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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now, the state of democracy through a 30-year lens, the lens of political scientist and philosopher and former state department official, Francis Fukuyama. As some of you know, Fukuyama had a burst of prominence in the early 1990s just after the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended with his book, The End of History and the Last Man, in which he foresaw liberal democracy and free-market economics, although regulated free markets, as where most of humanity was moving toward as providing the most self-determination and the most shared prosperity of any system people had come up with.

Maybe we were nearing the end of major ideological conflict in human history. Now, in fairness, Fukuyama has been misquoted frequently as to how far he went with that, but it was a big topic of conversation in the early '90s. Is this the end of history in terms of ideological conflict? What kinds of economies? What kinds of political systems? As we know, democracy has been in retreat in recent years in many countries.

Faith in capitalism has been shaken too, so what happened? Well, Francis Fukuyama has written a number of other books since 1990 and his latest is a big reckoning with the last 30 years. It's called Liberalism and Its Discontents. Francis Fukuyama is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Francis Fukuyama, thanks for coming on again. Welcome back to WNYC.

Francis Fukuyama: Thanks very much, Brian, for having me again.

Brian Lehrer: Would you like to first remind us of the real premise of The End of History and the Last Man and how you think it was misinterpreted in the lay press or elsewhere?

Francis Fukuyama: Well, sure. History in that title doesn't refer to events. It refers to something you might today call modernization or development. As societies develop, they seem to go through a progressive series of stages. The question is, where are they heading? My argument was that back in the 1980s, a number of people still believe the end of history would be communism. This is actually a Marxist idea that was articulated by many people on the left.

What I observed back in 1989 was it looked like we'll never going to get there. If there was an end of history, it was likely to be some form of liberal democracy coupled with a market economy. I think that in many respects, although you're absolutely right that we've had big setbacks in our global progress towards democracy, that it's not clear that there's an alternative endpoint that seems to be higher to liberal democracy in a way that communism asserted that it was higher.

Brian Lehrer: Let's get into some of the tough stuff. You address what you see as threats to liberal democracy from the right and also from the left, so let's take each one. From the right, too much denigration of the role of government in economic policy. You call it "neoliberalism." Why use a word that contains "liberal" to describe the threat to liberalism?

Francis Fukuyama: Well, classical liberalism believes in markets. It believes in property rights, the freedom to transact. Those are among the freedoms that classical liberalism protects. I think that those principles were extended in an unsustainable way, beginning in the 1980s and '90s. These were the Reagan-Thatcher revolutions in economic policy in which markets were seen as a solution to virtually every social dilemma and the state was denigrated.

The state's role was seen as simply an enemy of efficiency, an obstacle to economic growth. There was a big cutback in regulation in the role of states. I think that some of it was justified, but a lot of it went too far. You had an enormous growth of inequality as the global economy sought ever-lower labor costs. The deregulation produced a lot of instability culminating really in the financial crisis of 2008. As a result, we've now got populous movements on both the left and the right that resented this form of neoliberal as opposed to classical liberal economic policy.

Brian Lehrer: You worked in the Reagan administration if I'm not mistaken. Have you come to believe that his denigration of government as a regulator of capitalism contributed to the struggles of democracy or equality? I think you seem to say as much. I think you were a foreign policy official, not an economic official, but have your own views changed since you worked for the Reagan administration?

Francis Fukuyama: Sure. Even back in those days, I didn't buy into the kind of free-market absolutism of many people in that administration. I think it was certainly the case that the solution to the problems of the 1970s, that is to say more free markets, more deregulation, simply didn't work. The clearest case of this was what happened in the former Soviet Union when it fell apart.

This was the kind of height of neoliberal ideology. I think a lot of American economists simply didn't realize that you needed a state to uphold basic rule of law. When Russia privatized its state-owned industries, they were gobbled up by oligarchs. You had this very chaotic period. I think anyone living through that would realize that, actually, a transparent, impartial state is pretty necessary for any kind of capitalist economic development.

Brian Lehrer: I guess, no wonder, people on the left feel emboldened to go for more social democratic means like Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All and things like that that are fairly popular. We see how strong his Democratic primary for president campaigns were. That may not have gotten off the ground so much in 1996 or 2000, things like that, yes?

Francis Fukuyama: No, absolutely. Look, I think it's ridiculous that the United States is the only rich democracy that does not have a comprehensive, government-mandated system that allows everyone to have access to health insurance. It's a mark of this enduring American anti-statism that people on the right claim that something like Obamacare is socialism. I think it's kind of a necessary function of the state. I think that in my own thinking, a lot of the social democratic agenda was actually what kept liberalism going. Because if you have liberalism by itself, it produces a lot of inequality. Those really need to be mitigated by social policy that equalizes outcomes and shaves the sharp edges off of market competition.

Brian Lehrer: From the left or looking at the left, you're a critic of identity politics. I know you wrote a whole book about identity politics a few years ago and of what you call "critical theory." These days, people talk about critical race theory. I think that's a part of it, but we know that term gets abused. Where do you begin there?

Francis Fukuyama: Well, first of all, identity politics in my view has a good form and a bad form. The good form, I'm completely in line with. You have marginalized groups, African Americans, immigrants, women, gays and lesbians, and the like, who are excluded from mainstream society from its institutions. They don't have equal access to the courts. They don't get equal protection and so forth.

It is a liberal objective to have them fully included because liberals believe in the universal equality of human dignity. All human beings have a certain base dignity that needs to be respected and protected through a rule of law. In my view, that was really the point of Martin Luther King's civil rights movement, was to include African Americans in that broader liberal order.

However, there's a version of identity politics that's evolved over time that is not liberal that says that, basically, these fixed characteristics like our race, our ethnicity, our gender, our sexual orientation are the most essential things about us that what we are as individuals is less important and that, basically, the goods of society need to be distributed on the basis of those fixed characteristics. It's also been accompanied by attacks on other liberal pillars of a liberal order like tolerance.

There's clearly an intolerance on the part of many people on the progressive left, people that are more conservative, people that have religious views, and the like. I think that you get this attack in critical theory on liberalism itself where many critical theorists have said, "Well, actually, liberalism is just a cloak for patriarchy, for racial hierarchy." People that support a liberal order are basically following those agendas and not the equality agenda that they say they are. That, I think is wrong.

Brian Lehrer: What's the way around that? Because I think it's fair to say, tell me if you disagree, that identity politics in its modern form might spring from the frustration that members of marginalized groups have with the more universalist attempts to obtain more equal status, what you call the MLK approach of, "Just include us." For Black Americans, for example, here we are almost 60 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that Martin Luther King fought for.

The wealth and income disparities between Blacks and whites are much more stubborn and persistent than integrationists hope that they would be just by having universal non-discrimination standards, also police killings and maternal mortality, and other disparate outcomes. What's left as many people see it is group unity to fight the disparities in the name of the group. I think this is what critical race theory to some degree actually is. It says these universalist laws don't actually work well enough to bring people into marginalized groups up to equality. That's why things need to be fought for on the basis of, "Give our group its due." What's your reaction to that?

Francis Fukuyama: Well, I think that the substantive equality of outcomes that really should be what people desire in a liberal society is a completely legitimate objective. That's the point of social policy. That's why you want to give everybody access to health care and equal protection by the police. It's going to require compensatory policies that are targeted toward certain groups.

The issue really is when those kinds of policies end up being hardened and to the point that they begin to undermine other liberal principles. For example, in a lot of progressive areas, there's been this attack on the idea of meritocracy. This obviously happened in New York City. It happened in San Francisco, where there's an effort to close elite high schools that were based on standardized testing and old-fashioned academic performance in the name of racial equality.

I think that that gets you into very tricky waters because people are characterized. They are discriminated against based on these fixed characteristics, but they're also individuals. Not all individuals in a given established racial category does as well as other people in that category. Therefore, you need a system that does single out merit and reward it. That's the tricky thing is not allowing this awareness of these group disparities to undermine a basic appreciation of individual effort, ability, talent, and the like.

Brian Lehrer: Francis Fukuyama with us with his new book, Liberalism and Its Discontents. We can take some questions for him on the phones at 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Maybe some of you have been Francis Fukuyama readers for 30 years now since his seminal book. The End of History and the Last Man came out just after the fall of the Soviet Empire and the end of Cold War. He's taking stock of where we've been, including a lot of disappointments with what was going to happen with a democratic world and a mostly market-based world.

After that, too much optimism, perhaps, and just trying to take what, to him, is a clear-eyed view of why democracy is in retrenchment more in the world right now, for example. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. How do you explain the rise of Trump and modern white supremacy, the radicalism of the Republican base today from the demographic group that has had the most money in power if we look at essential attributes as you were calling them before? That's white men. White men are so angry.

Francis Fukuyama: Part of it, I think, is the explanation that's out there, which is that this was the dominant group that defined American national identity. They have been displaced by women, by other kinds of racial and ethnic minorities, and so they're resentful of that. I think that the hardcore of, let's say, the January 6th insurrectionist is composed of people like that. The problem is that over 70 million people voted for Donald Trump in the last election.

Not all 70 million of them were hardcore racists or xenophobes. I just know this from talking to a lot of my conservative friends. A lot of them couldn't stand Donald Trump. They understood the dangers of Trumpism, but they also didn't like a certain kind of liberal-- and "liberal" here, I'm using not in my sense of classical liberal but in the American sense of left-of-center, cultural disrespect for people that weren't part of that progressive movement.

Brian Lehrer: Right, but how does that connect with the future of democracy or the stability of this country's democracy as you see it? Because the polling suggests 70% of self-identified Republicans believe the big lie about the stolen election and would, therefore, go along with what is actually, potentially, the end of our Democratic electoral system as we've known it.

Francis Fukuyama: Oh, no. Look, absolutely, so there's a clear and present danger to American democracy based on that big lie. I think that of all the threats that we face, that's the single biggest one that we need to focus on. Unfortunately, it's very hard to get voters, including Democratic voters, to see that that's really the critical issue and not gas prices and inflation and baby formula and all of the other day-to-day concerns that are real concerns but, in the end, don't have that significance.

That's why it is extremely important that the Democrats retain power and don't allow this MAGA right to come back into power because it is going to be the end of American democracy. I just think that Democrats haven't been going about this terribly well because you don't win presidential elections in California and New York. You win them in a handful of swing states where you have to appeal to voters in a different way than you do in deep blue states. That's really the danger is that they're messing this up. They're missing an opportunity to actually stay in power that will have terrible consequences this November and in 2024.

Brian Lehrer: Then I guess we get into the tension, which we'll do with political reporters and other segments, between do you win in those states by motivating your base to turn out more or by appealing to independent swing voters? That's another show. Allan in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with Francis Fukuyama. Hello.

Allan: Good morning, [unintelligible 00:18:53]. I remember hearing sermons from our right-of-center Democratic rabbi back in the early '90s. He was very taken with your point of view about the inevitability or the seeming inevitability of the end of history with the triumph of democracy over communism. It seems to me that there's a level of triumphalism in the message, whether it was intended or not, that might have led to a very different result at the end of this triumph than the one we had with the Marshall Plan after World War II.

We had been in a far more violent fight with Japan and Germany, but we didn't create an atmosphere where the main message was, "We have triumphed over you and you are now to be treated as something less than human as we did in way of Germany after World War I." Did we not invite the kind of revenge syndrome from Putin by having that triumphalist tone? Do you think you would've nuanced or massaged your rhetoric a little bit to avoid that temptation on the part of--

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Allan. Francis Fukuyama?

Francis Fukuyama: Well, look, I think if you read my book or even the original article, you would see that that nuance is absolutely in there. The whole part of the book about Nietzsche's last man is all about the way in which human pridefulness is going to destabilize democracy in the long run because it's not going to satisfy this human thirst for recognition. I think that that's actually what's been happening.

I think on the policy issue that you've talked about, I absolutely do not believe that it was American triumphalism that has led to our current situation. Basically, this gets down to this argument over Putin's motives in the Ukraine war, his invasion of Ukraine, which, I think, have everything to do with his understanding of Russian national identity, that he felt the collapse of the Soviet Union was the biggest tragedy of the 20th century, and he wants to reverse that.

Really, the expansion of NATO that some people blame for the origins of the war was really driven not by NATO or by the United States and by any kind of triumphalism. It was driven by these Eastern European countries that had been held under communist dictatorships for decades. They were deathly afraid that this would happen again, the moment that Russia recovered its strength. In fact, that's exactly what's played out in the last few years.

Brian Lehrer: Is the retrenchment of democracy in this country and in Russia in your opinion, are they related to each other? Because, again, if we go back to 30 years and the end of history observations after the Cold War, one was triumphant and the other was completely delegitimized, and yet we have this happening in Russia and we have it happening here. Are they related?

Francis Fukuyama: Well, they're related in several ways. The MAGA right in the United States has become anti-liberal. They actually don't want to tolerate the actual diversity, especially ethnic and racial, that actually exists in the country. They actually joined forces with Russia because they also got a different attitude towards power. Liberalism is all about limiting power. You have a rule of law. You've got constitutional checks and balances so that executives can't just do whatever they want. That's the essence of classical liberalism.

I think both on the right in this country and in the case of Mr. Putin, they also don't like liberal constraints. They don't like the idea of a free press. They don't like congresses, legislatures telling presidents what to do. They don't like courts that stop them from doing certain things. I think this explains the affinity that Donald Trump himself has for Putin. He's never been able to say a single critical thing about Vladimir Putin because I think they share this underlying authoritarian instinct that you need to get rid of all these constraints so that you can just do what you want as a leader.

Brian Lehrer: Last word. If you had to start designing solutions with as much as you've studied democracy over the decades, do you advocate for things in this book in particular or are you doing your academic thing and just doing analysis?

Francis Fukuyama: Well, I stayed away from a raft of policy recommendations. I do that in other aspects of my career. Something like ranked-choice voting, I think, would be very helpful for the United States, but that's not what this book is about. I think that politics is downstream from culture, and I think that culture is downstream from ideas. That's really why I wrote the book, is that if you ask people what's great about living in a classical, liberal society, they wouldn't know what it is and they wouldn't be able to defend it.

I think that people need to be reminded about why it's better to live in a society that peacefully manages diversity, that promotes economic opportunity and entrepreneurship, and that recognizes the moral core of all of its citizens, why that's a better system than others. I think that's the initial work that has to be done, and there's a lot of filling in then about how that translates into actual things on the ground that are necessary to sustain an order like that.

Brian Lehrer: Francis Fukuyama's new book is Liberalism and Its Discontents. Thank you so much for sharing it with us.

Francis Fukuyama: Thanks for having me.

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