Freedom House’s annual Freedom in the World survey notes that liberalism has rapidly declined each year for the last 16 years. And its precipitous downturn is more evident now than ever amid waning respect for individual rights, increased growth of autocracies and most recently in the seismic Russian invasion of Ukraine. Decades ago, political scientist and professor Francis Fukuyama was one of the preeminent scholars to predict the marked impending fall of liberal societies. He serves as a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and is a bestselling author of numerous books, including one published in March 2022 aptly titled, “Liberalism and Its Discontents.” He joins WITHpod to discuss why liberalism doesn’t always live up to its own principles, challenges from the right and the left and why our democracy will be under continued threat without a revitalized approach to its core tenets.
Note: This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Francis Fukuyama: All human beings are basically morally equal, that they have an underlying dignity and that that dignity needs to be respected by governments. And the way that it is respected is through a rule of law, through constitutional arrangements that put limitations on the power of the state to manipulate individuals. And the state needs to allow them to speak, to think, to act, to associate, to believe, and ultimately really to participate in political life because that’s the moral core that liberalism is trying to protect.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me your host, Chris Hayes.
I think that the Russian invasion of Ukraine for a lot of us, I’ll speak for myself, felt like a kind of historical rupture, that it was such a seismic act and so fully tore up, what felt like an old era, that there was a kind of epoch basically shaped from late 1980s, like ’89, ‘90, fall of Berlin wall, fall of the Soviet Union, to the invasion, 30-year period, that was kind of like, basically, to oversimplify, right? Post-Cold War, ideological competition between capitalism and communism as alternate systems, globalization, the integration of more and more countries into what we call the global economy.
And I should note for both good and ill, we can get into that because it had positive effects and crushingly negative effects. And a rise in the number of nations that we’re essentially either in reality or, at the very least, aspirationally liberal democracies. And that 30-year period was a strange one in many ways, and in some ways, quite anomalous. And one of the people, I think, who best foresaw that period and understood it was a thinker philosopher named Francis Fukuyama, you probably know his name. He’s authored many books. He’s a very acclaimed scholar.
He wrote this book, actually in 1992, it was published, but it was based on an essay that had actually been written earlier, called “The End of History and the Last Man.” Now, I remember reading this book when I was, I think, in high school. And it’s a sort of famous, infamous and misunderstood book. Partly infamous because the title is like, “Oh, history is over and nothing will ever happen after this. And after 911 and all these other events, people would say, “Oh, how ridiculous that we thought we were living end of history.” But it’s not really what the books argument at all.
In fact, the books argument is much more sophisticated than that, in some ways, much more provocative. And I’m going to risk summarizing it here because remember we’re about to talk to the author who might correct me.
But basically, if I had to say the tweet length version was, it wasn’t that nothing else is going to happen. It was this is as good as it gets, basically. That in a sort of teleological sense, in terms of the development of human forms of ordered liberty and flourishing, that we were sort of evolving towards liberal democracy. And liberal democracy, with its inherent contradictions and all the different tugs and pulls and conflicts that come with normal politics, was still just about the best system we developed, and maybe the best we could ever develop for self-governance, for the ordering of human affairs.
And that didn’t mean that nothing else was going to happen after that. It meant that we had evolved to this sort of point at which there was nothing better than what we had. That was also extremely controversial for a whole variety of reasons. And what we saw, I would say, starting probably around 2013, 2014, we’ve started to see a real backsliding in this kind of what seemed at one point, inexorable growth of liberal democracy throughout the world, more human rights, more self-determination, more flourishing of people as democratic citizens of their nations, and more authoritarian backsliding.
For nations that had been formally ostensibly democratic becoming more and more one party, incumbents rigging the rules of the game so as to stay in power, rollbacks on press freedoms, rollbacks on religious liberties. Of course, Donald Trump then is elected in the United States in 2016, despite losing by 3 million votes of popular vote. Brexit is another sort of big moment in watching this kind of retrenchment, this reactionary backlash to the kind of spread of liberal democracy.
And now, we find ourselves in this moment that feels like that era is done, like the kind of end of history post-Cold War neoliberal globalization moment is done. We’re in some new era post COVID, post Brexit, post Trump, post the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in which various forms of authoritarianism are both on the rise. And I would say in the case of China, have a credible claim to be like a competitive alternative to the Western model, if we’re going to call it that.
And so I thought it would be an amazing time to talk to Professor Fukuyama, particularly because he has a new book out precisely on this, I mean, sort of reflecting on exactly this set of themes and topics called” Liberalism and Its Discontents,” which is out this May. So Professor Fukuyama, it’s great to have you on the program.
Francis Fukuyama: Thanks very much for having me, Chris.
Chris Hayes: I’m a longtime admirer of your writing and your thinking. Let me start with your gloss on “The End of History and the Last Man,” for people that don’t know the book, or are new to sort of thinking about this topic.
Francis Fukuyama: Well, I actually thought you did a pretty good job in summarizing the real argument. The book is really about history with a capital H, meaning what we would call development or modernization. It’s the gradual evolution of human societies. The one slight correction I’d make is that I didn’t assert that I knew that liberal democracy was the best possible system. It was a little bit more modest. I said that I don’t see an alternative system out there that really lays claim to being superior as a way of promoting human flourishing and human happiness.
And I do admit that China has been probably the most serious contender as an alternative because they’ve managed to grow very rapidly. They’ve been pretty stable. I think that there are many other aspects of human flourishing, like individual freedom that they don’t permit, which is why I wouldn’t say that it’s a superior system, but it is a pretty powerful one. And our system right now looks pretty troubled. So it does look like we’ve got some competition at the moment.
Chris Hayes: I actually went back to book this summer when I was writing about the Russian emigre philosopher Alexandre Kojeve, who was a Hegel scholar and taught a seminar on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in Paris that was attended by some of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century.
Kojeve would then go on to be a bureaucrat in the French Ministry of Trade, where he was actually instrumental in constructing the early precursor of the European Union through the European common market, and putting in place a lot of the kind of bureaucratic mechanisms that would draw you closer to each other in the wake of the disaster of the Second World War.
Just talk a little bit about the basic Hegelian, I mean, not to get too philosophical too quickly, but the basic Hegelian argument about Telos and human development, because I think it’s both embedded in the way we think of history, but we don’t actually recognize it as such, right? We think of history as a kind of march of progress, almost as a kind of like fact about what history is, but actually that grows from specific philosophical presuppositions and traditions.
Francis Fukuyama: Right. So Hegel was the first so-called historicist philosopher, meaning that, in his view, what people thought the way they behaved, the kind of institutions they had was relative to the historical period that they were living in. But he believed that that passage of history wasn’t just a random series of events, or it wasn’t cyclical like prior philosophers had thought, but it was progressive. And so, over time, mankind developed different forms of living, different values, different institutions, but we were progressing towards the kind of realization of the basic human freedom.
And Alexandre Kojeve, the philosopher that you refer to, did teach the seminar in which he, I think, slightly tongue in cheek, repeated Hegel’s assertion that history ended with the Battle of Jena in 1806, when the Prussian Army was defeated by Napoleon. What did that mean? Well, it meant that Napoleon was the bearer of the French Revolution, the liberalism of the French Revolution. The Code Napoleon is the basis of law and the rule of law throughout Europe today.
And I think what he was arguing was, despite all the Sturm und Drang of historical events, since that time, we haven’t really evolved past that liberal understanding of liberty and equality as the basic underlying principles of a modern society. And that was what I was thinking that, obviously, a lot happened, wars and revolutions, and so forth. There was an attempt to add another stage because Karl Marx succeeded Hegel, and Marx said, “No, no, the end of history is not liberal democracy; it is communism.”
And so then for the next 150 years, there’s a big struggle as people on the left tried to build a communist society. And all that came crashing down in 1989 with the fall of the wall and the reforms that were going on in the Soviet Union. And it became pretty clear that that higher stage of history was never going to arrive, and to the extent that there was an end of history. It was what we were seeing around us in existing liberal democracies. And so, that was basically the argument that I made back then. And I still think it’s true in the sense that I don’t see a higher alternative out there that is particularly attractive.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I mean, it’s always difficult, right? Because we are subject to the same historicist forces that all humans are right, where we have contingent knowledge based on the institutional arrangements and the horizons that we experienced. And so, it’s very hard for us to float up, right, and sort of view in this like deeply almost omniscient, comparative sense.
It is worthwhile, though, just to linger on this notion of progress as central, because I do think like, particularly, I think the listeners of this podcast, right, most of human history, we’re on the planet for 200,000 years. Like, we get civilization maybe 10,000 12,000, somewhere around there, what we think of a civilization, or at least just domesticating animals, staying in the same place, starting to urbanize and build denser societies that begin to have social layers. Most of it is not progressive. Like, it’s cyclical, right? Like, the drought season comes, the rainy season comes. You sow and then you reap, and then you go through the winter. Nothing changes year over year.
So our experience of progress both as a first person-lived experience, but also as a philosophical premise for how we think about things progressing. And you’re seeing this now, right, with people’s reaction to the role overturning. That feels to people like myself, we’re firm believers in abortion rights, like history turning backwards, right?
Francis Fukuyama: Right.
Chris Hayes: This idea that, like, it’s supposed to go in this direction, and now it’s going backwards in that direction. But even that presupposition is it’s not necessarily like the true way the world works. It’s a philosophical tradition.
Francis Fukuyama: Right. No, that’s right. I think that the idea of progress had both the material and the moral component.
Chris Hayes: Right, exactly.
Francis Fukuyama: Material one, obviously, was that modern societies get richer, and that allows us to live longer, our children survive out of childhood, we have more opportunities to have more fulfilling lives and so forth. The moral side of it I do think has to do with the question of equality, because all of those earlier ages that you referred to were oftentimes deeply unequal societies in which there was slavery, there was racism, there was certainly gender, women were assigned subordinate gender roles and the like.
And the kind of history that I think Hegel was talking about really had to do not just with the material progress, but the moral progress in which people would be recognized for their fundamental human equality. And I think any sensible historicist understands that this is not a straightforward linear progress, where we make a little bit of progress every year and we never go backwards.
So you think about the history of the 20th century, you had the rise of Stalinism and Hitlerism, two massive world wars that virtually destroyed European civilization. And yet, at the end of the defeat of Nazism is what laid the ground for decolonization. So all of the developing countries that were held in colonial captivity by Europe got their freedom. They became independent, could determine their own futures.
And you think about what happened in this country, at the time of the ratification of the Constitution, the only people that could vote were a very small circle of white males that own property. And that progressively widened with the ending of slavery and the Civil War to juridical equality of African Americans then with the 19th Amendment of women.
Of course, again, we see massive setback. So after 1876, the readmission of the southern states means that the United States then has to tolerate Jim Crow and legal segregation and it takes another hundred years to get rid of that. But that’s the way history operates. I think it’s not linear. But in the end, there is this kind of moral progress. And so that’s really, I think, the underlying idea in that historical or historicist’s narrative.
Chris Hayes: So let’s talk about liberalism which is the subject of your latest book, but also, I think, the through line of a lot of the thinking here, right? Because I mean, the notion of moral progress and liberalism are always sort of bound to each other.
And that the project of liberalism is to produce a kind of balance between liberty and equality that allows for max amount of human flourishing, but retains some sort of bonds to each other to avoid the kind of “winner take all” ethos of politics that are controlled by, say, one party, right, where if you seize control of the state, then you get to dictate every aspect of life. And that obviously has real losers if you’re on the wrong side then.
Francis Fukuyama: Right.
Chris Hayes: How would you think about liberalism in the broad sense that you’re talking about it here?
Francis Fukuyama: Yeah. So in the United States, it’s associated with a certain kind of left-wing politics. And that’s not the sense I mean it, because I think that the way that progressive politics has evolved in the U.S. has actually turned it rather illiberal in many respects. My view of liberalism is also not the right-wing version, where a lot of people think of it as libertarianism. They don’t like the state, and they want to get the state out of the economy and out of people’s social lives and so forth. And that’s also not the version I believed in.
My version begins with a philosophical premise that all human beings are basically morally equal, that they have an underlying dignity, and that that dignity needs to be respected by governments. And the way that it is respected is through a rule of law, through constitutional arrangements that put limitations on the power of the state to manipulate individuals. And the state needs to allow them to speak, to think, to act, to associate, to believe, and ultimately really to participate in political life because that’s the moral core that liberalism is trying to protect.
It’s that autonomy and that ability to decide things on your own, that is the moral basis for the doctrine. So that means that liberalism is I would say that Sweden and Denmark, two social democratic states that tax more than 50% of GDP, are liberal societies because they fundamentally obey the rule of law. And on the other hand, there are definite threats to liberalism right now because both Vladimir Putin in Russia and Viktor Orban in Hungary have said that they’re trying to build an illiberal society.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Let’s talk about the threats to liberalism because I mean, I think that the idea for a long time, particularly when you walk back to the sort of intellectual organs here, right, that obviously Marx is a Hegel scholar. He takes much of his basic framework from Hegel. But the dialectical progress of history with a thesis, antithesis, synthesis, right, to sort of set of institutional arrangements of backlash or reaction to that sort of new set of institutional arrangements that come in their stead.
And Hegel saw this as actually spiritual, when he talks about “The Phenomenology of Spirit” of like he actually liked spirit like capital S, Spirit of a, capital H, History, moving through humans. He was definitely not a materialist. Marx takes that and he talks about in material terms, where the engine for him his class struggle, control the means of production. And out of that grows this global battle in both rhetorical ideological, military and institutional senses between liberal democracies which range across right and left, right, in our concept, and socialist states, right?
Francis Fukuyama: Right.
Chris Hayes: And self-described ones. And what’s interesting to me is that we have something different now which is that we don’t have a Cold War. There’s no unified ideological threat or argument, right, like there was between Nixon and Khrushchev when they, when they met at the World’s Fair back in whatever it was. Like, how do you think about the threats to liberalism now, the alternatives, the arguments against it?
Francis Fukuyama: Well, it’s interesting because there are arguments on both the right and the left for why liberalism, as they regard, is not adequate. The right-wing arguments, in a way, come out of the essence of liberalism, because liberalism first appeared as a way of governing over religiously diverse societies. After the European wars of religion in the middle of the 17th century, Europe was completely exhausted. And the early liberal thinkers said, “Well, let’s lower the horizons of politics.”
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Francis Fukuyama: “No longer will the state set a religious objective or define the good life in religious terms. We’re going to rather have a tolerant society, where people following different religious views can live together in peace.” And that means that liberal societies, you can do whatever you want, provided that you don’t prevent other people from doing what they want. And I think a lot of conservatives feel that that allows a lot of moral laxity. People don’t accept the kinds of values particularly in areas regarding family, sexual behavior, and so forth. That religion had typically tried to define and constrain.
And nationalists feel that liberal society doesn’t give an entire people a common cultural framework. They don’t have the same traditions and views, and they feel that that’s a weakening of social solidarity as they see it. And those critiques are true enough, but the reason that liberalism existed was because in the days when people did pursue either these religious or national goals, they got into a lot of trouble because they wouldn’t agree on them and they’d end up with a lot of violence. So that’s a critique on the right.
The critique on the left has to do with the slowness oftentimes of liberal politist to actually address social justice problems. And so, that history that I was referring to, where you create juridical equality for African Americans right after the Civil War. But a hundred years later, you still have a situation where a Black person can’t walk on the streets of the nation’s capital because of legal segregation. And it takes a hundred years really to actually fulfill the promise of the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments.
That’s a long time. So I think that it’s quite understandable that progressive people that want the equal treatment of all people think that liberalism is hypocritical. It’s slow. It doesn’t actually move fast enough. And so, I think that’s kind of the origins of the unhappiness on both sides. Well, maybe we should put off the answers, but I think that defines the problem.
Chris Hayes: Well, let’s put off the answer for a second. I mean, I think there’s another aspect to this that I find really fascinating for me, particularly with my own, whatever my own history is, is that arguments that are formally similar to arguments that I grew up with among the left are now employed by the right, particularly the populist right. So there’s a certain kind of left argument against liberalism.
Marx’s concept of bourgeois democracy, which is basically that you say that basically this is a facially neutral and value neutral system, in which you’re not really picking winners and losers, and you’re sort of just balancing competing interests and allowing for tolerance. But really, you’re smuggling a huge amount of like actual substantive contentions in, wielding of power, and Marx’s conception on behalf of the capitalists and ownership class.
Now, you get it from right wingers that basically like you guys say you’re all neutral and tolerant. But really what you’re doing is like you’ve seized control of the commanding heights of both the state and culture to essentially create your “winner take all” regime, in which people have to listen to what you like. And it’s interesting because there’s almost a kind of postmodern aspect to it, or even throwback Marxist’s aspect to it that is, in some ways, similar to the left critiques of my youth, that you see a lot of people —
Francis Fukuyama: Absolutely.
Chris Hayes: — on the populist right using now.
Francis Fukuyama: Yeah. So I have a whole chapter in my new book about how structuralism evolved into post structuralism and post modernism, and then finally into critical theory. And the argument was, first, for a kind of radical subjectivism, that people imposed a structure on reality by speaking about, and therefore, words were very important. But those words were controlled by powerful elites. And oftentimes, those elites would use language itself to manipulate people, but the people being manipulated wouldn’t realize that they were being manipulated.
So the thinker that was the most prominent in this line of thought was Michel Foucault, the French philosopher who had this idea of biopower, where he said in the old days, a ruler could just order the death of any one of his subjects and use power directly. But in the modern world, it’s much more “subtle the map.” They hide behind things like modern science to declare certain people insane, or deviant, or to incarcerate them. But in fact, this is just an exercise of pure power. And so, it’s actually a kind of conspiracy or theorizing that there are these elites that are manipulating people.
And you’re right that that’s exactly what’s gone over to the right now. So you think about the COVID epidemic, or the kind of anti-vaxxers who make an identical argument. They say, “Anthony Fauci, Centers for Disease Control, these are not neutral scientific organizations where people, they’re actually being used by the elites to take away your freedoms because what they’re interested in is power. And that’s Foucault to a tee. Whether anybody on the right actually has read Foucault, I don’t know, but they’ve certainly adopted the structure of his argument and the kind of conspiratorial thinking that lies behind them.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I mean, Ross Douthat had an interesting column about sort of appropriation of Foucault. I think you can make the argument that Foucault always has reactionary strains in his thinking from the beginning. And there are parts of his politics, there’s a very fascinating and famous Foucault-Chomsky debate in which some of this comes out.
There’s also the fact that Foucault is a fairly enthusiastic supporter of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which again, there was reasons to want Reza Shah overthrown, but was quite enthusiastic about the Ayatollah actually, like, the regime in the early parts.
Francis Fukuyama: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: So I think there’s always been kind of a latent, if not explicit, reactionary aspect to it. But yes, this idea of the mechanisms of liberalism essentially being disingenuous, right?
Francis Fukuyama: Right.
Chris Hayes: That basically, it’s bad faith. Essentially, there’s a whole bunch of fancy words, and technologies, and a vocabulary of law that is all essentially just the cloaking of power, raw power. That’s not that different than other powerful regimes, and we just like to justify it in all sorts of fancy ways.
Francis Fukuyama: No, that’s right. I think the different branches of critical theory have different versions of it. So there’s a branch of feminist thought that says that liberalism is just a modern version of patriarchy that, again, hides the power of men over women. Critical race theory has a similar view. Post-colonial theory actually levels the charge that liberalism is actually all about the subjugation of non-European people.
Chris Hayes: In fact, to its core, right? I mean, that —
Francis Fukuyama: Yeah, that’s right.
Chris Hayes: I mean, these are I think quite, in many ways, even I’m not ultimately persuaded by them, but they draw a lot of blood, I think. I mean —
Francis Fukuyama: Yeah. Well, I think, in my view, a lot of that is guilt by association, in the sense that, yes, it was liberal Britain that colonized the world in the 19th century, and developed the largest colonial empire the world has ever seen. And that was hypocritical if liberalism aims to treat people as autonomous, equal moral individuals.
But the question I would raise is, did that colonization drive them from liberalism itself, or was it actually in contradiction to those liberal principles? Or what I think is really the effective historical truth is that who we regard as an equal individual has just been changing over time. And so, for centuries, women, people of different racial backgrounds, people of different religious faiths were not regarded as equal moral individuals, but were regarded as inferior in some way and that there was a hierarchy.
Chris Hayes: Well, by white liberals, obviously, not by them.
Francis Fukuyama: Yeah. But in other societies, it could have been the Chinese versus Malays. And there were a lot of other ways that people had of discriminating against other people. But this was in contradiction to that fundamental liberal premise.
And I think that’s something that Abraham Lincoln understood before the Civil War because in his argument with Stephen Douglas about slavery said, “No, there’s this prior principle that all men are created equal. That’s in our Declaration of Independence.” And if you don’t believe that, I mean, that has to be the dominant principle underlying our Republican form of government. So I think that it’s a contradiction of liberalism, and not the essence of liberalism, to practice this kind of unjust domination.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: What is your account of why liberalism seems to be somewhat in retreat/under attack in the last 5 or 10 years particularly?
Francis Fukuyama: Well, I think that it really has to do with liberalism being carried to extremes, and therefore being deformed. So on the right, you have the emergence of neoliberalism. This is the University of Chicago free market economics then applied to public policy everywhere that creates this globalized world, that produces a lot of social disruption, jobs being shipped overseas, communities being undermined, and ultimately the financial system becoming very unstable.
On the left, you have the growth of identity politics. There’s a liberal version of identity politics, where it’s simply marginalized groups that are mobilizing around their identity to say, “We want to be treated equally as people in the mainstream.”
But there was also an illiberal version of it that began to say, “Well, actually these differences based on race or ethnicity, or gender or sexual orientation, these are actually essential characteristics. And you liberals who think that we’re all equal individuals are wrong. We’re not all equal. We all have such different life experiences. They’re really not commensurate. And you shouldn’t treat us as individuals, you should treat us primarily as members of these groups. And things like resource distribution, or jobs, or other things should be distributed on the basis of our group characteristics rather than what we are as individuals.”
And that then becomes an attack on the broader liberal principle of equality. So the pluralism is no longer a pluralism of individuals, but a pluralism of well-established and kind of fixed social groups.
Chris Hayes: Not quite sure I’m with you that people are making that argument. So on the sort of neoliberalism side, I basically agree. But on the sort of, quote-unquote, “identity politics,” it just seems to me like there’s a kind of inevitable tension that you’re identifying. It’s a tension that’s just inescapable in any form of liberalism, right? So the sort of group identity, group recognition versus individual recognition is a complex question, right, whether it’s Quebecois folks in Canada, or its religious minorities in a country like say, India, or even in early liberal regimes in in Germany, or things like this.
Like, this question of how much you identify as part of this group versus an individual. It doesn’t strike me that there’s many Americans making like what seems to me you’re saying people are making a kind of ontological argument that like the difference between these groups is a fundamental truth about the world, as opposed to a contingent fact about how society has been ordered. And in order to respond to it, then you have to respond sort of like with like now.
Francis Fukuyama: Yeah. I think sometimes it’s a little bit hard to distinguish which of those things is happening. But certainly, in a lot of critical theory, you can find plenty of people that say the very principle of individual equality, the universal equality of individuals is fundamentally wrong —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Francis Fukuyama: — and fundamentally, the source of problems, because that’s what blinds you to the fact that group identity is really fundamental. And there’s other illiberal things that come out of that way of thinking. I mean, tolerance and freedom of speech are undermined because of the overriding need to meet the social justice objectives. And in fact, in certain quarters, even bringing up the liberal principle of freedom of speech is regarded as a kind of conservative reactionary idea. Because in the current political world, there are certain ideas that are just clearly right. And people questioning them don’t really have the right to articulate alternative viewpoints. So I think those forms of illiberalism really do exist.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I guess I think they do. I mean, I guess the one thing I would say here, and again, I think I’m probably more sympathetic to these kinds of critical arguments of liberalism perhaps than you are. But I do think like when we get back to the freedom of speech question, I agree, like there really has been, I think, a tangible change in how people, particularly on the left, think of that concept.
I mean, it definitely is the case that the notion of freedom of speech, as a left liberal idea, particularly in the Bush years or the years of my youth was much more central than it is now, where I think its political valence almost has kind of changed just in terms of how people think about it. So I don’t disagree there.
I mean, I guess I think that, once again, you end up in this territory where it is this critique that basically, the contention is right that we have a kind of like ostensibly facially neutral freedom of speech, which no viewpoint discrimination, all views welcome, right? But in practice institutionally, that’s not what happens, right? Like, avowed neo-Nazis don’t get invited to campus, right? More or less. I mean, really, it just doesn’t happen, right.
So then the question becomes, well, everyone is drawing the line somewhere. So once we start drawing the line, like who has the power to draw that line, which again, I’m sympathetic to that as a sort of interesting debate. But it also seems to me to get to one of the points I think about liberalism, which is that it contains internal contradictions that are unresolvable, right? Like, this battle between these sorts of questions are not resolvable within liberalism itself, except through the process of civil society, right, like nonviolent argumentation, protest resolution, whatever. There’s no Bible.
Francis Fukuyama: I’m not sure that there’s not ways of thinking your way through, what is acceptable and what is not. I mean, if you have a liberal society, you need to set rules that it can’t undermine itself. And so, if people’s speech promotes violence, this is “the shouting fire in a crowded theater” doctrine, right?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Francis Fukuyama: In First Amendment law in the United States, that’s beyond the pale. But short of that, speech is protected. I think the problem that we face right now is not that we don’t know how to draw lines, but we have a big problem about who should draw the line. And also, the consequences of not drawing lines I think are big right now.
Because in my view, the real problem in speech is not that people express really terrible points of view. It’s that modern digital technology has created this ability to amplify certain ideas enormously and send them all around the world in nanoseconds. And that power really didn’t exist before. And the control over that power shouldn’t be in the hands of governments, but it also shouldn’t be in the hands of private companies or profit companies either. And so, I think that’s the real problem.
In fact, we do draw all sorts of lines on social media, explicit pornography, violence, people being tortured. You can’t show that stuff, and everybody kind of agrees that there’s a limit to speech there. It’s in the realm of political speech, that we have this really big problem of what’s acceptable or not. And my view is we ought to accept also anti-vaxxers. I mean, these people are free to express those opinions. What’s not such a great thing is when a technology platform, or a government, or just a legacy media organization amplifies these views and makes them much bigger than they really deserve to be.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I mean, it’s the difference between the Hyde Park speakers corner, right, famously, the famous example of unfettered free speech in London house Park, where you can go and say anything, and like the BBC turning over 15 minutes to anyone at Hyde Park.
Francis Fukuyama: Right.
Chris Hayes: They would never do that, right? But that’s what we have now ostensibly, right, that there’s a sort of collapsing between those two speech spheres. So you sort of outlined what you see as sort of intellectual, cultural challenges to liberalism from left and right. But my question to you is like why now? This is a thing that I feel like I never get a good handle on.
I mean, my personal theory, which I will offer, I think a lot has to do with just historical memory. In the same way, when you talk about the sort of early forms of continental European liberalism grow out of the kind of “winner take all” bloodshed of the religious wars that happened particularly in the 15th, 16th, 17th centuries. And that’s very much informing. Like Hobbes, for instance, when he’s writing about Leviathan, that the historical memory of what non-liberal regimes, particularly fascism look like, and the bloodshed and horror they brought about has faded as people have died from the generation that experienced it.
Francis Fukuyama: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: And I think a huge part of it is just that, simple as that, that like people didn’t live through the Great War. They didn’t live through World War II. They didn’t live through fascism. Like, that historical memory has faded. And with it, people’s appreciation of how precious any kind of enduring liberal civil peace is, as a form of human life on the planet.
Francis Fukuyama: Yeah. No, that would be exactly my explanation for the timing. You think about a country like Poland that suffered enormously during the 21st century. Invasion being basically partitioned between the Soviet Union and Germany, then communism that made Poles in the immediate post-Cold War era, desperately eager to join the European Union and to become a liberal society.
But now, you’ve got young Poles, the vast majority of people in the country were born after the collapse of communism there, and they don’t have any memory of either the conflict or what communism was like, the dictatorship that their parents or grandparents’ generation suffered. And so, therefore, they can sort of think that, “Well, it’s the EU that’s really the dictator.” And that’s really the organization that’s taking away our freedoms.
And similarly, in the United States. I mean, we never went through anything like Poland did. But I do think that peace and prosperity, in a way, breeds its own form of complacency. This is where we started the conversation. That’s why the invasion of Ukraine was such a shock to everybody living in the peaceful Western world, because in our lifetimes, we’ve never witnessed one country just launching a big military invasion across the international border and trying to conquer another country.
Chris Hayes: Well, Iraq.
Francis Fukuyama: Well, Iraq. But –yeah, okay.
Chris Hayes: I mean, they weren’t neighboring, but it’s the closest.
Francis Fukuyama: Yeah, that’s true.
Chris Hayes: The closest analog. I mean, it felt to me as I watched the run-up to it, actually, the closest analog just in terms of back in 2003, thinking like don’t do this. This is a terrible idea. But yes —
Francis Fukuyama: Well, I’m not going to defend the Iraq War. I think that was a huge mistake. And probably what the biggest mistake that we’ve made in American foreign policy, precisely because it kind of desensitize people to how terrible it is when one country invades another one.
Chris Hayes: Exactly. And I think to your point, though, I mean, the shock of a sheer total war of conquest and aggression across the land border in the heart of Europe of one country to another. Again, in the part of the world, there’s a sight of some of the most extended barbarism in human history. I had Timothy Snyder on the podcast. He talks about particularly that area, right, that what Stalin and Hitler, in turn and just in short succession, did to that particular part of the world.
And to get back to Poland, right, so Poland is an interesting example where you have the Law and Justice Party ascendant and currently the controlling party there. There are right-wing party. They are not quite as sort of a validly anti-liberal as Orban is, but in that area, right
Francis Fukuyama: Right.
Chris Hayes: Particularly on LGBT rights, but other things as well. And they’ve been kind of bullies in power, and in ways, somewhat similar to Orban. But it’s interesting because it has seemed to clarify things for them, for the Polish government about the stakes here and about what like the liberal or non-liberal choices really look like when you put them on the table.
Francis Fukuyama: Well, I frankly think that’s been true for the whole of Europe.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Francis Fukuyama: I mean, you look at the Germans, the Germans were living in the world that started with Willy Braunt’s Ostpolitik, where the only people that were historically guilty of anything were themselves, or the Germans because they had created Nazism and invaded Russia, and that they constantly had to expiate, not just by developing friendly ties with Russia, but by not having a serious military, not stepping up to any responsibilities within NATO, and so forth.
And I think, I mean, the generation that really believed that were older people that had lived through the end of the war, and then the kind of expiation that Germany had to go through because of the Holocaust. But they were now woken up to the fact that they’re not the only bad actors. The real fascists now in the world are the Russians. And whatever they did in the past, you still got to deal with this current problem. And so, I think that’s why you’ve seen this revolution in German foreign policy that started with the invasion of Ukraine.
Chris Hayes: How lasting do you think this is? It’s been wild to watch this play out. I mean, we live in a very short attention span universe, and that’s something that I’m actually working on a much longer writing project on about right now. But I wonder how much you feel like this invasion marks some sort of hinge point, about whatever the next era is, after the, as I started in the intro, the sort of end of history era, the kind of, to me, what it feels like now is, after a lot of denial about whether there were challenges to liberalism, a lot of sort of I think (blive) triumphalism about its inexorable spread.
There is a much more acute awareness that liberalism is one of different alternatives on the table right now, and that there is an actual explicit battle being waged, in this case, militarily, but also ideologically, economically, politically over these different competing models.
Francis Fukuyama: No, I think that’s right. I think there was a great deal of complacency in this view that peace and prosperity was something that could be had without any sacrifice and without people actually even having to think about alternatives. And I think the invasion has really pierced that complacency. Whether we’ll go back to being complacent if the war winds down rapidly, we’ll have to see, I think the images are pretty graphic.
But the other thing to note is that the reaction of horror is really only true in other democratic countries. It’s true in Europe, in North America, Japan, South Korea, places that are democratic. But there are large parts of the world that actually haven’t been outraged, in Sub-Saharan Africa, in the Middle East, India. All of these places, they’re acting on the basis of national interest and they don’t regard this as a big clash of values where they have to take aside.
And especially India has never regarded the fact that it’s democratic as much of a definition of how it sees the world and it certainly hasn’t supported Ukraine because of support for a fellow democracy. So, I think we have to realize that there’s a big part of the world that actually doesn’t see things the way we’re seeing it.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: It’s interesting you bring up India when you talk about alternative models, right? I mean, I think that China is the most obvious, it’s the (belt) in the room. We should talk about in a little bit, because it does seem to me like it has a self -awareness increasingly under Xi of itself as an alternative model. It’s sort of outward-facing rhetoric. It has grown more sharp on that point, particularly under Xi, who runs a state that is much more pugilistic rhetorically about the world.
But India as well, I mean, India represents the world’s largest democracy. It is a billion people, but it is under Narendra Modi, again, increasingly illiberal democracy. And I don’t think Modi sort of speaks quite in the terms that Orban does. But the actual institutions of Indian liberalism, we’ve had run it on the program, are being really pretty attacked, I mean, quite intensely —
Francis Fukuyama: Definitely.
Chris Hayes: — about the Gandhian vision of pluralism, multi-ethnic, multi-confessional democracy among equal citizens being converted into a sort of BJP Hindustani vision of you know —
Francis Fukuyama: No, that’s right. And also, I think the United States has been very reluctant to criticize India for any of this, because we regard India as a critical ally against China. And so, we are really soft-pedaling the stuff going on in Kashmir and taking rights away from Muslim citizens of India, all of that stuff. And that’s why people, in a way here, don’t perceive that backsliding to be nearly as serious as I think it really is.
Chris Hayes: Yes, I agree with that. And I think it’s actually wildly worrying also because it keeps being ratified by majorities, right, that it is both sort of illiberal. It has produced, I think, a lot of real peril and misery particularly from Muslim minority in India, but also because it’s very popular. I mean, it keeps being ratified by the majority there. And then there’s China, I mean, how do you think about China? Do you see a world in which China becomes a kind of 21st century version of what the sort of Soviet Empire or communism was?
Francis Fukuyama: Well, it’s certainly going to be the major alternative out there. In a way, it’s going to be much more durable than the former Soviet Union because they’re economically much more sophisticated and successful. Soviet Union never really was at the forefront of anything, but nuclear technology and weapons. China really has a much more broadly based economy, and they’ve managed it amazingly well, and it is socially stable.
I guess the one thing you would say about China is that the social model that they represent does not seem to be wildly popular. A lot of people in developing countries, for example, admire them because they’re economically successful, and they’re growing. But do people want to leave Nigeria, or Kenya and move to India because they think it’s such a great society? No. They want to go to Europe or to North America because I do think that the way of life of a liberal society still remains much more attractive to people.
But I guess the other thing to say about China right now that’s particularly evident as a result of the pandemic is that they also have a somewhat lesser version of the Russian problem, right, that Russia invaded Ukraine because of the paranoia and misperceptions of one man who’s really unconstrained by institutions. That’s Vladimir Putin. And in a certain sense, China is pursuing what I think is a kind of crazy zero COVID strategy because their supreme leader is so committed to suppressing this disease that he’s letting the 25 million residents of Shanghai suffer and the economy and everything else.
And so, I think it kind of shows that there are reasons why it’s a good thing to have checks and balances in a political system. That’s what liberalism is all about, ultimately. It’s institutional constraints on a single person’s ability to make decisions and impose policies. And I think in both Russia and China, you’re seeing playing out the bad consequences of that kind of decision-making process.
So we’ll have to see in the long term whether that registers with people. And I mean, I think in terms of Russia, I’m almost sure it will, because who wants to be Putin, who wants to be a leader that’s both brutal, but also ineffective and ultimately shown to be very weak. That’s not going to be an attractive model. China’s a little bit more challenging because they’re much more cautious. They’re not risk-takers like Putin, and they’re willing to bide their time. And so, that may be much more dangerous in the long run alternative.
Chris Hayes: Well, I think that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet regime two years later give a little bit of a false sense of, I mean, that’s such a touchstone for so many people, right? Like, the wall falls without a shot firing. The Soviet Union dissipates without ultimately a shot firing, even though there’s a coup and ultimately is unsuccessful. In quick succession like dominoes, the various republics declare their independence. They reconstitute.
And then, very quickly, you start to have war, right? Chechnya, there’s two wars in Chechnya almost immediately, right? In fact, the first one starts under Yeltsin about what will be tolerated and not tolerated in terms of independence and separation from Russia. That said, the vision of the kind of the Velvet Revolution as the Czech revolution is called, and Vaclav Havel, that that’s a model or that’s like how history changes is incredibly anomalous, right? They’re usually force and guns and military.
So there’s something when you again go back one generation earlier, the World War II, where fascism is defeated outright through lots of bombs and guns and tanks and death. Timothy Snyder made his point about, like, the actual military outcome in Ukraine is going to matter a huge amount, like who kills more people, like who kills who better, right?
Francis Fukuyama: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Which agents of violence are more effective?
Francis Fukuyama: Right.
Chris Hayes: Because we tend to think of these as battle of ideas. But in the end, who’s doing more killing, who has better military operations ends up mattering a ton too, if not just positively.
Francis Fukuyama: Well, power remains a very powerful force, and ideas that aren’t backed by power tend to be weaker ideas. That doesn’t mean necessarily that might make right, but it is true that success based on things like the successful application of military power really do help bolster people’s belief in certain set of ideas. So I think that’s correct.
But that’s why I think the defeat of Vladimir Putin may be quite an important event because if you got a strong man who’s really only claim to legitimacy is the fact that he’s a strong man, and then proves to be weak and incompetent, who needs that? And I think that may go a long way to discrediting Putinism itself.
Chris Hayes: What is your view of the U.S.? I mean, we haven’t touched this as much. We’ve been talking about this all in international context. And obviously, I talk a lot on my program and my podcast about democratic decline in the U.S. To me, it’s incredibly perilous and urgent. How do you feel about it?
Francis Fukuyama: No, I agree. I agree. I think that we’re in a dangerous period of the sort we really haven’t experienced since the period before the Civil War, where you actually have a group of people in the political system that they’ve basically broken with democracy. They’re actually willing to overturn the results of a legitimate election in order to stay in power. And they’re coming to see our institutions simply in instrumental terms as ways of getting and keeping power rather than as things that are independently valuable.
Chris Hayes: (Inaudible) fictions.
Francis Fukuyama: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Right? Like, essentially pre-textual means of control by the other side, the other team that wants to suppress the real vote and the real the real Americans. And I think you also have this one of the themes and you wrestle with this throughout the book and throughout your work about who’s the real American, who’s the real Russian.
I mean, obviously, we talked about like immigrating to China, right? Like, well, part of the reason you don’t want to go to China is because China is an ethno-nationalist state in which the Han Chinese are this sort of centerpiece of them. It’s a multi-ethnic state, for sure, but it’s obvious like who’s on top of the pecking order and it has no real pretenses to being multiracial and pluralistic.
Francis Fukuyama: Right.
Chris Hayes: I mean, it sort of does and it’s official rhetoric. Actually, I shouldn’t say it does have pretenses to that. But the sort of question of the sort of nationalist challenge, right, which is that like a real American looks like this, or what a real Russian is, or what a real Indian is and Modi’s India. Like, that’s where the kind of beating heart of this challenge to liberalism lies and it certainly what has the real potent force, I think, in the U.S.
Francis Fukuyama: Yeah, I think that’s right. It’s a form of community that people really look to. In my view, one of the mistakes that liberals have made in many places, beginning with the United States, is not to recognize the power of the nation as an anchor for liberalism itself, that people don’t believe in liberalism just as an abstraction. They believe in it embedded in a particular nation, which is their own.
And I think that you need a sense of national identity that is liberal, that people can actually rally around. Many liberals, they don’t like this idea because liberalism itself asserts the universal equality of rights of all people in all places. And to say that there’s a border here and we’re going to enforce rights on this side of the border, but we’re not on the other side, really rankles a lot of people the wrong way. And you can see why that’s the case, but I think it’s something that is necessary because you can’t build a world order if, first of all, one country thinks that it can enforce rights universally.
But the more important issue, I think, is that emotionally, people will become attached to liberal ideas if it is embedded in their own country, in their own society. If you look at Ukraine right now, you’re getting this unbelievable participation, and national unity, and the heroism and risk of life, not for an abstraction but for a Ukraine that is different from Russia. But there’s an argument about whether they’re fighting for sovereignty or whether they actually care about democracy. And I think that’s kind of a false dichotomy because they’re fighting for a Ukraine who’s democratic and that’s the way they understand their society. And if it wasn’t embedded in this idea of Ukraine, they wouldn’t fight for it.
Chris Hayes: Francis Fukuyama is a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is a director of the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy. He’s the author of numerous books, including “Liberalism and Its Discontents,” which is out this May. Professor Fukuyama, thank you so much for your time.
Francis Fukuyama: Thanks very much for having me, Chris.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great, thanks to Professor Fukuyama for that fascinating discussion. I learned a lot from it.
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Tweet us with the hashtag #WITHpod, email WITHpod@gmail.com. “Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway, Tiffany Champion, Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and features music by Eddie Cooper. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.