The Critics of Classical Liberalism

FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: Classical Liberalism on the Line

POLITICAL SCIENTIST FRANCIS FUKUYAMA

engages in a critical and timely discussion of classical liberalism, why it remains one of the most influential political ideologies of the past millennium, and why its challenges from the left and the right will determine the path of the 21st century. From the May 16, 2022 program “Francis Fukuyama: Liberalism and Its Discontents.” This program is supported by the Ken & Jaclyn Broad Family Fund. FRANCIS FUKUYAMA, Ph.D., Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow, Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; Author, Liberalism and Its Discontents TIM MILLER, Founder, Light Fuse Communications; Contributor, The Bulwark; Communications Director, Jeb Bush 2016; Author, Why We Did It (Forthcoming)

TIM MILLER: [Your] book is Liberalism and Its Discontents, so I would like to start the conversation by defining our term, specifically liberalism. For those of you that don’t know, I’m a former, never-Trump Republican type. As a college Republican growing up, liberal was a dirty word for me. You know, it meant San Francisco taxhiking tree huggers. And then as I’ve come to read your book, I was like, actually, I think liberalism is the opposite of a dirty word. And it turns out I might be a liberal. But over in Europe, obviously an opposite definition.

So when we talk about the discontents of liberalism, what are you talking about specifically? FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: Sure. That’s very important, because I definitely don’t mean it in that American sense. I mean it in the sense of the doctrine that really got its start in the middle of the 17th century after the European wars of religion. At that point, Europeans had been killing each other for about 150 years over whether they are Protestant or Catholic or what sect of Protestantism. At that point, a number of thinkers said, “Well, maybe we shouldn’t actually be killing ourselves over these concepts of the good life, and lower the horizons of politics to life itself and to protect each citizen in their personal security, and agree to disagree.”

That’s a doctrine that is associated with certain institutions, the most important of which is a rule of law. These are rules that protect individuals from state power and limit what executive authorities can do, through constitutional checks and balances. It is really designed to enable individuals to exercise choice, moral choice, autonomy. That’s what gives them dignity. Liberalism says we’re all equal human beings, universally, because we do have this capacity for moral choice. And that’s really what the government needs to protect.

It’s not associated with a particular economic policy. So on the right, you have libertarianism, which is not what I consider liberalism. That’s kind of a funny, uniquely

PHOTO BY ED RITGER.

FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: I’m not in favor of just any old kind of national identity. The Hungarian kind or the Russian kind is really toxic, because it is exclusive, aggressive, intolerant. If you’re going to have a national identity, it really has to be a national identity built around liberal values. We have to take pride in the fact that we’re a free people. That’s what Americans used to say about themselves—we’re a free people, and we’re proud of that freedom and we’re willing to fight for it.

American, anti-government attitude on economic and social issues. The center-right version in Europe is like the German Free Democrats, that are kind of pro-market but socially more liberal.

That’s not my version either. As far as I’m concerned, Sweden—a social democratic state—is a liberal state, because they protect individual rights. They respect the rule of law. And that’s really the essence of liberalism for me. MILLER: So you’re really breaking it down to a few attributes. We’re talking about rule of law, a democratic republic, but you also talked about some other attributes—the scientific method, other elements of a liberal society. What are some of them? FUKUYAMA: Well, that’s particularly important now in the Internet age, because liberalism was highly associated with a certain cognitive mode called modern natural science. So modern natural science assumes that there is an objective reality that’s outside of our subjective consciousnesses. It can be apprehended through something called the scientific method. And that apprehension can be used to manipulate the world.

That’s really what creates not just science, but the technology that flows from science. Our modern economic world would not exist but for that technology. So that cognitive mode is very much embedded in the liberal approach.

MILLER: I want to get into the discontents on the right and left. But before we do that, one of the things I think was in the introduction to the book that I felt was interesting and timely for what we’re going through now here is, as you assess the threats that we face to liberalism are actually more acute maybe than the threats to democracy, even though we spent a lot of time talking about the threats to democracy.

I’m sure we’ll have more here at the Club of what we saw on January 6—we were on a panel together about that. But your point, as I take it, is basically that democracy is not necessarily protection from illiberalism. Right? [There are] demagogic democratic winners. As you kind of do a threat assessment right now, compare the threats facing the liberal order versus the democratic order. FUKUYAMA: Liberalism and democracy are usually allies and they usually support one another. But they are distinct phenomena. So liberalism is really about law and legal constraints against the abuse of power. Democracy is the legitimation of power through reference to the people and governments ought to reflect the will of the largest number of their citizens. Although the two support each other in what we call liberal democracy, they can also be separated. So Viktor Orban in Hungary had announced a number of years ago that he’s trying to build not a liberal democracy, but an illiberal democracy, meaning he’s democratically legitimated—he just won a big election, he got a pretty good majority in parliament, so there’s no question that he’s democratically legitimate, but he’s undermining the independent press in Hungary, he’s undermining the court system, he’s fostering a system of corrupt cronyism. All of that reflects the erosion of the rule of law. On the other hand, you can have a country like Singapore or maybe Imperial Germany in the 19th century that actually does have a strong rule of law. They respect property rights and permit individual freedoms, but they’re not democratic, they don’t hold elections.

I think that the reason I wrote about

liberalism being under threat rather than democracy is that these days, almost nobody contests the principle of democracy, that the people’s will should be sovereign. Even the Chinese— MILLER: Even Putin claims democratic [legitimacy]. FUKUYAMA: He pays homage hypocritically to democracy by holding fake elections, but he still holds them. And the Chinese Communist Party say they represent the true democracy, because they’re really representing the will of the Chinese people. But people don’t like liberalism in the first instance, and they attack those legal constraints. That’s what every populist in the world—Modi in India, Orban in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey, and our Donald Trump here in the United States—[did; they] all get elected, and the first thing they do with that mandate is to try to undermine the rule of law. That’s why I think that it’s really liberalism that’s the first victim. Now once you undermine the rule of law, then you can go after democracy, which is what you’re now seeing. In Hungary itself, there’s a lot of gerrymandering; in our country, something similar is going to happen. Federal judges are not going to stand in the way of election manipulation; then Republicans are going to manipulate elections. So the two of them are related, but they’re not identical. MILLER: I want to get into the critiques of our illiberal right and left here. But first, what are the legitimate grievances with liberalism that is sort of undermining this liberal movement on each side and— FUKUYAMA: Before we get into that, can I tell you what’s good about liberalism? MILLER: OK, I was going to end with what’s good, but we can start with what’s good if you want to.

FUKUYAMA: Start with what’s good, because I think it’s kind of a baseline from which you can then measure what’s not so good. I really think there’s three issues, very simply. There’s a pragmatic issue, there is a moral issue and there’s an economic issue.

The pragmatic issue is very simple. It’s a way of dealing with diversity in a diverse society. If you have a system that stresses tolerance for people that have different opinions from yourself, then it’s a way of managing violent conflicts. It starts out managing the conflict between different types of Christians in the 19th and 20th centuries. It’s an antidote to out-of-control nationalism. And in that respect, it’s very good; if you are coming out of two big world wars that have destroyed European civilization, liberalism looks pretty good to you. Or if you’re living under a communist dictatorship, having the freedom to come and go and speak your mind looks pretty good. So that’s pragmatic.

The second is moral, because liberalism is really about human choice. I think that it’s something that is pretty universal among human beings. They don’t like to be ordered around. They like to be able to decide what they’re going to do in life, who they’re going to marry, where they’re going to live; these basic freedoms. But it’s more than that, because going all the way back to the book of Genesis, what makes human beings uniquely human in that Judeo-Christian tradition is their capacity for moral choice. They can choose right or wrong, and that elevates them above the rest of nature. So by protecting the ability to choose, liberalism protects this fundamental human quality, and that’s what makes liberals think that all human beings are actually equal, because we may differ by skin color, intelligence, height, all sorts of things, but we all are moral creatures underneath.

Final thing is economics, because liberalism protects property rights and freedom to transact. So it’s historically been associated with prosperity, with modern economic growth and the like.

So I just want to say it’s important to hit the good points [about classical liberalism].

MILLER: Before you had the critique.

FUKUYAMA: We’ve been getting a lot of critiques lately.

MILLER: OK, that’s fair. I want to one up you actually then; let’s start about the positives of liberalism, because you sort of expressed toward the end of the book that one of the critiques of liberalism is the sense that it doesn’t foster a sense of community and that that’s optional. But as I was reading that, I was thinking myself, is that really true?

Your second point, this moral component, this component that everyone has this individual dignity when put together into a broad, diverse society, I think there is this sort of communal sense, right? Maybe we don’t agree on every specific thing. Maybe our backgrounds aren’t exactly the same. But we have this one thing in common, which is that we all want to flourish and that we all want everybody to succeed.

I’m just imagining here in San Francisco, you’re sitting in Dolores Park on a Sunday afternoon like I was doing on Sunday. And there’s all kinds of people, all races. And I think everybody in that park does feel like there’s some communal, some connective tissue. We’ve all chosen to be here in this free country. So I wonder sometimes why advocates of liberalism aren’t that good at making the case for the communal nature.

FUKUYAMA: I think the problem is that it’s not one community, it’s many communities. So liberal societies produce a very variegated and healthy and vigorous civil society. But there are people doing all sorts of things. They’re environmentalists, they’re feminists, trade unionists, stamp collectors. There’s all sorts of people, and that is an aspect of our human freedom to be able to join with other people voluntarily to pursue passions and interests that we share. But I think that for many people, that’s not enough. They would like to actually see a stronger sense of a broader community where people share more than just these hobbies and kind of interests, but religious views or a sense of national purpose. I actually do think you can see that in Ukraine right now. I mean, you’ve got—

MILLER: This is where I was going.

FUKUYAMA: You got this unbelievable degree of national unity right now. So something like a quarter million Ukrainians that had been living in other parts of Europe have actually gone back to Ukraine after the war started so that they could fight on behalf of their country. That degree of civic spiritedness and engagement is certainly not—even in our country, I think it’s deteriorated. I remember reading Dean Acheson’s autobiography many years ago when I was a graduate student. World War I broke out when he was an undergrad at Yale. Every member of his Yale class volunteered to join the U.S. Army at that point and then went off to Europe. Now, can you imagine the members of the Yale undergraduate class answering this—

MILLER: We don’t need zoomer slander here, OK? [Laughter.] Who knows what the threat would be from the Gen Z crowd at Yale?

But I like your own challenge on that point a little bit, though. I absolutely hear what you’re saying about the national fervor of what’s happening in Ukraine. But I think that there has been a sort of reanimation of kind of a pan-Western unity behind Ukraine. And you see this across Europe. Obviously, in some of the countries closer to Ukraine, there’s a security element. But in France, I don’t think that they’re that concerned that Russia’s going to march across Europe. I think [we] saw the rejection of the nationalist wing there. I think Ukraine played a big part of that in the recent French election.

FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: I just wanted to point out I’m wearing a baseball cap with the Ukrainian trident. I’m now going to take it off, although I realize that it’s actually quite helpful in shielding me from those bright lights— but just in politeness to The Commonwealth Club.

Here in America, speaking to my peer group, I see a lot of people who want to volunteer, they want to contribute, they want to help. Maybe they’re not flying to Ukraine, but there is this sort of sense that we might not share this nationalist or religious connection with Ukraine, but we do share something. It’s this connection of a free people.

FUKUYAMA: That’s absolutely right. In that respect, I think Ukraine has been really useful in reminding another generation that there are these kind of higher ideals that can bind the country together.

I want to make something really clear. I’m not in favor of just any old kind of national identity. The Hungarian kind or the Russian kind is really toxic because it is exclusive, aggressive, intolerant.

So if you’re going to have a national identity, I think it really has to be a national identity built around liberal values. So we have to take pride in the fact that we’re a free people. That’s what Americans used to say about themselves. You know—we’re a free people, and we’re proud of that freedom and we’re willing to fight for it.

And it has to be something that is equally accessible by the actual diversity of the people that live in your society. So you can’t, like Viktor Orban has, say Hungarian national identity is based on Hungarian ethnicity. That’s kind of what people on the right, the MAGA right, want to do in the United States. And that’s not the right kind of national identity.

But I do think that there has been a tendency of certain liberals taking seriously the universality of human equality to dislike the idea of national borders and the idea that we’re going to treat Americans differently from non-Americans. I think a lot of that has kind of conceded the patriotism issue to the right, where it shouldn’t be, because you’re absolutely right. There’s no reason liberal society can’t feel this sense of national pride.

MILLER: I agree with that. I wonder about that kind of critique of the left a little bit, because that is frustrating to me as sort of an immigrant to the left coalition now, having left my old party. That seems so natural at Republican events, that sort of patriotism. And I understand the concern of people on the left about overdoing it.

But I don’t know. I traveled to Brazil last month. I was there on vacation. I went to a festival; it was all these American bands and American brands and American fashion and really kind of the types of people that probably didn’t vote for Donald Trump. I’m thinking to myself, there is an American cultural identity that is healthy, that does embrace diversity, that is not revanchist. Right? And it does feel like sometimes the left is hesitant to sort of wave the American flag and say “This is all of us.” There are these elements that aren’t about throwing back to the ’50s.

FUKUYAMA: If you ever want to be imbued with that spirit, go to a naturalization ceremony. They’re very, very moving. In most European countries, it’s actually very hard to get naturalized, because they don’t want you to be a citizen. But in the United States, we typically have wanted immigrants to become citizens. [In U.S. naturalization ceremonies], the governor will show up. There’ll be a military color guard. Everybody will say the Pledge of Allegiance. And it’s a very, very moving ceremony. This is what I mean about a liberal national identity.

My former colleague and mentor Seymour Martin Lipset used to say that you can’t be unGerman or unJapanese, because those identities are basically racially based. But you can be accused of being unAmerican, because American identity had become detached from ethnicity or religion or race, and became a political thing that could be shared in terms of common love for the Constitution, rule of law, but also a broader culture and a lot of it was popular culture.

So you think what’s defined America in the 20th century? Well, the Great American Songbook, rock and roll, jazz, hip hop. All of these incredibly vigorous cultural forms that have really defined what it means to be an American. And even sports; like in all these World War II movies, there’s a Nazi infiltrator and you want to find out whether he’s a real American so you ask him—

MILLER: —who the Cowboys quarterback is. FUKUYAMA: But unfortunately, that’s deteriorating. And even in sports it’s become politicized. So there are some sports that are

red and some that are blue. And I think that those cultural icons, unfortunately, have seen some deterioration in recent years.

MILLER: I agree with that. So let’s take that just then for a moment into the right and left critiques of liberalism. And then we kind of pick apart what’s wrong with them.

FUKUYAMA: OK, so the right wing critique is exactly what I just outlined. But it’s not enough that you have a diverse civil society. They basically want to go back to an America that they imagined; for some of them, it’s a Christian America, for some, it’s a white America. A monoculture. I think this is kind of a fantasy, because in the 19th century, everyone may have been Christian, but the Protestants hated the Irish that were coming in and so on.

MILLER: And nobody told the Black people about the monoculture, I don’t think.

FUKUYAMA: And you know, and now you’ve got these conservative intellectuals like Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen and so forth that are toying with integralism, where you basically have a state religion that’s backed by the power of the state. That’s a kind of extreme version. But I think that hankering for that kind of deeply rooted national identity is one of the things that they don’t like about the current diverse America.

On the left, it’s pretty understandable; liberalism is based on the rule of law. It’s highly procedural, and therefore it’s very slow. Just to point out one glaring example: the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments after the Civil War, in theory, give African Americans equal juridical rights to white people. But for the next hundred years, you still had Jim Crow, and it’s only until the Civil Rights Movement that the legal segregation gets wiped away. And that’s pretty slow progress. It is progress, but it’s slow. And I think anyone interested in social justice wishes that it would be faster.

But you got a system that protects property rights and therefore you’re going to protect the rights of oligarchs and rich people as well as ordinary ones. And that’s a problem on the left. That’s the problem in their eyes.

MILLER: And so how are you seeing that left critique manifest?

FUKUYAMA: It’s not just the slowness of the system. It’s also a questioning of the liberal premise of “under the skin we’re all human beings,” because there’s a couple of versions of identity politics that have appeared as a redefinition of what it means to be a progressive. So one version of identity politics is actually just liberalism in a different form, where you have a marginalized group—African-Americans, women, gays and lesbians, so forth—that say “We’ve been excluded, we’re mistreated, we want to be treated equally.” So that’s a liberal understanding of identity. But there’s an illiberal one that says, you know, those identities are so essential to who we are that we deny the individualist premise; that’s the thing that you ought to look at first when you’re apportioning our resources or hiring people for jobs and so forth. And that’s the point at which it becomes potentially illiberal, because you’re judging people based on a group characteristic and you’re giving rights to groups rather than to individuals.

MILLER: I thought this was maybe the most interesting part of the book. It put some language around a problem that I’ve been having, because I’m gay and have a little Black daughter. So there are elements of identity politics that resonate with me, right? Like the representation elements, that it’s hard for my mom to go find my daughter a black ballerina toy. The representation would be nice. I see her looking at Black women [and] this is good. It’s something that I think does have value.

I wrote a lot about Pete [Buttigieg]’s candidacy, and I felt like people undermined how important that was. It’s kind of crazy to me. It didn’t even occur to me that I could get married when I was in college, and now a married gay man is running for president. That has to have an impact on college.

So I thought all of those elements of identity are good. At the same time, there’s this obvious pernicious element to identitarian politics, I think is causing some of the right-wing backlash. How do you kind of navigate that line well?

FUKUYAMA: So this is kind of the larger theme. So you ask me what’s wrong with liberalism? So we’re finally getting to that. [Laughter.] And I think that it’s not liberalism as a theory itself, but interpretations of liberalism that have been carried to extremes. One of them on the right has been the evolution of liberalism into what’s called neoliberalism. You know, the market is good, so 10 times as much market is going to be 10 times better. And the state is an obstacle to markets working efficiently, so let’s get rid of the state. That’s one of the things that’s led to the kind of inequality in the United States.

But on the left, you have a similar evolution where you say, well, autonomy is a good thing. Basically, all of us want to be free agents and want to be respected for that. But certain liberal thinkers want to carry that to say autonomy is the be-all and end-all of human life, and it doesn’t matter what you choose as long as you’ve chosen it. So it’s not just your ability to follow the rules as established by a religion or culture, but you’ve got to make up the rules yourself. And that in a way undermines every existing moral tradition that people have.

People actually don’t want to be completely autonomous free agents. You can’t, like [Friedrich] Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, just make up a new moral order. They actually want to live their lives according to orders that have been existent before them, that their ancestors practiced and so forth. There’s a version of liberalism that says, “No, no, you have to start from zero. You get to decide everything.”

MILLER: You get into this sort of tension in the book that you’re talking about now, this liberal value of individual rights. But then a critique of what you refer to as Rousseauian individualism, which is what you’re getting at now, where it goes too far. This idea that American culture has developed [to where it] has replaced some of those uniting values with individualist pursuits—I don’t know, self-care, yoga, the lived experience, kind of these cliches of modern life.

But what struck me is, OK, but when does that become problematic? At an individual level of somebody that wants to find community through these sort of self-care and pampering, is there anything that’s fundamentally wrong with that in a free society?

FUKUYAMA: No, it is just an aspect in a way of liberal choice. Where it does become dangerous, I think, is when it becomes a matter of public policy and a kind of formal way of distinguishing groups.

If you think of a liberal society not as a collection of free individuals, but a collection of sort of closed groups that are competing with one another, that becomes a very problematic sort of society. We have a lot of examples of that around the world. Political scientists call it associationalism.

As we speak, Lebanon is melting down, because it’s a very diverse society. But in Lebanon, you don’t act as an individual, you act as a member of a particular sect. And all the political positions are given out based on which sect—the speaker of the parliament, the president, they’re all given to different people.

That’s a very, very extreme example. But I think that to the extent that you can maintain a liberal order that is based on individuals rather than on formally recognized group rights, that’s a better way to proceed.