READING: Quotes & Such from Frank Fukuyama: "Liberalism & Its Discontents"
From the book, & from his truly excellent podcast with Sean Illing on Vox Conversations...
Frank Fukuyama & Sean Illing: Podcast
Francis: The democratic part of liberal democracy has to do with institutions like free and fair multi-party elections to gauge popular will. The liberal part really has to do with constraints on the power of the state… rule of law… checks and balances… a leader… legitimate… isn't able to do simply whatever… in… violating the individual rights of people…. This legal constraint on power…
Francis: Three arguments in favor of a liberal political order…. Pragmatic… protect life itself, by having a regime that allows tolerance of different points of view…. Protect… human autonomy… freedom in terms of what life course to select…. Economic… market economy… liberal societies tend to be the richest societies in the world.
Francis: Liberal societies do have their own culture…. If people are not… tolerant… public spirited… paying attention… enough to… vote intelligently… that kind of society is not going to work…. Actual, real existing liberal societies have been built on top of non liberal foundations in which you have nations… cultures… language… shared history…. that give your life a certain thickness that just being a liberal individual doesn't necessarily give you…. That creates a tension because sometimes those cultural foundations are exclusionary…. The trick… is to have enough of a culture that people… are in a common endeavor…. But… that… shared core has to be tolerant and accessible.
Francis: A lot of the out-of-control resentments and anger in the United States is a product of people… losing sight of the real stakes…. That's one sense in which… the Russian invasion of Ukraine has… been a useful reminder to people that… there are… serious… tyrants and autocrats…. I had an argument with a reasonably well known conservative intellectual who had gone partly MAGA… and said: that we're living… increasingly under a tyranny. And I said… it seems to me we're living in one of the freest societies in the world, [so] what do you see as so tyrannical? And… he said… there’s a group of nuns that are forced to distribute contraceptives in their medical practice…. Maybe that was based on a wrongly reasoned court decision. But… that’s not the worst violation of individual rights that I've encountered…. That’s something that you can only begin to believe if you live in a pretty peaceful and secure society…
Francis: Americans 20 years ago would disagree over policy…. But that’s… morphed into affective polarization…. You’re in this bizarre situation where being against vaccines is part of a new kind of conservative identity…. When did opposition to rigorously tested vaccines become such an important issue that it's one of the fundamental causes of the political divide in this country…
Francis: To be successful and sustainable in the long run, you… need to link liberalism with democracy… a political mechanism to do a certain degree of redistribution… to mitigate… social and economic inequalities…. The most successful liberal societies… were the social democratic ones… after World War II, where the elites had this recognition that a lot of the horrors of the early part of the 20th century were due to… class cleavages… a real effort to create a welfare state… to try to be more inclusive in terms of having everybody sharing the benefits of economic growth…. If you don't couple liberalism with a political order that is more egalitarian, it's not going to survive…
Francis: We need more redistribution…. We need… [a] universal healthcare system and it’s… outrageous that we're the only… rich country that doesn't have one…
Francis: There's also… a problem… of state capacity, that the American state… is not very efficient…. We just don't have the kind of bureaucratic and administrative traditions that a lot of other parliamentary democracies have…
Francis: The clear and present danger to the American constitutional order comes from the right…from Republicans that basically want to try to steal the next election in a way that they tried to steal the 2020 election… voter access… [and] the way that votes are counted…. Republican state legislatures are trying to change the rules so that they're the ones that can determine… how many electors are sent to the electoral college to vote for the next president…. That is a really big threat to American democracy and to our constitutional order…
Francis: Neo-liberalism… is a deformation of classical liberalism in the sense that it takes the ideas of property rights and market transactions and kind of absolutizes them and demonizes the state in a inappropriate way. And… there's a version of identity politics that itself then turns into something very illiberal when you… start to say that it's our group characteristics that are the most essential things about us…. I think the neo-liberalism part is the easiest to fix. And we're already in the process of doing that…. The deformation on the progressive side… is a little bit harder to walk back, because it does involve people's understanding of basic civil rights. And so it's harder to kind of explain what the problem is. But you know, I do think that that's something that's also not unfixable…
Sean: I do think the age of liberalism is dead…. You write… liberal societies… cannot survive if they are unable to establish a hierarchy of factual truth…created by elites of various sorts who act independently of those holding political power. The game is over as far as I can tell, if you're right about that…
Sean: Is anything that you've written in this book or anything you've said today feel like a revision to your “end of history” thesis…. You talk about how the class issue has more or less been resolved in the West…. I'm not sure that was correct then. I feel like there's just no question that that's not true today. The underlying legal and social structures are not egalitarian. They're not meritocratic. And that is part of the reason you felt compelled to write this book.… And it's one of the many reasons people are disenchanted with the system that we have today…
Francis: I can imagine a political moment will come when people will take up that challenge and then fix the institutions the way they did during the 1930s, after the Great Depression or as a direct result of the Great Depression…. Buried in liberal theory is a belief in human rationality that ultimately people will… listen to evidence… deliberate, and… the result… is going to be some socially productive conclusion…. Modern technology has… challenged that…. It’s made the debate even more open…. But… it provides… big megaphones and opportunities for amplification… without regard to… quality…. The biggest disappointment that I've felt in liberal democracy is that… many Americans could vote for somebody like Donald Trump…. That’s something that I worry about a lot…
Francis: The fundamental argument for liberalism is this pragmatic one, that it's a way of governing societies peacefully that are highly diverse, and that people want to live in that kind of liberal society the most when they see what the alternatives are…. And so liberalism has gone through these long swings, after the wars of religion… challenged again in the 19th, early 20th centuries by out-of-control nationalism…. People go back to liberal values and institutions having experienced that or… communist dictatorship…. [Then] people get complacent… take liberalism for granted and once again… start aspiring to a higher form of politics…. One of the things that gives me some hope is that, we have come out of previous cycles like this. The 1930s was pretty bad… and the world managed to survive that and restore a liberal order…
<https://www.vox.com/vox-conversations-podcast>
Frank Fukuyama: Liberalism & Its Discontents Quotes":
Liberalism... is individualist... egalitarian... universalist... and meliorist.... Liberal societies confer rights on individuals, the most fundamental of which is... autonomy... choices with regard to speech, association, belief, and ultimately political life... the right to own property... to undertake economic transactions... to a share of political power.... Liberal societies embed rights in formal law, and as a result tend to be highly procedural....
There have been three essential justifications for liberal societies.... Pragmatic... liberalism is a way of... allowing diverse populations to live peacefully.... Moral: liberalism protects basic human dignity.... Economic: liberalism promotes economic growth and all the good things that come from growth.... Liberalism has a strong association with certain forms of cognition, particularly the scientific method.... Liberalism’s most important selling point remains the pragmatic one...
Populists on the right and progressives on the left are unhappy... with the way that liberalism has evolved.... Economic liberalism evolved into what is now labeled neoliberalism, which dramatically increased economic inequality and brought on devastating financial crises.... This inequality... is at the core of the progressive case against liberalism.... Personal autonomy expanded relentlessly, and came to be seen as a value that trumped all other visions of the good life including those put forward by traditional religions and culture. Conservatives... felt that they were being actively discriminated against by mainstream society... using a host of undemocratic means... media, universities, the courts and executive power.... On the right... manipulate the electoral system... to guarantee that conservatives remain in power, regardless of democratic choice.... On the left... recognition of groups rather than individuals based on fixed characteristics such as race and gender, as well as policies to equalize outcomes between them.... These threats to liberalism are not symmetrical....
Modern technology has challenged the liberal principle of free speech.... Overwhelm[ing] everyone with more information than they had ever had access to previously or could make sense of... information... of poor quality, false, or at times deliberately weaponized.... The large internet platforms operate on a business model that prioritizes virality and sensationalism over any type of... vetting.... Human cognition... people... begin with strong preferences for the reality they prefer, and use their considerable cognitive skills to select empirical data and devise theories that support that reality in... “motivated reasoning.”... Freedom of speech is... challenged... by concentrations of power that give certain actors great control over speech, and by the steady erosion of the zone of privacy.... The deliberative function of freedom of speech has been weakened... by excessive demands for transparency... [and the] different kinds of fantasy worlds made possible by the shift of our social interactions to online communications...
Broad principles required to rebuild faith in classical liberalism.... Progressives for their part will have to accept the fact that roughly half the country does not agree with either their goals or their methods.... Conservatives need to come to terms with the country’s shifting racial and ethnic mix, the fact that women will continue to occupy the fullest range of positions, both professionally and privately, and that gender roles have changed profoundly...
Certain state-level decisions... do actually challenge fundamental constitutional rights and affect the basic character of liberal democracy.... Jim Crow... returning in American politics. Republican legislatures in many states have passed or proposed bills that would effectively make it possible to overturn the results of democratic elections and make it harder to vote, especially for African Americans...
Public speech... governed by a host of norms.... There are well-established techniques for determining factual information, techniques that have been used for years in court proceedings, professional journalism, and in the scientific community.... There are other necessary norms promoting civility and reasoned discourse that underpin democratic deliberation in a liberal society. Norms regarding public speech should furthermore be applied universally...
Our institutions need to focus on the rights of individuals rather than those of groups. People are never fully defined by their group memberships and continue to exercise individual agency. It may be important to understand the ways they have been shaped by their group identities, but social respect should take account of the individual choices that they make as well. Group recognition threatens not to remediate but to harden group differences...
Successful liberal societies have their own culture and understanding of the good life, even if that vision may be thinner.... They cannot be neutral with regard to the values that are necessary to sustain themselves as liberal societies. They need to prioritize public-spiritedness, tolerance, open-mindedness, and active engagement in public affairs.... They need to prize innovation, entrepreneurship, and risk-taking.... A society of inward-looking individuals interested only in maximizing their personal consumption will not be a society at all...
<https://www.amazon.com/dp/0374606714/>