It's no secret that liberalism didn't always live up to its own ideals. In America, many people were denied equality before the law. Who counted as full human beings worthy of universal rights was contested for centuries, and only recently has this circle expanded to include women, African Americans, LGBTQ+ people, and others. Conservatives complain that liberalism empties the common life of meaning.
As the renowned political philosopher Francis Fukuyama shows in Liberalism and Its Discontents, the principles of liberalism have also, in recent decades, been pushed to new extremes by both the right and the left: neoliberals made a cult of economic freedom, and progressives focused on identity over human universality as central to their political vision. The result, Fukuyama argues, has been a fracturing of our civil society and an increasing peril to our democracy.
Fukuyama isthe Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a faculty member at Stanford's Institute on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. His previous books include "Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment" and "The End of History and the Last Man."
Liberalism and its Discontents
Episode Transcript
Michael Berkman
From the McCartney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University. I'm Michael Berkman.
Chris Beem
I'm Chris Beem.
Jenna Spinelle
I'm Jenna Spinelle, and welcome to Democracy Works. This week, we are honored to be joined by Francis Fukuyama, who has many titles, I'll just read a few of them here that are relevant to our work in the show. He's the Oliver Nollemani senior fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and a faculty member at Stanford Center on Democracy development and the rule of law. And his name may be most familiar to many of you, because of his now, I might say infamous book, The End of History. And the last man, which was released, I believe, in the early 1990s.
Chris Beem
Right, and a really important book, and I think I'm misunderstood one, but I don't want to spend a lot of time on it. But the book came out when democracy was kind of ascendant around the world. And his argument was that, well, the end of history was liberal democracy and capitalism. He still thinks that liberal democracy is the best solution. But in this book, he's arguing that there are some serious threats, you know, both on the right and on the left, and that liberalism needs to do a better job of defending itself of articulating why it is the best solution.
Michael Berkman
Yeah, I mean, the war in Ukraine, the rise of authoritarians around the globe, led people to think that or led people to argue anyway, that the ascendancy of liberal democracy isn't so clear. Isn't that where some of the attacks come in? Yeah. So what is liberal democracy, Chris? Well, we Why do we tend to talk about democracy with these two terms instead? Right?
Chris Beem
Right. So liberalism is an adjective, right? That describes democracy, democracy is basically majority rule. It's about everyone having a vote. And it's the procedures by which you make genuine make real, the idea that the people are the sovereign in that society, and liberalism is a system of government that puts checks on itself, and puts limits on its power. So that preserves individual liberties. Right, exactly. Although I've argued, and I still would argue that, you know, if you're going to accept democracy, and equality in the way the framers do, that same equality, is grounded in the idea that we all have these rights. Yeah, you know, I usually use lose that argument. I'm not going to put, but in any case, you know, there is this, this notion that liberalism is about rights and diffusion of power. And so anytime you hear anybody talking about democracy, you know, except when you're talking about something like deliberative democracy or something on a very much lower scale, what you're talking about is liberal democracy.
Michael Berkman
Right? So it's not liberalism, in the sense of left something to the left or something correct. Yeah. And, yes, I kind of agree with what you were saying before, he uses a expansive definition of liberalism, and a pretty narrow definition of democracy. So that democracy is essentially just how we make the decisions that organize our society, but equality, individual rights, the limits on government fragmentation of power, all of that is liberalism's is liberalism. Is that right? Is the liberal part of a liberal democracy.
Chris Beem
You know, we've talked about Hungary on this program before. And his argument is to create what he calls explicitly an illiberal democracy. So if the majority wants to, you know, curtail or, or diminish the rights of the press, or the rights of minorities, gay people, trans people, and whatever, refugees, immigrants, the the majority has the power to do that. And there's no we don't have to have these kind of liberal, you know, trappings in order to make it a genuine democracy.
Michael Berkman
So what does it say about where we're going that so much of the right in the United States celebrates or a bond and his a liberal, liberal democracy?
Chris Beem
Well, that's kind of the point of the book, isn't it that there is a threat to liberal democracy and And that there's something inherently illegitimate about separating these two words. The point is that we're at right now in, in, you know, in the contemporary world, this liberal democracy, this amalgam of rights and popular sovereignty and rule of law and, and limited power is under threat. It he says it's under threat from the right and the left. But he is absolutely clear that the bigger threat right now is from the right from people like Orban.
Michael Berkman
One of the central premises of liberalism is the emphasis on the individual. Right, on individual rights. And, and this, in fact, as he explains in I think, also really, really neat earlier chapters are sort of the movement away from kinship based societies and religiously based societies, that right that everything is placed in the individual, the individual becomes of critical importance. And he's arguing that from the left, this notion of the individual has been replaced by the group.
Chris Beem
And so what this does is it undermines calls into question, some of the most fundamental orienting principles of liberalism. And so he doesn't want to say that's not a problem. Matter of fact, I think, you know, in terms of theory, I think he would argue that, you know, the threat on the left is at least as important as the one on the right. But, you know, just in terms of where we are right now in history, there's no doubt that the right is more exigent and more of a threat.
Michael Berkman
Right. And once you move out of the United States, certainly the the threats seem to be coming more from the right than they do from the left.
Chris Beem
Yeah, there and here.
Jenna Spinelle
I think you guys did a great job of setting the stage for what Dr. Fukuyama is going to talk about. It was a real pleasure to get to sit down with him on campus. So let's go now to the interview.
Jenna Spinelle
Francis Fukuyama, welcome to Democracy Works. Thanks for joining us today.
Francis Fukuyama
Thanks for having me.
Jenna Spinelle
So lots to talk about including your most recent book, liberalism and its Discontents. You know, we talk about liberalism a lot on this show, I'm sure that the basic tenants of it are familiar to our listeners. So rather than then starting with the kind of strict definition, I wonder if you could take us back to the period when liberalism seems to have worked the best or taken the strongest hold in the US the post war period. And, you know, kind of walk us through, you know, what it was about that era that seemed to match so well, or line up so nicely with the principles of liberalism?
Francis Fukuyama
Well, I think that, really, you're talking about the period after 1945, because you had these very severe threats to both liberalism and to democracy with the rise of Hitler and Stalin. But with the defeat of Hitler, Europe, I think, woke up to the fact that if you base your nation on a aggressive form of nationalism, you're going to end up with a lot of violence. So after two world wars, there was an attempt to create a new liberal world order. And the United States was part of that. In fact, it was really the the chief architect of that system. And I think in that period, pretty much everybody took liberalism for granted. Liberalism is part of the American DNA, built into the declaration of independence with the declaration that all men are created equal, and we need a rule of law, constitutional order. And that fit very much I think, with this European recognition that nationalism had really gone wrong. And then I think, got another shot in the arm after 1989 to 91, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism. And again, you know, communist regimes were the only ones that were the principal opponents at that time of liberal democracy. And they seem to implode at that point. And a lot of countries then made a transition to democracy, some of them and unfortunately, been backsliding since then. But you know, it created a spirit of 1989. That carried on I think, for pretty much the next generation.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, and you have so many of those things we've heard about, especially in the early days of the war on Ukraine, there was lots of framing about is this the end of the liberal order that you know, Western liberal order that that sort of thing. But can you say more about how you see the connection between liberalism and democracy?
Francis Fukuyama
Sure. So I think liberalism and democracy are very closely aligned. You know, liberalism is really a set of laws and constitutional provisions that limit the power of government, over individuals, whereas democracy are things like free and fair elections that make sure that governments are accountable to the people. And for the most part, they support each other. The law restricts you know, the power of governments and democracy makes sure that the law remains, you know, the dominant guide to civic activity, but they can be separated. And so you can have a liberal order that's not terribly democratic. I think, you know, Germany, the rich thought in the 19th century was a liberal order that guaranteed legal rights, but it wasn't democratic. And sometimes people speak of Singapore today as being liberal but not democratic order. And you can have illiberal democracy. That's what Viktor Orban in Hungary claims that he's trying to create. So he's popularly elected, he has a democratic mandate, but he's trying to dismantle all of the checks and balances in Hungary, the free press, independent judiciary, civil society, opposition political parties, that are part of the liberal order. Now, I think they actually do go together, because the moment you dismantle the rule of law, you get more power, and then you can undermine democracy by gerrymandering or denying people access to the vote. We see some of that happening, unfortunately, in this country at the moment. So I think the to support each other, but, you know, I think, technically, in historically they're not identical.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah. And that gets to some of the the arguments around the discontents of liberalism. And is it fair to say that, you know, the, the disconnect between what liberalism or what liberal democracy should be and the speed at which or the extent to which it actually gets there? Is that the source of some of that?
Francis Fukuyama
Well, it's a source of, of some of the problems. So I think that for many people on the progressive left, the real problem is that liberalism is slow, it works by law, it's very procedural, you have to respect you know, the rights of all the people, including entrenched interests. And so sometimes it's very hard to, you know, to change things. And that is very frustrating because liberalism in no society has ever lived up to the full promise, you know, that everybody would be treated equally under the law, that doesn't happen in the United States today, despite, you know, our founding on those principles. And so that's one thing. I think there are other sources of discontent. So a lot of it has to do with economics, you know, liberal societies protect property rights. And for that reason, I think they've been associated with economic growth and prosperity. But beginning in the, you know, late 70s and 80s, you had the rise of what's now called neoliberalism where I think market principles were carried to extremes. And also the state, you know, the role of the government was denigrated, and there was an attempt to rollback the state to a point where you had financial instability, because of deregulation, you're the growth of a lot of inequality. And that I think, you know, led to a lot of populism in the 2000 10s, because people didn't like the world that emerged out of those principles.
Jenna Spinelle
So you just now and in your book, you you've identified threats coming from both the far right and from the far left. And in the book, you you mentioned, there's there's an asymmetry to the discontentment and I wonder how important you think it is to acknowledge that asymmetry or to be vocal about it. I feel like sometimes, there's a tendency to want to downplay it for the sake of compromise or for the sake of trying to move things forward.
Francis Fukuyama
Well, you know, we've just been sitting through a series of January 6, committee hearings about you know, what happened on that date? And, you know, in my mind, there's no question that the clear and present danger to a liberal democracy in the United States is coming from the right. You know, what that committee has revealed is that, you know, the storming of the Capitol was not just a spontaneous protest that somehow got out of hand. It was planned by President Trump based on a legal theory of John Eastman that somehow the vice president could override and overturn the election. They didn't get away with it, but they tried. And they're going to try again because unfortunately, a lot of the Republican Party has coalesced against around you know, downplaying that attempted a coup basically. And they're putting people in power in All of the states that they control so that they could do it again in 2024. So there's really nothing happening on the progressive left side that's remotely comparable to that. I mean, we could lose our democracy. If there's a close election in a little more than two years. I think that what's going on the left is a slower acting up, you know, change in culture that has to do with the way that we regard certain liberal principles like freedom of speech, and, you know, due process and individualism that have come under critique by certain versions of identity politics, but that's not that's not going to destroy our democracy in the next couple of years, I would say,
Jenna Spinelle
Well, and on that point about the the states, I've heard the phrase democracy deserts before we're gonna some of these states that are engaging in gerrymandering in in restricting the vote in some of these other practices. So I wonder how you think about liberalism and liberal democracy and federalism, is there a sort of baseline national, tight standard for lack of a better term? Or Or is it is it okay, that there's discrepancies or disparities?
Francis Fukuyama
You know, it all depends on the issue. So with something like fundamental equal rights, rights of citizens of human beings, you know, you can't have federalism, that was really what the Civil War was all about. Because the southern states that well, you know, we voted for slavery. Before the Civil War, after the Civil War, they said, We voted for segregation. And that should be the dominant principle and the federal government should leave us alone. And I think that Abraham Lincoln's argument, when he was debating this with Stephen Douglas, before the Civil War said, No, that's not right. The principle of democracy does not trump the principle that all men are created equal, that's contained in the bill of rights, and that that's the dominant principle. And therefore, the federal government has to, you know, has the right to override states rights in those cases. And that's really why the 14th Amendment was passed, you know, is to make sure that no state could nullify those basic rights. Now, that's true for something as basic as the right to vote, right to speak, you know, right to believe. There are other things that you don't need that kind of uniformity on and I think, you know, policing, education, a lot of things vary from one part of the country to another, and they probably ought to, because the conditions in you know, rural Louisiana are really different from San Francisco or Chicago. So I think, you know, you really have to understand the kind of issue that is being federalized. If it does have to do with, you know, basic rights, then that is something that I think you're going to need to impose, you know, uniformly, but there are other issues of policy that, you know, I think you need some variation.
Jenna Spinelle
And it seems also that, you know, if you look at it at a public opinion, polling support for liberal democracy goes down at lower you get in, in the age bracket. So, there's also, you know, lots of calls to reimagine civics education, and then in the way that young people learn about these concepts, do you have have ideas, or maybe things that you've learned from your own teaching career that seemed to work well, to sort of get get these principles across in a way that that translates?
Francis Fukuyama
Well, you know, civics education is important. One of the problems, though, right now is that between the two polarized sides, we don't actually agree on the narrative that we are trying to teach. I believe that there is one out there, I think that you could teach American history in a way that, you know, confronted very, very, honestly, the whole legacy of race and slavery and Jim Crow and the continuing in justices, you know, to African Americans that have been there from the start, but also conveyed a sense of progress, you know, that this hasn't been, you know, that the things actually have gotten better as a result of reforms, maybe it's very slow acting, it's too slow, for, you know, many generations of people, but there has been progress. I think the problem right now, is that we do have this polarized view, on the one hand, you know, the, the one that wants to whitewash, you know, the whole American experience and kind of expunge the, you know, the bad stuff, and then what you'd call maybe the 1619 view that says that really nothing has changed since slavery, you know, that the same racist structures are still in place and so forth. I think both of those are wrong. But unfortunately, you know, in in this fight over critical race theory and so forth, that's what a lot of the fight is, is how you tell that narrative. I think that basic information about the way our government works is something that is lacking in a lot of young people. And there's all this poll data that, you know, great majority of young people can't identify the three branches of government can't name a single one of the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights, this sort of thing. I can see that, you know, in my own university at Stanford, where there actually had been earlier a kind of required core course that ended up with, you know, some teaching about American democracy. And that's all disappeared over the last, you know, 2030 years. And it's disappeared in a lot of, you know, elite universities, as a matter of fact, and I think that's, you know, that's something that's too bad.
Jenna Spinelle
So what I mean, what, what do we do about that? How do we change the incentives or change that, you know, kind of mechanisms to sort of not I don't want to say bring it back? I don't know, that needs to be like, how it was before, but how to, you know, reimagine something that that fits our current moment, our current media landscape, those sorts of things?
Francis Fukuyama
Well, you know, that's a part of a larger question about how we overcome the current polarization. My view about that is you overcome it politically, which is to say you win an election, or the right people win the election. And by that I just, I don't want to sound partisan. But you know, in a democracy in a way that that's what has to happen is that, you know, a certain view ends up predominant, and because it's a democracy, if, you know, that's what most people believe, there's a lot of pressure to jump on board. Just to give you a historical precedent for this, the country was extremely divided in the late 19th century. And so control of Congress would flip between Republicans and Democrats virtually every two years. At that point, the parties were reversed. So the Democrats were the agrarian rural party, and the Republicans were the kind of urban, you know, progressive party. And then it all changed in the 1896 election that brought McKinley to power. So the Republicans captured control of both the presidency and both branches of Congress, or both houses of Congress. And, you know, what's interesting about that is that it's in a way comparable to the situation we're in because the two parties represented two visions of America. One was kind of backward looking agrarian, you know, people living on family farms, and the other one was looking forward to an urban industrial, you know, modernizing future. And the country just couldn't make up its mind as to which of these futures it really wanted to embrace. But after 1896, you know, the Republicans won, the progressive movement got a firm started, a lot of basic American institutions were put into place at that point. And I think we're in a kind of similar situation, globalization has created this division between people that are looking backwards, wanting to make America great again, and people that are willing to embrace a kind of more open cosmopolitan future country has to make up its mind. And I think it will make up its mind when it votes, you know, a certain way.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah. Well, and on that point, about the Progressive Era, you know, people who talk now about political reform, you know, bring up things like ranked choice voting and proportional representation as maybe some changes we can make now to help reduce polarization and maybe a liberalism to some extent, how much do you think policy solutions like that can help here?
Francis Fukuyama
Well, I think they can help. I don't think they're going to be the solution. So I think that in both parties, you actually have divisions that cannot be expressed because of the plurality voting system we have. It's actually plurality voting combined with popular primaries, you know, because primaries are low turnout events. It turns out, the main people that show up are activists. And so both parties have been pushed to their extremes, especially the Republican Party, because of that phenomenon over the past few years. And so if you did have rank choice voting, you could have more situations like Lisa Murkowski in Alaska where she didn't toe the line, the Republican line, National Republican line, the party didn't nominate her. So she ran as an independent. And because of her father and her name, you know, she won the election. If you had rank choice voting, that could happen in more states where, you know, you get some centrist, let's say centrist Republican, who actually could get do pretty well in a general election but can't get past the primary. If you had rank choice voting, that person could then end up you know, as the other candidate. And so, you know, there's some chance that that could actually moderate our policy. The other thing about rank choice voting is it encourages cross party coalition's because you want to get the second preference of your opponent, and therefore there's some incentive to do deals. Now, in Australia, where this has been practiced a long time, it hasn't ended the two party system. And so it's not, you know, it's not the universal fix for our problem. But I do think that, you know, there are some institutional changes that could perhaps moderate our current polarization to some extent.
Jenna Spinelle
So in the the lecture you gave, during your visit to Penn State, it was all about climate governance and, and policy, and you talked a lot about the administrative state bureaucracy and some of the ways that that can sometimes get in the way perhaps of, of climate or, you know, policy changes, that kind of thing.
Francis Fukuyama
So the problem I think, is in liberal societies that are based on rule of law is they tend to be procedural. And over time, they become excessively procedural. So what I was talking about in my lecture was the difficulty of actually coming to decisions in the United States, because of very complex procedures we have imposed upon ourselves, in order to make decisions. And these are procedures that tend to give a lot of vetoes to different stakeholder groups, where you have to get such broad agreement that it becomes really difficult to, you know, for example, if you're adapting to droughts in California, in order to build a new reservoir to build a water treatment plant, you know, the procedures, you have to go to get approval for that mean that it's going to take years to do, and it's going to cost, you know, a whole lot of money. And so it makes it actually very hard to do that kind of adaptation. And so I would say, and it is related to liberalism, because liberalism is about the rule of law. I once wrote a little article about this, that in a sense, we have too much law. In some cases, there's too much litigate. I mean, this is another thing that we do in America is we, when we regulate, sometimes we do private regulation, where we permit people to sue in order to enforce laws, we don't have the government just enforce the law. And so this is something that, you know, I think makes regulation more costly, it makes it slower, and it just makes it harder to make decisions.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, and so you mentioned there that the concept of veto points, which I know also generated a lot of questions during your talk. Can you just say more, I guess, first, first about what they are like?
Francis Fukuyama
Sure. So yeah, in fact, I invented a term v talk cracy in my book, political order, and political decay, which is ruled by veto. So, you know, basically, vetoes are checks and balances, and we Americans take great pride in the fact that our constitution provides lots of checks on executive power. So this has to do with splitting power between the President and Congress, you know, having a powerful upper house of Congress federalism, a separate judiciary that has the power to overturn rules. So these are all institutions that block strong government. And you know, it's a good thing, for the most part, that's what prevents tyranny. We don't want a strong executive that can run roughshod over individual rights or just make arbitrary decisions, like in China, you've got this crazy decision on zero COVID, that doesn't seem to make any sense. And in the United States, it's harder to, you know, pull something like that off. But the problem is that, you know, it's a check against bad government, but it's also a check against good government, because it also makes doing things that are in the common interest. And we're gonna have to do a lot of that, to meet the climate goals that that we need. It makes that harder as well. So on the upside, those checks and balances are also an obstacle. And so I think that in the end, I don't want to go to anything like an authoritarian system, that's completely uncalled for, it's not going to solve the problem. But I do think that we could probably reduce the number of veto points that would, you know, look, just to give you an example, you cannot get an assistant secretary or a cabinet member confirmed in any administration without that taking six months or a year because all 100 senators have the ability to veto that appointment. It's just a ridiculous system. But you know, we can't get rid of it either, because they can also veto the ability to reform the system. So I just think that there's a lot of ways that you can streamline decision making staying within the universe of acceptable democratic process that will allow us to come to collective action to decisions more readily than we do now?
Jenna Spinelle
Well, and the distrust in institutions, yes. And that seems like a kind of another big chicken in the egg sort of problem, you need to get rid of that you need to reduce polarization to repair trust, but you can't repair trust until you reduce polarization.
Francis Fukuyama
That's right. That's right. Yeah, I mean, distrust in institutions is something very hard to repair once once it's happened. And unfortunately, you know, the combination of the internet plus kind of desire to weaponize every vehicle you have to get at the other side is, you know, has really led to this huge erosion of trust in virtually every institution in the United States. This is a broader problem than just the US. But I think it's gone further here than in many other democracies. And it's really impeding our ability to, you know, come to any kind of agreement on important issues.
Jenna Spinelle
How much of of that distrust do you think is because of the what you mentioned, the very beginning of, you know, decades of taking liberalism for granted, if you talk to young people or, you know, rereads public opinion, data or, you know, news stories, it's this, this sense of like, well, why should I trust these institutions that haven't done anything for me that I don't really see any value in? Whether it's it's student debt, or you know, you pick whatever it is climate? How do you think about that factor? When it comes? ,
Francis Fukuyama
Well, I have a kind of complex view about the decline of trust, because I actually think that part of it is the result of some good things that have happened, right, that part of it is actually more information. So you know, for example, Catholic priests abusing children. Do you think that this only happened in the last generation? No, it's been happening continuously. It's just that a lot of it was covered up in earlier ages. And so people didn't know about it. But it's very hard to hide that kind of stuff these days. And so we hear about the way that sausage is made in the factory, say, Oh, this is horrible. But that's a good thing that we know, you know more about it, people are better educated, they're not willing to defer to authority, just because you're wearing a uniform or because you know, you have a certain official position, people learn to think critically. And so, you know, there's a certain degree of distrust, that is a good thing. That means that people are holding people in power more accountable. But there's also I think, irrational trust, and a lot of that is driven, really, by the Internet, where you've cut the legs out from under a lot of the sources that actually provided credibility to information. This is the mainstream media, scientific community, you know, the legal community, I mean, you need these gatekeepers to actually verify basic empirical, factual information. And with the internet, you can say anyone can say anything about anything they want. And sure enough, they do. And it's, in fact, been weaponized to such a degree that, and then also, you know, even foreign actors. I mean, I think people misunderstand in a way what, what the Russians had been up to, but, you know, what they have been pushing is not a particular line, necessarily, but just the idea that no one knows the truth about anything, you can't therefore trust any institution. And that has been unfortunately, taken to heart by a lot of people. So maybe they don't even trust their own side, but they certainly know that they're not going to trust the other side. And that, you know, then makes it very hard to deliberate and come to decisions and the like.
Jenna Spinelle
You know, we've talked a lot about systems and structures, and also that people can vote and should vote for, you know, politicians and, and candidates that I uphold, and and believe in, in value liberal democracy, but are there other other things you would put in that bucket, so to speak of, of individual actions people can take to uphold those liberal principles in their their own lives?
Francis Fukuyama
Well, I actually have a whole chapter on the question of patriotism and national identity. Because I think that nobody fights for liberal principles just in the abstract. They always fight for them embedded in a particular country. And it's important, even, you know, so there's a problem in liberalism, where we believe all human beings have rights, but we only enforce rights in our country. And that, you know, seems like a contradiction to many liberals. And I think it shouldn't be because, first of all, I think liberal states should be limited in their jurisdiction. But, you know, secondly, I think that you can't have a cohesive society if people don't have a common set of values and loyalties that are themselves liberal. And that's kind of a trick You know, you want national identity, but you don't want it to be intolerant or exclusionary. And so I do think that, you know, you need to build a sense of national community based around liberal principles of rule of law, respect for constitutional principles and the like, and then thicken it, you know, in some ways with shared culture, again, a culture that has to be accessible to everybody that lives there and seeks to be a citizen, but is, you know, strong enough to support a kind of emotional commitment to a public good. And that's a pretty hard trick to pull off. But I do think it's important and possible,
Jenna Spinelle
Well, we will link to your blog and to all of your books, so our listeners can read more of your work. I'm sure they're already very familiar with it. But Francis, thank you so much for your time today.
Francis Fukuyama
Thanks very much for having me.
Chris Beem
A lot to chew on there, man. I mean, again, a really impressive and impressively expansive scholar, he just knows a lot about a lot. One thought that I had as kind of a way of framing. The second part was, you know, the title here recalls a book by Freud, Civilization and its Discontents. And, you know, I'm not a Freud scholar by any means. But the point of that book was that within civilization itself, it contains the seeds of its own destruction. That's really a good way to say it. Yeah. Civilization contains the seeds of its own destruction. And I think there's a way in which you can find that same kind of thread in Fukuyama as well. You know, if you take the individualism that is at the core of liberalism, if you take that too far, you end up denying some basic human realities. If you take the idea of capitalism and free enterprise, too far, if you see people operating, merely and solely as profit maximizers, you end up undermining society, and you create resentment. So there is at the core of this liberal democratic project, this danger that is present within itself, and we need to be vigilant, and we need to use all the parts of this liberal democracy to keep things balanced and in control.
Michael Berkman
I think that's a really that's a that's a good point about what he's arguing here that the seeds of its own destruction are contained within it are contained within liberal democracy. I, I thought one neat example with that had to do with something he calls vetocracy.
Chris Beem
I think, talk or see, I think is what he calls it. But yeah, veto autocracy is probably a clearer way to understand what he's saying,
Michael Berkman
He talked about that when he was on campus. I mean, we were who knew that Francis Fukuyama went to high school in State College, Pennsylvania, is something we learned when he came back this summer to give a talk at a conference on environmental politics. And he was talking about this notion in the context of what it takes to do any kind of project in California, where he lives that there were just so many veto points, that it's impossible to get anything done. And certainly, you know, I thought that was a great observation, because it is very hard to get anything done. It's hard to imagine, you know, the United States being able to undertake the kind of large scale projects that build, for example, the interstate highway system, right, or the big dams out west or any of these other major infrastructure projects that have occurred. And his point here. And of course, we can think about that, in terms of in terms of just how Congress operates that there are so many veto points within Congress, and then within the executive branch within the administration and all the regulation. And his point here is that these these multiple veto points are a consequence of a government designed with limits and those limits taken too far.
Chris Beem
But it becomes particularly relevant, because he argues that democracy is the really the only mechanism by which we can constrain or better can ameliorate the sins of capitalism.
Michael Berkman
You know, an autocracy can act. That's easy for them to happen. That doesn't mean they will act right. These issues, it's more likely to occur within a democracy, but they can't act because intrinsic within it, are these all of these veto points that have only increased over time. We which makes, you know, which is a consequence, a natural consequence of the distrust of government within a liberal democracy, that it's impossible to act. But he also talks about individualism taken too far.
Chris Beem
So, capitalism just creates inequality. That's what is meant to do, right? Some people win, some people lose. And that creates this incredible engine of economic progress. But democracy is driven by is grounded on the idea that we are all equal, and that one person's vote doesn't count more than anybody else's. And so democracy is there to constrain or to put a brakes on the worst impacts of capitalism. So there are public goods, there are you can there are people who are harmed by capitalist choices that had no nothing to do with those choices, right. They just are collateral damage. Well, democracy is the way you address that and keep those effects you minimize those effects. But if you if democracy doesn't work, or if there are too many vetoes that stand between democracy and some kind of democratic solution, then there's then neoliberalism, then capitalism is unleashed and that undermines democratic society. So from Fukuyama meet Bernie Sanders.
Michael Berkman
Okay, well, Jana, thanks for the interview. It was really a pleasure to hear Dr. Fukuyama and also to meet him when he was on campus this summer. I'm Michael Berkman.
Chris Beem
I'm Chris Beem. Thanks for listening.