what the rights that a liberal society protects are meant to foster. Finally, the third advantage of a liberal society is economic. Among the rights that liberal societies protect are the right to own private property, to transact, to make commercial transactions, to buy and sell. And for that reason, liberal societies have been associated with economic modernization and growth right from the beginning.
So the Netherlands and England were the first two really liberal societies. They really led the commercial and then the industrial revolutions. And up to the present, it's really that liberal protection of these basic economic rights that has led to growth, even in a country like China.
So China, contemporary China, is not a liberal society in terms of... of its political system, but beginning in 1978 when Deng Xiaoping reformed the system, he did it by actually giving Chinese citizens certain economic rights and in particular quasi-prime. property rights where peasants no longer had to work on collective farms but they could actually keep the fruits of their labor and within four years Chinese agricultural output doubled because there's an incentive now for peasants to produce and you know the right to buy and sell own property to transact to start businesses really is what powered this amazing Chinese growth story that you know, has been unfolding over the years since 1978. So there's a connection between being a wealthy modern society and having these kinds of liberal principles or protecting these kinds of liberal principles.
Now, what I argue in my book is that part of the reason that people are upset and unhappy with liberalism has not so much to do with the basic character characteristics that I've just outlined, but by certain deformations of liberalism that took place both on the right and on the left. You might call the ones on the right neoliberalism, and the ones on the left, I don't know, woke liberalism. I don't use that term, but it's a kind of shorthand for understanding what's been going on.
So let's begin with the neoliberalism. It's not, you know, neoliberalism is thrown around a lot, oftentimes as a synonym for capitalism. And I don't use it that way. I think that neoliberalism for me was a certain extension of basic free market principles that really arose in the 1980s and 90s under Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher.
You know, politicians that wanted to advocate free markets, led intellectually by people like Milton Friedman, a number of Nobel Prize winners. prize-winning economists, so-called Chicago School, they begin with a correct insight that private property and markets are important for economic growth, but they carry that to an extreme where the state is denigrated and neoliberals attempt to cut back the state in terms of social protections, regulation, and the like. And this leads to markets creating huge inequalities. Inequality in especially the most liberal societies, or the most neoliberal countries, Britain and the United States, have grown enormously since the 1960s. The deregulation, especially of the financial sector, is what leads directly to the cascading set of financial crises that take place in the 1990s and then culminates in the 2008 subprime crisis in the United States.
This, in turn, is very bad for a lot of ordinary people who lose their homes because their mortgages are underwater. Whereas the elites, you know, the bankers and the hedge fund managers and so forth that created that system experienced maybe a year or two of disruption, but basically they end up fine. And I would say that this is really what propels a lot of the populism that then appears in the subsequent decade, both on the right and the left. Ordinary people suffering from neoliberal policies that don't seem to be benefiting and in fact seem to be hurting them.
You know, what you might call the woke liberalism is different because they start with another correct premise, which is that liberalism protects individual autonomy. But, you know, in my view, they carry that autonomy to an extreme where Autonomy is seen as a good in itself and not, you know, embedded in an existing or pre-existing moral framework. That people exist simply to be able to make choices regardless of what those choices are, which, if you think about it, makes society impossible because what makes a society is the fact that there are commonly shared rules and, you know, people have norms that embed them in communities. And that's really what...
A lot of people want out of life is that ability to work together with other people. If people have the ability not just to follow the rules or not, but to actually make up their own rules, you're not going to have much of a structure of society. The way that this manifests is in identity politics. And for me, there's really two versions of identity politics, one of which I believe in and support, which is the liberal version.
And then there's another version that's not so liberal. The liberal version says there are many marginalized groups, African-Americans, immigrants, women, LGBTQ people, and their rights are not being respected. They are not being incorporated into the mainstream society, and they ought to be.
You know, this was basically the message of Martin Luther King in the civil rights movement, that black people were not being treated the same as white people and that they ought to have the same rights and opportunities. And that, you know, to me is a liberal idea and a liberal state ought to pursue that version of identity politics. All identity politics does in that case is to mobilize people, get them angry about the their marginalization and then use the democratic system to, you know, force changes. There's however a different form that I think is less liberal which says that it's actually the individualism that's the target, that we are really members of groups before we are, you know, individuals and that our group characteristics are more important and more essential in evaluating us, you know, for jobs, for promotion, for employment, for whatever, than what we've achieved as individuals.
I think it's obvious that our group membership... do affect our sense of identity and that those are very important to us. But there's a kind of absolutization of these group identities that then begins to question the underlying premise of equal individuals that is really critical to the liberal approach to politics.
And at an extreme, you actually have cases of countries in which this kind of group identity group identity politics becomes dominant. I mean, you know, Lebanon or Bosnia or Syria, you know, there's any number of countries that have actually fallen apart in recent years because the politics is all about a zero-sum distribution of goods, you know, between established... established identity groups and that form is fundamentally I think not compatible with a well-functioning democracy and it's also I think not compatible with liberal principles now Between these two threats, or, well, so, let me back up a little bit.
So the extension of these liberal ideas to what I regard as these more extreme forms, then I think go a long way to explaining the current polarization that's hit the United States, but other societies as well, because on the right there's an intense dislike of this illiberal form of identity politics, and on the left... There's certainly a big reaction to the economic and social inequality that's been produced by neoliberal economics. And in many respects, you know, the two sides have mobilized against each other.
And it's landed us in the current, I think, very dangerous situation that we're in in the United States as a society. And in fact, you know. To my sorrow, the United States, I think, suffers from this probably more than almost any other established democracy in the world today. Now, if you ask, you know, I've been speaking as if I'm being very even-handed between the left and the right. If you ask me which of these threats...
to liberalism is more important, the one coming from the contemporary right or the one coming from the left, I would say, without question, right now, it is the one coming from the right. Because, you know, the extreme right in the United States, I think... Many of them have broken with the basic, both liberalism and with democracy itself.
You know, we found out, for example, through the January 6th commission, if you've been following their work, they've actually revealed that that attack on the Capitol wasn't just a spontaneous demonstration that somehow got out of hand, that it had been planned ahead of time, you know, by the president and a small group of advisors, and it's direct. The purpose was to overturn a legitimate election and you know in a way what's worse than the actual assault was the fact that then you know a lot of the Republican Party has sought to normalize what happened and say oh it's not that big a deal whereas I think it's one of the biggest deals that we faced you know since the Civil War in terms of the continuity and the principles of American of American democracy and you know, the coming election in 2024 will be a big test about whether our institutions can actually survive this assault. So I think that that's a clear and present immediate danger. The danger on the left is a little bit more, it's more long term because it's primarily a cultural phenomenon and it occurs, you know, primarily in certain more or less elite cultural institutions like universities, the arts, Hollywood, and so forth. But I think that there are tendencies there that are illiberal towards intolerance.
So many right-wing ethno-nationalists in the United States don't like the diversity represented by racial diversity, by immigration, and the like. I think there is a tendency on the left not to tolerate certain kinds of political diversity or diversity with regard to religion, you know, or holding people that hold, you know, deeply felt religious views. But I would say, you know, to repeat, I think the threat on the right is much more severe at the present moment.
So this is the kind of situation that we are facing at the moment. The other big problem is the one regarding our cognitive framework, because as I said, liberalism was strongly associated with modern natural... science, I have a chapter in the book tracing the attack on science that has appeared over the years.
And this one actually, in my view, begins on the left rather than on the right. I know this stuff very well because in my younger days I went to France and I studied with a lot of postmodernist French intellectuals like Jacques Derrida. Roland Barthes.
I met Michel Foucault actually when I was still an undergraduate at Cornell. And you know that intellectual tradition begins with a skepticism about objectivity in a certain way. That language for many structuralists is not something that reflects the real world.
It's a kind of imposition by the speakers of the words. on that reality that then shapes the reality. And this expands into a kind of across-the-board subjectivism where that reality is increasingly questioned and it's really only your consciousness of it that matters, but everybody's consciousness is different and so there's a questioning about the solidity of that reality.
This is articulated the most fully by Michel Foucault. He has a concept of biopower. So Foucault argued In a series of really brilliant books, he said, Look, in the old days, a ruler would be able to order the death of any one of his subjects if he didn't like what they were saying.
And so you used fear in that very overt way. Today, it's a little bit different. A ruler doesn't kill his subjects.
He tries to use the language of science to persuade people that something is true, whereas, in fact, it simply represents the interest of the elites that are behind the scenes manipulating the society. the society. And he showed this with respect to phenomena like incarceration, homosexuality, madness, that these were all concepts that were defined ostensibly scientifically, but in fact they reflected A kind of power interest on the part of existing elites that wanted to keep these different groups marginalized in different ways. And by the end of his career, he had extended this idea of biopower to virtually everything. And so, in my view, in a way, Foucault is the original conspiracy.
theorists, right, that nothing is actually the way it seems. And if you think that something is simply, you know, true because a scientist says it's true, you know, you're not understanding the way you're manipulated. So does this sound familiar to you?
It should because it's now drifted over from the left to the right. So during the COVID epidemic, what do we get? We get a lot of conservatives saying, you know, the public health authorities that are telling you that you need to wear masks and get vaccinated.
aren't actually scientists that are just reporting, you know, objective scientific findings. They're actually representing the interests of elites that want to have power over you. That's why they're making these mandates, and you should distrust their authority. And that leads us into this cognitive wasteland that then is hugely amplified by the technological development of the Internet over the same period, right, where... It used to be that the information people would get had to be vetted by certain institutions, you know, legacy media, the courts, scientific journals and the like, before they would be accepted.
What the internet did was basically allow anyone to say anything they wanted. We thought initially this was going to be great because, you know, we take away the power of these hierarchical gatekeepers, but it turns out that anyone can then weaponize the internet and anyone can say anything they want. So when you combine that technological capacity with an intellectual framework that tells you that everything is essentially subjective and that you shouldn't trust any kind of established authority, you get this what you would have to label an epistemic relativism. That liberalism...
in a sense endorses a certain kind of moral relativism because we're not all going to agree on what moral truths are but at least we sort of thought we agreed on you know factual information like you know is this vaccine safe or who won the 2020 presidential election but under epistemic relativism you're not even agreed on you know those basic facts and that makes actually a liberal society or liberal democracy pretty hard to sustain because You know, you can't deliberate if you can't actually agree on kind of empirical facts and empirical truth. So maybe the last thing I'll mention, the book is not a policy book. I've worked my whole life in policy institutions and taught at policy schools.
And I could go on and on about, you know, a laundry list of things that you might do to mitigate the current. polarization. I don't try to do this in this book because I think, you know, that in many ways, policies and politics are downstream of ideas and culture. And if you don't establish the proper ideas and the cultural framework first, you're not going to derive the right policies and actions. And, you know, so that's where I'm situating this book.
I want to establish, you know, what liberalism is and why it's important. There are a couple of things that I would say would be important to establish liberalism more firmly. One of them has to do with the idea of nations and national identity. There is an ostensible contradiction between liberals who believe that all human beings regardless of where they live have equal human rights.
It doesn't matter whether they're American or they're living in Bangladesh or Kenya or wherever they've all got equal rights and yet we're all divided into nations in which our jurisdiction really doesn't extend to anyone but, you know, people living in our territory. You can read it in the book, but I believe that liberal theory doesn't really tell you why we're divided into the nations we are, but they remain important because the nation is still the custodian of force, you know, of coercive power represented by things like armies and police forces. We need these in order to protect ourselves from external and internal security threats, but also to basically deliver services to enforce laws and the like. And at the moment... The only mechanisms we have for controlling this kind of power exist at a nation-state level.
You know, those control mechanisms are things like courts, legislatures, independent media, and we don't have the power, you know, we don't know how to build a transnational authority that would be powerful enough to do things. and yet would be controlled and used effectively. But the other consideration just has to do with our emotional attachments. The nation is at the moment probably the largest social unit to which people feel an instinctive emotional attachment. Generally speaking, The larger the group, the more attenuated your feelings of solidarity.
And this is important because I don't think you can sustain a liberal society without that. I'll conclude by illustrating what's going on. going on right now in Ukraine because Ukraine in my view is it's the front line of a big struggle against foreign against liberal values 2019 Putin gives an interview with the FT he says liberalism is an obsolete doctrine and he has been building you know a powerful illiberal state and he has been trying to absorb and eliminate the independent nation of Ukraine because it you know he doesn't think it has the right to exist he was very mistaken in this because ukraine has actually resisted tenaciously but if you ask why are the ukrainians fighting back so hard you know they are dying in great numbers in order to prevent you know being taken over and conquered by russia why are they doing it and there's been a debate do the ukrainians really are they fighting on behalf of liberal democracy or are they just fighting in in you know, for sovereignty.
It wouldn't matter what kind of government they had as long as it wasn't, you know, controlled from Russia or some other outside power. And I would say that it's really both. That very few people fight and die, risk their lives for liberalism as an abstract cause. They fight and die for it as it is implemented and embedded in an actual nation and in fact embed it in their nation.
I've spent a lot of time in Ukraine over the last seven, eight years and have lots of Ukrainian friends and I know that this is the case with, you know, virtually all of them that they actually are both both Ukrainian patriots, but, you know, why are they, why do they like, why do they love Ukraine? It really has to do with the fact that it's not Russia, that it's a fundamentally free society. You can criticize the government.
You can come and go. The state isn't monitoring you or putting you in jail for, you know, the slightest disobedience to its rules. And that's why they're willing to, you know, to fight on its behalf.
And I think... If you don't have that kind of instinctive loyalty to liberal values embedded in a liberal regime, that regime isn't going to work. But the idea of the nation that people fight and die for has to be a liberal one. There are plenty of illiberal forms of national identity that are based on ethnicity, race, you know, kind of deeply, or religion, very deeply.
inherited narrow set of cultural values that people can't necessarily share in and that's not a good form of national identity you need a liberal form of national identity that is inclusive of everyone that actually lives in your society so with that I'll stop and I look forward if any of you have questions I'm eager to start a discussion thank you very much So have you factored in what used to be called the paranoid style of American politics? And do you have a suggestion for how we cope with the situation now where the Republicans, or many Republicans, finance... by big business, are determined to make a society where they control everything. And then what do we do in a liberal society funded by the Koch brothers?
Darrell Bock Well, I think what you do is you fight back using the tools that democracy itself gives you, right? So in a democracy, if you don't like the fact that, you know, these things are unfolding, you mobilize people, you get them to vote, you put up candidates. And you also, I think, have to have an alternative to this, you know, which I agree is a very...
dark and dangerous you know trend you have to have a plausible um uh alternative to that and i would say that uh you know right i mean i i in the book i don't get into kind of short-term you know american politics but i would say that right now the um the progressive side of the ledger has It's not been actually putting up the kind of agenda that would actually entice a lot of, especially swing state voters to, you know, vote for their party. So you need to do all of those things. You need to call a spade a spade and, you know, attack the kind of anti-democratic things that are going on in the Republican Party.
You have to pose a plausible alternative, and then you've got to get people concerned and angry. One of the big problems right now is that, you know— I as a political scientist believe that, you know, this effort to change the laws on a state level, to be able to override a democratic outcome in 2024 is the single biggest threat to American democracy. Do ordinary voters care about this? No. I mean, you cannot get people upset.
I mean, they care about inflation. They care about gas prices. I'm not saying that that's not something, you know, you understand why that's the case.
But right now, people don't understand that their democracy is a problem. democracy is at risk and you've somehow got to Explain that to them and get them mobilized around that issue. So Elizabeth Warren Professor Thank you for your remarks Just to follow up on the as you mentioned the significance of the conflict in Ukraine to liberalism and to Western liberal democracies and just like if you could comment, how do you see that conflict playing out in the next weeks and also what could we anticipate from the western liberal democracies response considering its significance no it's a good question I have a blog whose title is frankly Fukuyama. I helped to establish an online journal called American purpose Calm and you can find the blog there.
So I've been writing a lot about About Ukraine and I have right from the beginning been much more optimistic about the way that this war would go militarily because Russian Competence and morale are just catastrophic And the Ukrainians, you know something. I mean there been hundreds of thousands of Russians that have left Russia since the beginning of the conflict. There's like a quarter million Ukrainians that came back to Ukraine from other parts of Europe once the war started because they wanted to defend their country. And so there's just a huge imbalance in the moral factor on the two sides, plus which the Ukrainians are much better led and so forth. So I'm not surprised that they've actually driven the Russians out of the...
Kiev region and Kharkiv now and you know my hope is that they can actually drive them out of the south and get back much of the Donbass at that point you might be able to talk about a ceasefire or some kind of political settlement right now it's not possible with the Russians occupying that much of Ukraine's territory but I do think that it's it's it's bad to do what the New York Times just did in a recent editorial to say well the war is hopeless it's just gonna bogged down here and therefore we need to push the Ukrainians to accept, you know, that outcome because I don't think they need to. Okay, thank you. Hi.
Hi. I really enjoyed your presentation and I suppose what I'm about to present is just to see what, how you reflect on it. Okay. Yes to just about every word you said. If, however, there is not somehow a questioning of what it means to be a human being at this point in history.
just not for America, but worldwide, we will never get anywhere because we have to find out if we've become obsolete in our own creation. That's one thing. The other thing that is so fundamental, we'll probably agree, is that if we never ask about what are the roles of wealth and power, regardless of what the underlying philosophy is, because...
essentially you could even take communism and if you could get a wonderful way of doing your governing to really do it for the people that could work so any of these things have a possibility left right whatever but if we don't understand the fundamental nature of wealth and power and the tendency to grab on to it it will never get anywhere yeah well wealth and power have always been big drivers of human motivation and You know, it's not as if they're a new thing. I think that, you know, what's different about the modern world is that in a properly governed market economy, you can pursue wealth and power in a way that is socially beneficial to a lot of other people besides yourself. Like you create a new technology that then has lots of spillover effects, you know, in medicine and IT and a lot of other areas. The issue really is having the correct political framework to control the consequences of that kind of, you know, basically market innovation.
In my view, you can't just have a liberal society that has these rules that permit market exclusivity. because left to itself, that kind of capitalism produces too much inequality and therefore it really needs to be mated to democracy. People have to be able to mobilize and push back.
and do redistribution, create controls on out-of-control banks and economic actors. And it's possible to do that. I mean, that's kind of the history of the last 150 years is the market spreads and then you create new institutions to control it and then it evolves further.
And right now the financial sector, for example, is evolving in this kind of really crazy, very uncontrolled way and we're trying to... to grapple with how we deal with that. But I don't see the alternative to trying to keep this under control using the existing mechanisms that we have, because you're right that if you don't control it, you're going to end up with a very unequal and not very just society.
Thank you. Hi, I would just like to say it's an honor to see you face to face. So my question is, do you think that liberalism is just as much to blame for the rise of illiberalism as the... as a liberalism itself, like the emphasis on the individual rights, putting forth kind of the idea that everybody should be heard, that markets should be free, that governments can't governments can't enforce censorship. And that, yeah, I'm sorry, I kind of forgot my question.
No, I understand. So that actually is a question and a criticism that's come up in, you know, as I presented the book. My claim is that you have a form of classical liberalism that was relatively moderate, that accepted the basic principles of human dignity and the rule of law.
and that that worked pretty well, but it's been deformed by certain extensions of those principles in ways that then become illiberal, and that's what sets off a reaction. So neoliberalism in the economic sphere and a kind of unlimited autonomy in the personal sphere. And some of the critics have said, well, you say that these are deformations of liberalism. but I think that they're actually intrinsic to liberalism, that a liberal, you know, you start with liberal principles, you're inevitably going to get to this point of kind of unlimited capitalism and unlimited, you know, human autonomy. And, you know, it's a serious...
idea and but I don't think actually that it's correct that I think you know you've had efforts to pull back on some of those principles for example right now we've reinjected the state in to the regulation of the capitalist market. In Europe, they've got a really serious effort at antitrust to control these big companies in the... United States, you know, we've returned to government intervention to support people, you know, spending and, you know, giving up on austerity and this sort of thing. So I think, you know, there is the possibility of readjusting these policies so that, you know, they're not taken to these, these extremes. Okay.
If you don't mind, I remembered what I was trying to ask. So liberalism's fault is its inability to thwart illiberalism, I feel. And as a result, within the last 15 years, we've seen a rise of right-wing authoritarianism. Well, look, yeah, that's right.
I mean, you're not going to defeat the right by becoming authoritarian yourself, right? and forbidding certain things from being said. I think there's other things that you can do to prevent the artificial amplification of, you know, certain voices and that's why I think the internet platforms really need to be regulated in some way. But yeah, you're right.
I mean liberals believe in freedom of speech and you're not going to be a liberal if you start simply banning certain, you know, right-wing voices. Thanks. Hi. Hi there. I was wondering if you had a perspective on the recent election in the Philippines with the Marcos being restored to power and disinformation essentially erasing a large portion of history.
for that country? Yeah, well, it's bad. It's really very disappointing that the Philippines voted this way.
But it's part of a larger trend. I mean, according to Freedom House, you know, they publish an annual Freedom in the World report, and liberal democracy has been in decline for the last 16 years. And we've seen recent setbacks in Myanmar, you know, in Sri Lanka, in you know, India, in the United States, and in the Philippines, and Tunisia, so forth. And so we're definitely in a very difficult period of world history, where a lot of the gains for liberal democracy that occurred in the period from the 1970s up until the early 2000s is being reversed.
And they get kind of cumulative, because if one of these strongmen rulers succeeds in one country, they're going to succeed in others. That's, by the way, another reason why I think that The war in Ukraine is actually important for a lot of people outside of Ukraine because, you know, the dominant model of a strongman ruler is Putin himself, and he's had good relations with all of the populist nationalists around the world. You know, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour in France, and Donald Trump in the United States, who to this day has never said a single negative word about.
you know, about Putin. So I think that you've got to demonstrate that this kind of strongman government doesn't work. Now, that's why I think there's a little bit of hope just in what's happened recently, because you've had two really big authoritarian failures, like The war in Ukraine is obviously one of the biggest miscalculations, you know, done by any, you know, great power leader in living memory. And I think that, you know, what the Chinese are doing in terms of their zero COVID policy, which to me seems really crazy, locking down an entire city of 25 million people for two months, just so Xi Jinping doesn't have to admit that he was wrong about.
you know about this i mean that could only happen in a in a authoritarian country with no checks and balances right and so i think that there is some hope that you know the perceived advantages of these authoritarian governments is going to recede as these authoritarian failures pile up. But, you know, democracies have to do better themselves. They have to show that they can deliver on basic public goods and, you know, things that people want. But, you know, I'm not giving up hope yet.
Thank you. Sorry, I've kind of got two questions. Should I ask both at the same time?
Yeah, go ahead. Then I get to decide which one I answer if I don't like one of them. So I wanted to ask, first of all, I think it's kind of liberalism is all about equating difference, but what happens when people disagree? So like we're seeing with like in the latest WTO convention, it kind of happened that there were so many voices that nobody could come to an agreement and they had to actually call it off. Yeah.
So what mechanisms does liberalism have for that kind of not to happen? In which case, doesn't that kind of make questioning epistemology a bit more relevant? And then my other question is the thing that you said about objectivism. What I've noticed is that objectivism, it seems like it's all about what you can prove with quantitative data and that kind of thing.
But an objective policy that's... created will always have subjective results, like some people will be really happy with what happens and some people won't. So I was just wondering, yeah, how you can kind of value that maybe qualitative data that would come from objectivism, how that balances out. Sure.
First question, one of the big challenges to, it's not just liberalism, but liberal democracy, where you want to give lots of people a voice in making decisions, is that, you know, societies can be so diverse that it's really hard to actually come to an agreement. So most political institutions have mechanisms for forcing a decision and forcing people to agree. Like right now, the European Union.
With 27 members, any one of them can veto a foreign policy decision, and therefore Hungary can stop the EU from criticizing China or doing a lot of the things that it would like to do. And that's why you move to something like... majority voting or qualified majority voting or you know you create an executive authority to which you delegate the ability to make decisions and so it doesn't always work and it is a big problem if you want to make everybody happy in some a lot of cases it's simply not going to happen but you know that's the way decision making is supposed to work in a open society on the question of subjectivism you know the the issue is not that people are subjectively going to react to an event or you know a decision or something the question is really about factual information is it completely subjective that we say oh yeah yeah, there's Connecticut Avenue outside, you know, of this bookstore, and I know what the name of that street is, that's what it is. Should that be subject to people saying, well, you know, that's just your opinion. I mean, I have opinion, my opinion is it's Wisconsin Avenue, right?
So I think that that's really the issue that I was trying to talk about, that, you know, just simple factual information is not you know we all have a subjective window onto that outside reality but what the scientific method does is to try to get past it through a social process that that brings in evidence, refutes held positions because it doesn't correspond to the evidence, and then that position can be refuted. It's kind of an unending social process, but it actually tries to get you closer and closer to what that objective reality is. And that process is social, but it's not simply subjective.
Thank you. Sure. Hello.
Mine is not a very serious question, I apologize for that. But in retrospect, do you wish you had given your book, The End of History, a different title, considering the number of people who criticized that phrase without actually reading the book? Well, look.
The title was not mine. The philosopher that talked about the end of history was Hegel. And it was his concept as then in the 20th century reinterpreted by...
Alexandre Kougev, who was probably the greatest 20th century interpreter of Hegel. And Karl Marx had that idea. He said that there was an end of history and that that end of history would be communism.
And so I was simply saying that the Hegelian version of the end of history looked more plausible than the Marxist version. Well, it was before the fall of communism, but anticipating that. So I don't apologize for using it. I think that, you know. People simply did not understand what I was trying to argue.
So it's true I've had to correct them continuously for the last 30 years. That's not fun, but that's life. If I can add a personal anecdote to that, I was once in the French diplomatic circles, and there was a great number of people who liked to start a phrase at cocktail parties by saying, Fukuyama's greatest mistake was that... But they never read your book.
It's not just there. A lot of people do that. sorry for that okay okay There are no many questions.
All right. Thank you so much, Francis. And thank you all for joining today and for your wonderful questions and for your fantastic presentation. We do have books signed available at the registers, but he will personalize. So if you could just line up right here and please fold up your chairs and lean them against something solid.
So let's all give Francis a warm round of applause.