Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Director of Stanford’s Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy. He is the author of many books including The End of History and the Last Man, The Origins of Political Order, and most recently, Liberalism and its Discontents.
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I think that there is a core set of shared values that liberals have to embrace. You know, if they don’t believe in a rule of law, they don’t believe in the fundamental legitimacy of their constitutional order, that’s a big problem. But as I said, probably the strongest argument in favor of liberalism is this pragmatic one. That this is something that allows pluralistic diverse societies to live in peace with one another.
Francis Fukuyama
Key Highlights
- Introduction – 0:47
- Interpretation of Liberalism – 3:04
- Liberalism and Democracy – 17:15
- Conservative Critique – 26:22
- Threats to Liberalism – 39:16
Podcast Transcript
Two weeks ago I began what I call a three episode arc on liberalism. Every once in a while I like to do a few episodes in a row on the same theme. But I called this an arc, because I viewed it almost like a narrative. Michael Walzer introduced us to what it means to be liberal. Then Patrick Deneen provided a conflict between liberal and conservative values. In this episode Francis Fukuyama will help us resolve this conflict from last week’s episode.
Francis Fukuyama is a widely known intellectual and political theorist. He is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Director of Stanford’s Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy. He is the author of many books including The End of History and the Last Man, The Origins of Political Order, and most recently, Liberalism and its Discontents.
Now I wanted to talk to Francis Fukuyama last, because he offers a balanced defense of liberalism. He recognizes the critiques from thinkers like Patrick Deneen, but believes moderation is the solution rather than outright rejection. Nonetheless, I found I still have plenty of thoughts about liberalism even after these episodes. For those who want to hear my final thoughts on these conversations, there is a bonus episode for premium subscribers to the podcast at Patreon or Apple Podcasts. In the show notes I’ll provide a link to my Patreon page to make it easy to find. A subscription is only $5/month
Like always you can find a complete transcript of this episode at democracyparadox.com. But for now this is my conversation with Francis Fukuyama…
jmk
Frank Fukuyama, welcome to the Democracy Paradox.
Francis Fukuyama
Thank you very much for having me.
jmk
Well, Frank, I’m very excited to be here with you. I’ve read so many of your books before and was a big fan of your most recent book Liberalism in its Discontents. One of the things on my mind as we get started is throughout the conversations I’ve had so far in this through episode arc, one of the things that I’ve been finding is that a lot of the conversations actually center around values, and we’ll get deeper into that as we go into it, but what is it that liberalism means to you?
Francis Fukuyama
So, when I’m talking about liberalism, I need to define carefully what I mean by that. I don’t mean the way that it’s interpreted either in the United States or Europe. In the United States, it’s a left of center progressive position that wants more state redistribution and more equality. So, in Europe it’s more pro-market center position and cautious about an expansive welfare state. I think both of those can encompass the kind of liberalism I believe in, which is really not based on economic policy, whether you have a big state or a small state, but on a belief in the equality of human dignity that extends to the human race as a whole and is protected by a rule of law, by a state that enforces rules, but also self-constrained by constitutional checks and balances.
I also say that there are three broad justifications. The first of which is a pragmatic one, which really reflects the origins of modern liberalism in the 17th century. It came against the backdrop of Europe’s wars of religion after the Protestant Reformation and what early liberals wanted to do was to say the regime should not be based on a strong set of values as those embodied in a particular religious doctrine. That what was important was the protection of life itself rather than the good life. That it was a pragmatic means of allowing people in diverse societies to live peacefully with one another.
I think it also has a moral dimension, which was the second justification, which had to do with autonomy because the reason that liberals believe that people are equal is that they have an equal capacity for choice. That choice is important to them, but in a way that puts a certain limit on your enthusiasm for liberalism because you know it’s deliberately not based around a strong set of communal values. One of the objections that people have always had to liberalism is that it doesn’t actually tell you how to live. It simply says you’re free to make choices and you can determine your way of life.
I think that if you live in an authoritarian regime, in a dictatorship, then that basic freedom to come and go, to express your opinions, to associate with whom you want, to travel, to engage in economic activity. I mean, you really enjoy that, but I think one of the problems now in contemporary liberal societies is that’s not sufficient. I’ve had now a couple of debates with Patrick Deneen who has tried to lay out a conservative postliberal position and his complaint goes back to the origins of liberalism. There’s no telos. There’s no end of human life that liberalism seeks after and he wants to restore that.
You know, I think that’s absurd. I mean, we in contemporary America are simply not going to agree on an end of human life and what the good life is. We’re way too diverse to have that kind of agreement and therefore that longing for strong community based on very deeply held communal values is simply not something that you’re going to get in a liberal society. What you are going to get is security, stability, basic freedom to come and go as you choose. Most liberal societies are rich because you have the protection of economic rights in addition to your individual civil and political rights and that leads to a level of prosperity. I think those are really the reasons that you should prefer liberalism to any of the alternatives out there.
jmk
So Frank, when your book came out back in April, it was very impressive and, in the book, you write, “It is liberalism rather than democracy that has come under the sharpest attack in recent years. That was a line that really struck me because we talk a lot about the democratic recession. We don’t talk much about a liberal recession. Shortly before your book actually came out, Russia had engaged in its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Many described that as yet again, an attack on democracy. I’d like to know whether you think of that as also an attack against liberalism.
Francis Fukuyama
Well, it was an attack on both. You know, democracy and liberalism are close allies of one another, but they are distinct ideas and they’re reflected in a distinct set of institutions. Democracy really has to do with popular choice and popular sovereignty. The institutions with which it’s associated are things like free and fair, multi-party elections, whereas liberalism really is about the rule of law, the constraints on state power, the idea that rulers cannot simply do whatever they want. They have to be limited in their exercise of power by a rule of law.
The reason that I pointed to the attack on liberalism rather than democracy really has to do with the rise of global populism over the past several years where you have a number of leaders that have been elected legitimately in a number of countries like Turkey, India, and the United States with the election of Donald Trump. The first thing that these populist leaders do is attack liberal institutions. This is really what happened with Trump. He wanted criminal indictment of his opponent Hillary Clinton. I mean, the worst outrage against liberal values was really trying to overturn the last election illegally. But you know, this was true also of Erdoğan, Modi, and the like.
Now, what many people have said is that once you attack and undermine the liberal constraints on power, then you begin to attack democracy as well. I think that that’s true. So, obviously the Trumpian attack on the rule of law was meant to overturn a democratic election. Victor Orbán in Hungary has used his democratic election to gerrymander and remove the level playing field so that future Hungarian elections would be tilted in favor of his Fidesz party and the like. So, in the end, it ends up being a threat to both liberalism and democracy. But I do think it’s really those constraints on state power that are really central to a lot of people. If you ask why do populists across the democratic world admire Vladimir Putin? The reason I think is that he’s an unconstrained, authoritarian.
He doesn’t have to worry about liberal rules or constitutional checks on his power and they would like to do the same thing. They say, ‘I’m elected. The people want me to carry out certain tasks and these laws, these courts, these judges, these bureaucrats, these media figures are standing in my way. I want unconstrained power.’ So, that’s why I think the first attack really is on liberal institutions.
jmk
Now, obviously the line between liberalism and democracy though is not always clear. I mean, there is a line that you and Andrew Grotto had written in this piece called “Comparative Media Regulation in the United States and Europe,” where you wrote, “Freedom of speech is normatively regarded as critical to the proper functioning of a liberal democracy.” And I think that we could break those apart and say that freedom of speech is both critical to a liberal state and a democratic state. I mean, it’s critical to both. It’s hard to imagine there to be genuine democracy without freedom of speech and at the same time, it seems to be the most definitive form of liberal values that there is.
I mean, when we think of liberalism, we think of freedom of opinion, freedom of ideas, freedom of speech. Where do you think the line is drawn between democracy and liberalism?
Francis Fukuyama
Well, I think that freedom of speech is important to both liberalism and democracy. I mean, speech itself is a kind of individual freedom that’s critical to the way that we understand ourselves. You know, we are beings that are able to make choices to express our views on things and the act of speech itself, the exercise of speech, is an important basic human right. But it’s also important to democracy, because democracies are pluralistic. But they also need to make collective decisions and if you’re not able to have open discussions informed by evidence and the like, then you’re not going to collectively come to good decisions. So, it also has a pragmatic function in facilitating collective choice. So, freedom of speech is really important to both of them.
I think the problems right now with speech really have to do with technology, because the principle that there shouldn’t be state constraints on speech are fine, but what you’ve seen in the last few years is the power of certain privately owned technology platforms to vastly amplify the voices of some people and to silence the voices of others. I think that the classical view of free speech as a marketplace of ideas where good ideas will inevitably beat out bad ideas, given sufficient discussion and interaction is not what’s happening today, because of the power of technology to really make bad ideas flourish in ways that good ideas have trouble competing. That’s why I think that freedom of speech has become a kind of neuralgic issue that has been troubling people both on the right and on the left.
jmk
So, I wanted to ask you about the differences between political and economic liberalism. There’s a line in your essay, “The End of History?” “Political liberalism has been following economic liberalism more slowly than many had hoped, but with seeming inevitability.” I don’t want to dwell on the line. What the line brings out is that there is a difference between political liberalism and economic liberalism, but at the same time you see a connection between the two. What is the connection and are they simply aspects of the same idea or are they different from one another?
Francis Fukuyama
Well, they’re connected, because the freedom to own private property, to transact, to engage in economic activity, is among the freedoms that liberalism protects. But you can have that kind of economic freedom without having political freedom. That’s really the challenge that’s been posed by East Asia over the last couple of generations where you have a lot of countries that have economic freedom without having political freedom. The most obvious example of that is Singapore where you really don’t have anything like an open democracy, but you do have the protection of economic rights. And that’s one of the reasons they’ve done extraordinarily well economically.
But even in China the reforms that Deng Xiaoping introduced were based on a kind of liberal economic understanding where the household responsibility system allowed peasants to keep the surplus that they earned as a result of their own labors and it gave them an incentive to produce. So, China has developed a private sector. I mean, it’s now being rolled back, but a lot of their economic success in the last 40 years has been due to the fact that they adopted economically liberal policies including integration into the global trading system. That really was the motor of their success. But China has also showed economic freedom by itself does not inevitably lead to political freedom. Many people were assuming or hoping at any rate, that it would.
This was the core of modernization theory where there was a view that if you had economic growth and you developed a middle class, countries became richer, people became better educated and better informed then they would also become politically more active, interested in political participation, and interested in more open debate. But China seems to be proving that wrong. They’ve gotten rich. They’ve got a huge middle class now. But it’s hard to see evidence that they actually want more democracy. Now, maybe that’s not true, because we don’t really know what Chinese citizens want since they’re not free to express that. You know, you saw an outburst of unhappiness in the protests over covid, but how widespread those are, whether that extends beyond the actual policy that they were protesting and goes to unhappiness with the regime as a whole, that’s something that we really don’t know.
jmk
So, we continue to make this link between political liberalism and democracy. In fact, you just did when you were talking about China and the way that they’ve engaged in economic liberalism and the way a movement to political liberalism should have eventually moved to democracy, but they haven’t moved towards political liberalism or democracy so far. Do you feel that liberalism makes democracy more democratic or do you feel like liberalism constraints democracy?
Francis Fukuyama
Look, liberalism is based on this principle of the equality of human dignity, so it already has an equality principle built into it. You know, liberals believe that people should not be treated differently by the law simply based on group characteristics. Now, of course, in actual history, they didn’t observe that. They believe that all human beings should be treated equally, but they didn’t agree on who a human being is, who is a full rights bearing human being. And at the beginning of the founding of the American Republic it was only white men with property that qualified as rights bearing individuals and what we’ve seen over time is a great expansion of that. I would say that the way that it’s related to democracy is that it established this premise of equality and then people could fight about the question over who qualified.
So, in American history that led to a very bloody civil war over slavery and eventually resulted in the 14th Amendment that gave rights to African Americans. But then for another century they continued to be dispossessed of those rights. Women faced a similar sort of struggle as well as Native Americans and various categories of people. But I do think that it was this liberal premise that was also important in that struggle, because what it allowed people to do is to say black people are human beings also. Women are human beings also and ought to be treated as human beings, because there is an already made framework for understanding the importance of rights and having a legal system that protected them. So, in that sense, I think they were very close allies.
jmk
Yeah, I mean, Sheri Berman’s obviously written pieces about the way that it’s impossible to really have an undemocratic form of liberalism. I mean, to have a truly liberal society, you need to eventually embrace democracy. The two generally move side by side or in parallel with one another. I’ve tended to see that a lot of different forms of liberalism actually seem to not just compliment democracy, but even make it stronger such as freedom of speech, different freedoms of assembly, or even just by enforcing the rule of law, it guarantees things like free and fair elections.
It’s hard to imagine that you can have free and fair elections if there isn’t a consistent application of the law. In fact, that’s one of the reasons why places like Russia are not democratic is because they don’t apply the law consistently. It seems to me that liberalism isn’t the adjective that just explains the type of democracy that it is, but in a lot of ways almost intensifies the idea of democracy by making it more democratic.
Francis Fukuyama
Yeah, that’s right. You know, Shadi Hamed has just written a book about the Middle East in which he argues that we ought to be supporting democracy, but not liberalism even when democratic votes lead to lower rights for women, for gays and lesbians privileges one religion over another. He says that’s more in tune with local culture and so forth.
But the problem with that is he also then asserts if you have democracy without liberalism and let’s say you elect the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, they screw up and there’s another election and they lose the election, that they’re just going to respect those rules and step away from power. I think that’s really questionable. It’s very hard to see populist or Islamist parties simply obeying liberal rules in which they followed the law to a tee. It means that they’re going to lose power. I think there’s very little precedent for that and that means that you also have to have the liberal rules in addition to the democracy. So, the two really do go together.
jmk
So, your book is called Liberalism and it’s Discontents. It’s not just about liberalism, but also the discontents. In the book you write, “Once again, we see liberal ideas being stretched to the point of breaking.” At what point does liberalism break?
Francis Fukuyama
Well, it’s not a clear threshold. There are two forms of what I regard as excessive liberalism. One is on the right and one on the left. The one on the right was what we call neoliberalism. I mean, it’s really the belief in markets at the expense of any form of state or social control. That I think had a very deleterious effect. So, what’s the right level of state regulation? Well, you can’t say that clearly. You can say what levels are inadequate and which are probably excessive, but it’s very hard to come up with a principle ahead of time that says you need to regulate this and that, but not something else. I think that’s something that you arrive at in a way pragmatically by seeing what the consequences are of different degrees of state intervention.
Now on the progressive side, I think the problem was really that many progressives believed in a form of identity politics that was initially meant to achieve liberal goals. That is to say making marginalized communities and groups aware of their marginalization and therefore empowering them to fight back and demand inclusion. That was a liberal value and that’s really what the Civil Rights movement was all about. In that sense, it didn’t go too far. You know, my standard for what’s an excessive emphasis on identity is when identity becomes an essential category as opposed to one of several things that people believe in.
So, if your race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation becomes the single most important thing that anyone should know about you on the basis for employment or promotion or even the freedom to speak then I think you carry things too far and you’re no longer liberal. You’re undermining some basic liberal values. But what is an assertion of essentialist identity sometimes is not terribly clear.
jmk
Do you feel that some of the identity politics, the way that people have tried to associate themselves, whether it be with gender, whether it be with race, whether it be with any of the different characteristics, that have come up in the past… Do you think that that’s somewhat an attempt to be able to establish a sense of community, a sense of belonging? Because it seems to me that if it is, it parallels some of the critiques from the right as well.
Francis Fukuyama
Oh, of course. I mean, that’s why people want to cast themselves in identity terms. It’s precisely because people want a sense of community. People that look at democracy around the world know very well that many countries that aspire to be democratic are organized communally and they’re organized around identities. So, in Lebanon, I mean, that’s the classic example or Bosnia, you don’t have anything like non-identitarian citizenship. You’re a member of a community, you vote as a community. Lebanese political offices are allocated to the Maronites and the Shiites and the Sunnis. They all get different political posts. In Bosnia, you have separate communities voting.
These aren’t people longing for community. These are people that have lived in these strongly bonded communities for centuries and they don’t want to give up their language, their customs, their ability to control their own affairs, and in those kinds of circumstances, democracy really has to make a lot of compromises. Even in North America, the demands of Quebec nationalists for special treatment of the French language that wasn’t comparable to the way English was treated becomes a kind of illiberal position. I mean, it’s one that Canadians accepted in the interest of getting along, but it did reflect this belief that the Francophone community in Canada was being threatened by the dominance of English in North America and that it needed to be protected and those traditions needed to be protected. So yeah, it’s all about community.
jmk
So, let’s go ahead and move over to the conservative critique. In your book you write, “The substantive conservative critique of liberalism that liberal societies provide no strong common moral horizon around which community can be built is true enough. This is indeed a feature and not a bug of liberalism.” So, when you think of it from that perspective, are you saying that liberalism is essentially inward looking?
Francis Fukuyama
No, it’s not inward looking. I think that it leaves people to their own devices in terms of the personal choices that they make. So, we’re not going to tell you that you have to be a Catholic and you have to go to mass regularly or whatever alternative religious sect exists. Instead, you get to choose. Do you go to a mosque? Do you go to a church? Do you worship at a Hindu temple? That’s all up to you. So, that’s the essence of liberalism is that freedom, freedom of choice, and then the acceptance of life in a diverse community where you’re going to be dealing with people that are different from you.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t experience a sense of community. In fact, strong liberal societies are full of what we call civil society, which is voluntary associations of people that are united around a particular interest or passion. They fulfill their communal belongings that way, but there isn’t going to be a single over-arching community that applies to the nation as a whole except in certain areas. This gets into a discussion of national identity, which I think is also important for a liberal society, but it is going to be a national identity that is itself liberal.
jmk
But is that something that is apart from liberalism? Like when we think about civil society and people getting involved. Is that coming from values that are coming from another place or do you think that that is embedded within liberal values themselves?
Francis Fukuyama
I don’t know that they’re embedded in liberal values. I think that the need for nations turns out to be a very pragmatic necessity, because the institutional expression of liberalism is a state that can enforce a rule of law and the actual existence of a common set of laws and things like an independent judiciary that makes judgements about the law. But the way that human communities are organized, the states don’t have universal jurisdiction. They have territorially limited jurisdiction and it’s actually a good thing that that’s true because I don’t think we want to live in a globe in which there’s one government that forces everybody to behave according to one set of laws.
So, given the fact that states are necessary to enforce liberal rules and given the fact that there’s a diversity of states, you are going to need nations and you’re going to need people that are loyal to particular nations and believe in the legitimacy of those nations. So, I wouldn’t say that the need for a nation is deeply embedded in liberal values, but I think it turns out nations become the necessary vehicles by which people can protect and defend liberal values.
You know, there’s a very concrete example of this going on right now, which is what’s happening in Ukraine. So, Ukrainians are fighting and dying in very large numbers to maintain their independence and sovereignty which includes a defense of liberal values. They don’t want to live in a dictatorship, but are they fighting for the liberal values themselves or are they fighting for their homeland? I think it’s impossible to separate the two. They wouldn’t be fighting for the abstract principle of liberalism. I mean, they’re not traveling to Myanmar to fight for the rights of people there that are also being oppressed. They’re fighting for their Ukrainian freedoms. In that sense, you have to have the liberal values embodied in a particular nation for them to actually have impact and for them to have the emotional weight that’s needed.
So, I think nations remain necessary for liberals, even if they don’t necessarily derive directly from liberal principles. In fact, one of the things I’ve argued both in the liberalism book and in my previous book on identity is that’s one of the big gaps in liberal theory. What are the boundaries of a particular nation? I don’t see any liberal principle that allows you to make an easy decision that the border between Mexico and the United States should be the Rio Grande River. That’s not based on anything that a liberal theorist will tell you. That’s something that’s notably absent from John Rawls or John Locke or any of the great liberal theorists of the past.
jmk
I guess my thought is I don’t know that it’s necessary for those questions to be answered through liberal theory or liberal philosophy. I mean, it’s possible to have things like even civil society itself, the desire to be part of that community, to be able to make things happen that doesn’t have to be necessarily an expression of liberal values for it to necessarily compliment other liberal values that might exist. I would think that there might be multiple different philosophies that need to exist within a community to be able to make a democratic society function.
Francis Fukuyama
That’s right. I think that there is a core set of shared values that liberals have to embrace. You know, if they don’t believe in a rule of law, they don’t believe in the fundamental legitimacy of their constitutional order, that’s a big problem. But as I said, probably the strongest argument in favor of liberalism is this pragmatic one. That this is something that allows pluralistic diverse societies to live in peace with one another precisely because they reject a strong principle of social order.
jmk
So, in your book you do write, “The answer to these discontents is not to abandon liberalism as such, but to moderate it.” So, what should we use to moderate liberalism?
Francis Fukuyama
Well, you just got to begin with individuals because moderation was one of the four cardinal Greek virtues and I think that a lot of people growing up in Western societies are not taught to be moderate. Particularly every graduation speaker in the United States typically has some trope where he says you should follow your passions wherever they may lead. That’s not a call to moderation. That’s actually a call to immoderation. So, one of the ways that you can promote moderation is in changing the way that people think about themselves and their relationship to their community. That maybe taking things to the extreme is not the best way to live. That just because X is good, it doesn’t mean that 10 times X is 10 times better.
So, we believe in economic freedom and property rights. That doesn’t mean that absolutizing economic freedom and property rights necessarily leads to happy outcomes. We can all believe that we want to exercise individual autonomy, but taking that to an extreme where autonomy, regardless of what is chosen, is a value I think also undermines community and the livability of the society. So, that’s the sense in which I think moderation as an individual virtue is important, but it’s also an important political virtue. Our politics should not run to extremes. That’s something that’s pretty obvious right now in the United States where we are extremely polarized, because people take their underlying principles to extremes.
jmk
The concern I have when we say that we’re going to moderate liberalism without having something to moderate it against is that it just asks people to hold back in terms of their liberal values, but nothing to balance it. Is there a secondary set of values that we should be thinking about to be able to moderate against liberalism?
Francis Fukuyama
Well, sure. I mean, in a liberal society you also live in a community, so individual freedom typically has always been thought of as being balanced against the needs of the community to make certain communal decisions. There are lots of examples of that. I mean, the most obvious one being things like security and national defense. Liberal societies really sometimes force their young people to go into the army, because there’s an overriding common interest in national defense or to give up certain liberties in order to pay their taxes in order to have certain kinds of support for fellow citizens. But that’s kind of a high school civics understanding of liberalism and what it needs to be balanced against.
jmk
So, the big critique that you mentioned that came from the right and in some ways even comes from the left involves trying to have this sense of community and we keep coming back to that as being the argument, not even argument, but the thing that liberalism is tempered against. When I think about democracy, that is also something that involves intense community engagement. Whereas when I think of liberalism, I think of something as being very much based around individualism and individual rights. Is it possible that the idea of liberal democracy itself opens up the opportunity to be able to balance the two against each other, to kind of moderate liberalism against democracy itself and to moderate democracy against liberalism?
Francis Fukuyama
Well, liberalism is based on an individualist principle. You know, what I said in the book is that that’s immediately a difficulty because human beings are by nature, very intensely social animals. Actually, one of the sources of alienation in the liberal society is the loneliness of liberal individualism. So, one way of interpreting liberalism is not to say that we are all these atomized individuals, all making individual choices, but the choices we make are actually choices about community, about voluntary associations, about families, about neighborhoods, about private organizations, and then about the nation as a whole. So, the way we ought to interpret our individual freedom is it’s basically a freedom to engage in communal activity of different sorts.
I think that in that sense if you want to call that a democratic principle instead, that’s fine, but I think that that actually has been the way that many liberals have interpreted their liberal values. You know, Tocqueville, for example, was an early… he didn’t call himself a liberal, but he was in effect, an early voice for liberalism. The thing that people remember from Democracy in America is the art of association. The fact that Americans joined organizations, they had churches and clubs and all sorts of ways of connecting with one another that didn’t revolve around the state necessarily. He argued that this was really necessary to sustain democracy.
jmk
Tocqueville’s a great example, because it’s really not an accident that one of his good friends in England was John Stewart Mill. So, I mean, there’s definitely a tie between Tocqueville and Liberalism directly. As we kind of look to wrap up and we’re thinking about liberalism, obviously we have the war in Ukraine.
Obviously, there’s threats to democracy and threats to liberalism throughout the world. What do you see as the greatest threat to liberalism at this moment?
Francis Fukuyama
Well, right now, it’s the geopolitical threats that are at the top of everybody’s list, you know, Russia and China. We just got back from a visit to Japan, which like Germany just decided or announced at least that they’re going to double their defense budget because of worries over what China is going to do in the future. So, that’s a near and present danger. I think that there’s also this internal threat of populism. In many Democratic societies beginning with the United States I think the news on that front has been a little bit more hopeful over the past year, but it hasn’t gone away. There’s still a lot of people with very illiberal views. I think at the moment, probably more on the right than on the left, but the two basically stimulate one another and that’s a situation that’s not healthy for our liberal democracy here at home.
jmk
So, would you say that the greater threats exist externally or internally, like within the countries or from external actors?
Francis Fukuyama
Well, it’s hard to say. I mean, the external and the internal threats feed off of each other. Putin has been very supportive of populist nationalists all over the world and they have been supportive of him. But I think our system could be brought down by either one of them.
jmk
So, Larry Diamond and others have described our age as one where there is a democratic recession. The quote that I opened up with talked about how liberalism is under even greater attack. Would you say that there’s also a corresponding liberal recession throughout the world?
Francis Fukuyama
Well, I think actually what is described as a democratic recession is a liberal recession. You know, the rise of Hungary, Poland, India, Turkey, these were countries where it was the liberal part of the liberal democracy that was being dismantled, less the democratic part. As I said, once you eliminate the liberal checks on power, then democracy begins to be eroded as well. But I think that actually it’s less a democratic recession than a liberal recession.
jmk
Well, thank you so much Francis Fukuyama for joining me today. It’s been an honor and a pleasure to be able to speak to you about liberalism. Once again, the book that you wrote was Liberalism and its Discontents. Thank you so much for writing it. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Francis Fukuyama
Thanks very much, Justin. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.
Key Links
Liberalism and its Discontents by Francis Fukuyama
The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama
Learn more about Francis Fukuyama
Democracy Paradox Podcast
Michael Walzer on Liberal as an Adjective
Patrick Deneen Offers a Powerful Critique of Liberalism
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