Plain English with Derek Thompson - Why the Bad Guys—in China, Russia, Iran, and the U.S.—Are Having a Terrible Winter

Episode Date: December 2, 2022

One year ago, we had Anne Applebaum on the podcast to talk about her essay, "The Bad Guys Are Winning." And I think you could have made an argument that this was the most important story in geopolitics. Across the world, the rise of authoritarianism—in Russia, China, Turkey, Venezuela, India, and even right here in the U.S. authoritarianism was ascendant. Illiberalism was rising. Anti-democratic forces were assembling. But at this very moment, the opposite narrative seems like it might just be the most important story in the world. The fall of the authoritarians. Look at China, where the ruler Xi Jinping's "zero-COVID" policy is sparking a wave of protests. Look at Russia, which is losing its war against Ukraine. Look at Iran, which is rife with protests for women’s rights. Today’s guest is Francis Fukuyama, the author of the very famous (and very misunderstood) book, 'The End of History and the Last Man.' In this episode we take a first-class tour of what’s happening in China, Russia, Iran, and the U.S., ending with some thoughts on the future of liberalism in America. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. You can find us on TikTok at www.tiktok.com/@plainenglish_ Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Francis Fukuyama Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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You can listen to This Blue Up on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. So I'm starting to think about what the most important stories of the year will be. How will we remember 2022, 5, 10, 100 years from now? One good place to start is to think about where we were one year ago. We had Anne Applebaum on the podcast to talk about her essay, The Bad Guys Are Winning. And I think you could make the argument that that was the most important story in geopolitics one year ago, that across the world you saw this ear. and spooky rise of authoritarianism. You saw it in Russia, in China, in Turkey, Venezuela, India,

and even here in the U.S., authoritarianism was ascendant. Illiberalism was rising, anti-democratic forces were assembling along the right wing of the Republican Party and along the western border of Ukraine. And this followed decades of what political scientists had already been calling a democratic recession, that is the number of democracies in the world was actually declining, and the quality of liberal democracies around the world was declining as well, as you saw these authoritarian populace on the rise in Europe, Asia, and again, right here in the U.S., whereas everybody listening knows an outgoing president told his followers that an election had been stolen out from under him and cheered from the White House as they invaded the capital to do a bunch of mischief.

So if you were to stop the clock at the beginning of 2022 or in the spring of 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, what would you say the most important story in geopolitics was? It was the rise of the authoritarian's. But at this very moment, today, in December of 22, I think the opposite narrative is the most important story in the world. The fall of the authoritarian's. What am I talking about? Well, look at China, where the ruler Xi Jinping and his zero COVID policy is sparking a wave of protests as that economy tumbles into a recession.

Look at Russia, which is losing a war to an opponent one quarter of its size. Look at Iran, which is suffering its own massive protests for women's rights. 30 years ago, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote a very famous, very misunderstood book. It's called The End of History and the Last Man. And many people took that title to mean that liberal democracy marked the final, ultimate, most successful system of government in world history.

Nothing else would supplant it as a clear global model. And every time some global authoritarian seemed to be on the come-up, It was guaranteed, guaranteed that someone would take to their blog, cable news, Twitter, whatever, and say, aha, Fukuyama is wrong. History isn't over. Liberal democracy hasn't won. The bad guys are winning. But maybe one of the most important stories, one of the most important lessons of 2022 is that in the biggest picture, Francis Fukuyama was right. There is something astonishingly resilient about liberal democracy.

You look at the current chaos in China and the current failure in Russia and the current protests in Iran and even the dismal performance of those crazy anti-democratic MAGA right-wingers in America. What you are seeing is, in fact, proof that Fukuyama's prophecy was right. Today's guest is Francis Fukuyama. In this episode, we travel the world. We take a first class tour of what's happening in China, Russia, Iran, and the U.S. We fold it into a brief history of democracy and authoritarianism in the 21st century, and we end with some thoughts on the future of liberalism in this country. It is a lot to pack in to 40 minutes, but damn did I learn a lot.

I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Francis Fukuyama, welcome to the podcast. Thanks very much for having me on. I want to start with your very famous and very misunderstood book, The End of History and The Last Man. I think it's absolutely fascinating how many people have not read your book who claim to know what this book is about because the title makes them feel something very strongly. So you'll sometimes see these essays that claim that you said

nothing will happen anymore after 1992, no more interesting stuff will occur, no more global conflicts or domestic turmoil. Let's just set the record straight at the top of the pod. In your own words, what was the thesis of this book? Well, I think the misunderstanding is a misunderstanding of the words in the title. So history does not mean events. It's history with a capital H. You could speak of this alternatively as development or modernization. It's the long-term progress of human societies. And end does not mean termination or cessation. It means goal or objective. And so the real question in the book, and by the way, the phrase, the end of history was not mine. It was that of the philosopher Hegel, who was the first historicist philosopher who posited

that there was something like a progressive history of mankind. And, you know, this idea was taken up by Karl Marx, who said there is history and there's an end of history, and that end of history will be a communist utopia. And so what I was arguing back, in 1989 was that I, too, believe that there was progress. There was this long-term historical process, but it wasn't leading to communism. It was leading to liberal democracy tied to a market economy. And that, you know, was what the argument was about. And I think that, you know, the real question that I was trying to pose is, is there a higher stage of history? You know, is there another form of society the way that communism was purported to be a higher stage of human civilization

that we can look forward to out there. And I would say that, you know, 30 years after that original article, more than 30 years, I don't see one. So in that sense, I still, you know, believe that, you know, the historical trends are pointing in the direction of liberal democracy. So it's an evolutionary argument. Like the same. The same. way that, you know, whatever, the egg turned into a larva, which turns into a chrysalis, which turns into a butterfly. The butterfly does not turn into anything else. The butterfly doesn't turn into a grasshopper and it doesn't turn into a monkey. The butterfly is the end of that evolutionary process. And you were similarly arguing that the end of the evolution of development systems that went

through feudalism and went through all of these different forms of capitalism tied maybe to totalitarianism or other kinds of political economies, that we had reached the end of that process with liberal democracy. Yeah, I mean, that's right. I would actually state it in a somewhat less strong form. I didn't see an alternative that would make me think that this evolutionary process

was going to continue beyond liberal democracy, but I was open to the possibility that that's the case. But, you know, I still honestly don't see it. I don't think we're all evolving towards a Chinese-style system. or Iranian-style system, certainly not a Russian type of system. So in that sense, I think that, you know, the absence of competitors leaves us stuck with liberal democracy as really the only realistic alternative for modern society.

And this is a thesis that because the title was so strong, the end of history, people have been consistently trying to overturn it and show that it's wrong. So the book comes out in the early 1990s. This is a period of jubilation about the prospect of liberal democracy. It's the end of the Cold War. Liberal democracy seems to have triumphed against communism. But then in the last few decades, since the turn of the 21st century, we've had what some people call a democratic recession.

According to the VDEM project and other organizations that try to measure the state of democracy around the world, authoritarianism has been rising, not just in Asia, but throughout the globe. Why do you think, by various measures, it has been a rough century so far for liberal democracy? Well, actually, I think the shift came in about 2008 around the time of the U.S. subprime financial crisis, which in a way represented the peak of this period of American hegemony in world politics and in the global economy and the like. and the recession has really kicked in in the, you know, whatever, 16, 17 years since then. I think that there are a lot of causes for this.

I think that, you know, it's, first of all, unnatural that the world be so unbalanced with one hegemonic power, and so you've had the growth of China and Russia and other places that have different models. And I think that liberal democracy was also interpreted in ways that, in a way, undermined its own legitimacy. So, for example, I don't think that the kind of, quote-unquote, neoliberal policies that were

pursued from the Reagan administration onwards that emphasized, you know, pretty much unconstrained free markets is necessarily the implication of, you know, classical liberalism. And yet many people interpreted it that way because of the retreat of the state deregulation, privatization. You had the growth of a lot of inequality. And that started to pile up. And I think actually one of the reasons that the turnaround occurred in 2008 was because of that financial crisis, which was the direct result of deregulating financial markets in the United States and Europe and other places that really destabilized the system and then led to a political de-legitimation of a market economy and democracy. And then, you know, it had a big social impact as well because a lot of working class people

in rich countries were affected by the outsourcing of jobs to China, to Vietnam, to other parts of the developing world. And I think all of that growing inequality and the fact that many people had been left out of the economic growth in that period, laid the ground for the rise of populism, which is democratic in the sense that it represents popular will, but it's not necessarily liberal, that populist leaders were elected like Donald Trump or Modi in India or Orban in Hungary who said, well, I was legitimately elected and the people want me to make them great again. and here's a court, here's a journalist that's preventing me from doing this, and I'm going to overpower them.

And so I think that was one of the origins of the kind of populist nationalism that we've seen in many countries around the world in the last decade. So we're racing a bit through the 21st century, but basically you have this bright period of unipolar hegemony of the United States between about 1992 and 2008, where liberal democracy doesn't seem to have any kind of backsliding. It is clearly sort of dominating as a model for the world. But after the global financial crisis, you start to see cracks in the edifice. In the U.S., the legacy of neoliberalism is discredited around the world. Populist movements are surging. You mentioned India, China, Hungary.

Let's take us to the beginning of 2022, because this is really where things come to a head. And it seems like this spring, the thesis that liberal democracy is going to be the end, the goal of history, is really coming in for a beating. Russia invades Ukraine. Seems at some points to be really, really close to conquering its neighbor, getting close to Kiev. People start to worry, including you, I believe, that if Ukraine falls, maybe Russia will continue to expand its empire. It could emboldened China to swing in. into Taiwan and try to conquer that, that liberal neighbor. Tell me what you were thinking. Yeah, well, I mean, even short of, even short of a Taiwan invasion, I think that, you know, China looked like it had mastered the COVID crisis that everybody in the Western world was suffering under COVID, but the Chinese seemed to be doing very well. And both Russia and China were putting out a narrative that said that Western liberal democracy was obsolete.

elite was a declining, you know, form of government and that they represented the future. To everything that you said, I think that the other big dark cloud on the horizon was what was going on in the United States, because on January 6, 2021, you had an effort by an outgoing president to stay in office illegally. He basically was provoking an insurrection against the United States to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, which was unprecedented in American history. And, you know, the Republican Party that he represented, instead of rejecting this as a completely undemocratic stunt, began to coalesce behind him. So I think it's that combination of, you know, surging populism at home and abroad and rising authoritarian government that made things look very

dark in the winter of 21-22. Yeah, so this is like a story that I'm beginning to tell myself, sort of based on your analysis, is that there were three crises in the last 15 years that liberal democracies seemed to fail. Liberal democracy seemed to fail the financial crisis. It was a global financial crash, but it started in the U.S. It started in the heart of liberal democracy. There was a health crisis.

There was a global pandemic. And who seemed, at least by the numbers, which I didn't quite believe, but the numbers of the numbers, who seemed to be doing the best of any country in the world, it was China. It was not a liberal democracy. It was an authoritarian Chinese, the Communist Chinese party. And then there was this political crisis that at least the Republican Party failed by falling in line behind a wannabe authoritarian rather than standing up and saying, no, it is insane. to call for people to march down the street and clap in the Oval Office while they invade the Capitol to theoretically overturn an election. And so there's this moment in the spring of 2022 where liberalism and liberal democracy seems to have failed this three-part, these three crises. What I find so

interesting now, and the reason why I wanted to have you on the show, is that I think we're in a moment today, maybe six months after things looked really, really dark for liberal democracy. We're in a moment today where it feels like cracks are starting to show not in the edifice of the U.S., but rather in the edifices of these authoritarian. China, Russia, and Iran. So I want to go one, two, three. Let's start with China. It can be hard to see clearly what's happening there because the government's control

of media and the Internet is so strong. the gist seems to be that over the last few days, over the last week, Chinese protests have exploded. The population is frustrated by severe COVID lockdowns and the country's COVID-zero policy. People have stormed the streets. They're posting videos, their protests. Frank, why do you think this is happening now? Well, look, let's back up a little bit. I'll get to China, but, you know, I think that this really gets to the heart of, you know, the argument I was trying to make back in 1989 or 91, which is that, you know, there's a big superiority to a liberal democratic political system over an authoritarian one. You know, one of the problems with authoritarianism

is that it tends to concentrate power in the hands of one single individual. And over time, no matter how smart that individual is, it's almost inevitable that they're going to start making mistakes. And when you don't have checks and balances, when your policies don't have to be vetted by, you know, the people or legislators or courts or other institutions, the likelihood that you're going to make a big mistake goes up. And then I think the second issue really is one of legitimacy. Once again, if you don't put yourself up for election, if there's no mechanism by which you can be held accountable, and you start making these big mistakes, people are going to say, why do we need this person, you know, running the country? And I think that that's a weakness

that's shared by all of the countries that you mentioned. Now, when you get into the specific Chinese case, that one-man rule is really evident and the bad downsides of it. You know, one of the things about the older form of Chinese authoritarianism prior to the rise of Xi Jinping, was that you had collective leadership, at least within the standing committee of the Politburo. There are seven members, and they pretty much have to argue among themselves and arrive at some kind of consensus for any new policy change. But Xi Jinping has systematically dismantled that system, making himself really the only decision-maker in the Chinese system, to the point where nobody in the standing committee can really question.

his authority, you may have seen at the 20th Party Congress his humiliation of Hu Jintao, his immediate predecessor as the president of China, who was, you know, just pretty brutally escorted out of the room just to show that, you know, you can't stand against Xi Jinping. So he has engaged in a policy that for a while looked good, but now it's turning out to be really disastrous, which is zero COVID. So, you know, I think the- And let me pause you there, because this is the question that I think I get more than just about any other when I talk to friends or sources about China, which is why is this country pursuing a zero-COVID policy?

What is your understanding of the logic or reasoning behind zero-COVID? Well, I think there are several things involved. The first is that China has been unwilling to import any effective Western vaccines. they develop their own vaccine, which only has about a 50% effectiveness rate. And it's turning out that a lot of elderly Chinese are resisting getting even that vaccine. And so, you know, they actually are going to be in a lot of trouble if they simply let COVID rip. Because they have kept it at bay for such a long time, nobody has contracted COVID and then recovered from, I mean, you know, around me at Stanford, everybody I know has gotten COVID. I've gotten COVID, you know, my wife has gotten COVID.

And so there's just, you know, part of the reason that everybody can go to the World Cup and enjoy, you know, being out in the stands with everybody else is that there's this herd immunity that's developed in most countries that have gone through it. But China has not. And so if they relax no zero COVID, they're going to have a big problem. They're going to have the same problems that Italy or the United States had early on in the crisis where their hospitals are going to. or ran out of capacity. They've got a much weaker health care system in any event than most Western societies do. And, you know, they may, I mean, some estimates say that as many as a million or two million elderly Chinese could die if that disease gets out. And so they've kind of trapped themselves into a policy that looked very, very good. You know, they only had about 5,000

COVID deaths compared to like a million in the United States. But as time has gone, on, you know, it looks less and less good. And the big, the really big impact is economic. You know, I think at the moment, like a third of the Chinese population is under some form of lockdown. It's hit, you know, like last year, Shanghai was closed for a couple of months. I mean, one of their most important economic hubs, nobody could go to work. And, you know, furthermore, there's no prospect of this ever ending. At least in the West, people could say, well, you know, another six months or another year, but by then we'll have vaccines and we can, you know, start to go out and go to restaurants and go shopping and this sort of thing. But with

China, it's just not clear what their path out of this is. And so, you know, they're really in a very tight spot because, and, you know, and so I guess the final thing to say is that, This is the problem with one-man rule. You know, this policy is very much associated with Xi Jinping. And it's just hard for him to admit, okay, I was wrong, because he's been trying to create this cult of personality around himself that says that he's the wise leader, you know, that Chinese people should be grateful that they've got such a terrific, you know,

person running the country. And if he says that this disastrous policy is actually my fault and we've got to reverse it, it's going to undercut his authority pretty substantially. So I think that's why they developed the policy, but that's also why they're stuck with it right now. I'm very curious to know what you think is going to happen now, because there are some people who compare the protests that we're seeing to the Tiananmen Square protests

from several decades ago. But after those protests, China liberalized its economy and had explosive growth for the next few decades. And so one could make the argument, and maybe it's the wrong argument, but one could make the argument that they squashed the protests in a brutal way,

but then made further protests less likely by liberalizing the economy in such a way that dramatically raised living standards. And so you had the opposite of, say, Shanghai being shut down and no one can go to work. Instead, Shanghai was growing faster than any city in the world

and was getting richer faster than almost any city in the world. China, at the moment, it seems to me, doesn't have quite the same option. They're dealing not with the possibility of extraordinary catch-up growth, but rather with decelerated growth. They might be in a recession right now.

They've hobbled their tech sector. They've enforced all sorts of money-losing farming policies on their agricultural sector. They really are in a tough place economically in addition to the zero-COVID policy, in addition to the protest and response to the zero-COVID policy. What is your outlook on China in the next five years as she tries to negotiate all this? It's not very promising.

I think their economic model is really run out of steam. You know, for a couple of decades, they had double-digit economic growth year after year, no recessions. And then in the last five years or so, that rate of growth slowed to about five or six percent. Today they claim it's like around, you know, a little over three percent, but nobody believes. that, and they actually could, as you said, be in a recession of negative growth. And they made huge mistakes. I mean, you know, quite frankly, I didn't think I would end up saying this, but there's still a communist country in many ways, you know, where the state is actually in control of all the commanding heights of the economy. And they've made these mandates,

which are really, you know, don't make any sense. They've way overbuilt housing. They were pouring 50% of GDP into investment, most of which was going into apartment buildings, condos that basically had no demand. You know, if you go on YouTube and you type in Chinese buildings being blown up, you'll see one video after another where, you know, these 25, 30-story apartment building complexes with a dozen buildings are all being dynamited because they basically wasted all these resources building them. there's no demand for them. So, yes, you're absolutely right. You know, the Chinese will be lucky to eke out two, three percent growth over the next few years, and unemployment is going to be a

big problem for them in a way that it hasn't been before. So that's why I think that the model, the entire model, is really in a significant amount of trouble. COVID has accelerated and sharpen that crisis, but I don't think that that's really all there is to it. There are many other things that are working against them. Let's move on to Russia. And actually, it's the same, it's exact same theme that you mentioned earlier, which is that you have this leader who has entirely isolated himself from the possibility of being influenced by something like a Politburo. He is entirely ruling the country by himself. It seems like even some of the military leaders didn't even know he was planning on invading one of his largest neighbors in Europe.

And quoting from a piece that you wrote in the Atlantic, quote, far from demonstrating its greatness and recovering its empire, Russia has become a global object of ridicule and will endure further humiliations at the hands of Ukraine in the coming weeks. The entire Russian military position in the south of Ukraine is likely to collapse, and the Ukrainians have a real chance of liberating the Crimean Peninsula for the first time since 2014. End quote. Do you still think that things are going that badly for Russia? Yeah, well, they definitely are. You know, they are running out of things. They had over 3,000 tanks at the start of the war compared to Germany and France, each of whom have, you know, only

300 each. And they've lost, you know, maybe 80% of that tank inventory. They're down to just a few tanks themselves. And the manpower problem is very severe. They're scraping the bottom of the barrel. They're going to ethnic minorities. They're releasing, you know, hundreds of convicts from prison to put them on the front lines. And then they started this mobilization on September 21st, where they've just pulled, you know, young men off the streets, sometimes old men, sometimes disabled people and they've just thrown them into this horrible maw of Ukrainian power, where already thousands of them have been killed or wounded. And so I think that they're in a very tough spot. I do think that the Ukrainians will make further gains as time goes on. Right now, I think we're

in a kind of consolidation phase, and people are waiting for the ground to freeze so that they can move their vehicles a little bit better. But I do think that over the winter, you're going to see the Russians thrown out of the rest of Kerosan Oblast, probably out of Jauporizia Oblast, and that puts Crimea, the whole of the Crimean Peninsula in range of their artillery. And finally, I want to bring in Iran. Iran, as you've noticed, and many have noticed, has been rocked by weeks of protest following the death of Masa Amini at the hands of morality police. This country is in terrible shape. Tell us about the similarities that you see between, you've already brought out between China and Russia, sort of the fact that authoritarian leaders that isolate themselves from influence can sometimes

create policies that incur extraordinary backlash. Are we also seeing that in Iran? Well, sure. And then in Iran, you've got this gender element that. isn't quite as prominent in the other two cases where, you know, so Iran is a society where a lot of people, young people are being educated, given higher educations, but women make up 60 to 70% of all college graduates in that country, right? So you have this growing pool of well-educated women that are being asked to subordinate themselves in this medieval social system where men have to make all the decisions, not just men, but this small circle of elderly men. And I think that that was the fuse that was lit, you know, when Masa Amini was killed, that, you know, people just aren't

going to take it anymore. At this point, it's been two months since that happened. There's been a horrific crackdown on protesters with thousands jailed and many hundreds killed. And yet, you know, they keep happening because people can't take it anymore. Now, in Iran's case, this comes on top of several other crises that have been brewing for some time. There's a water crisis. There's a banking crisis. There's an environmental crisis. And there's a zero economic growth crisis, a jobs crisis. So, you know, there's plenty of dry tinder for an explosion prior to this. And I think this, you know, death in custody was really just the spark that lit this. And I think that it's just going to be hard for the regime to continue to rule in the way that it has been in the face of this kind of anger.

So you put all these things together. You have China sputtering. You have Russia sputtering. You have all of these problems, complex intertwining problems in Iran. I finally want to bring in the U.S. because even as all of this is happening in some of the largest authoritarian governments around the world, the U.S. holds this midterm election where the American electorate has the opportunity to decisively defeat the most radical anti-democratic slice of the GOP. These Republicans who say that the 2020 election was a hoax and who are often trying to bring in a new set of state secretaries who have failed to not to the Constitution,

but to President Trump. And almost to a person, those members of the most radical anti-democratic slice of the GOP lose their election. And so as I'm looking at all of this, the cracks of the edifices that are appearing in authoritarianism abroad

and the cracks in the edifice of domestic authoritarian instincts, like it almost makes me wonder, like, I'm not a full hegelian, I don't believe there's like a spirit that shapes world events, but it is hard to see all these things happening at the same time

and think that it is mere, randomness. Do you think it's mere randomness, or do you think there's a reason it's all happening at once? It may be a little bit of just luck that all of these things have been timed in a similar way, but they are connected in certain respects. For example, Putin believes pretty clearly that a Republican electoral victory, either in the last election or coming up in 2024, is really his biggest ticket to success in Ukraine. With every successive aid vote in Congress, the number of Republicans voting against aid for Ukraine has increased.

And I think that if the Republicans had actually pulled off a red wave in November 2022 with, you know, I don't know, a majority of 50, 60 seats in the House, it would have been very hard to keep military aid to Ukraine going. Because with every vote on aid, the number of Republicans voting against it has increased, and that means that the MAGA wing would have looked like it's on a role. Donald Trump clearly does not like Ukraine. He prefers Russia. And the fact that that bubble was punctured is really good for Ukraine.

that option of using American kind of right-wing politics to undermine the will of the United States to aid another democracy. That really threat has been beaten back. So there is that connection. Whether the defeat of authoritarian government, I mean, nobody on the left or the right really admires China all that much. but there's definitely admiration for Putin. In fact, there's just this video that's been released after Nick Fuentes had dinner with Donald Trump, an earlier video where... Nick Fuentes is the little young wannabe Nazi,

or at least want to be anti-Semite, who recently had dinner with Yeh and Donald Trump. Right. So in one of his rallies, you know, he starts saying Putin, Putin, Putin, and everybody, you know, breaks into a cheer. And so there's definitely a pro-Putuzzi. wing of the MAGO movement that, you know, ties together in one attractive bundle, you know, anti-Semitism, fascism, authoritarianism, you know, belief in, I mean, a kind of dislike of American democracy. And so I think that the defeat of their like-minded friend in Moscow

can only discredit people like that and make that alternative, you know, it always was a pretty fringe one, but it was one that looked like it could become more mainstream in the United States. And I think any momentum in that direction has now, you know, been stopped, fortunately. There's a couple interesting intersections, I suppose, between these stories I was thinking of as you were talking. It's not just that if Trump had won in 2020, he would not have helped Ukraine. And so if the, one of the authoritarian populist had won the American election in 2020, then the actual authoritarian dictator in Russia would have had a much better chance of actually conquering Ukraine or at least keeping the Dunbos because there's no way we would have been sending these billions and billions

of dollars to Ukraine again and again and again. I guess that's part one. Part two is that if she in China were a little bit maybe less proud and more rational, he would have imported the Western M RNA vaccines earlier, he would have mandated the vaccination of Chinese seniors faster. China would not have to do a zero COVID policy to protect its elderly and general population, which means that its overall growth rate would be higher, which means, and maybe I'm getting too far over my skis here, gas prices would be higher. Global demand for gas prices would be higher. And if the price for gas were 50 cents higher, I truly believe that Democrats would have lost the 2022 election in an absolute landslide because I think the relationship between gas prices

and incumbent voting is that strong. I want to close on some of your writing and some of your thinking about the U.S. specifically and about the war over liberalism in the U.S. specifically. We've talked a little bit about some of the threats that liberalism faces from what most people recognize to be the right. But you also believe that liberalism faces certain threats from the left as well. What are those? Well, I think that on the far left, there's been a growing intolerance that's been fueled by the rise of identity politics. There's a liberal version of identity politics where identity is simply used as a mobilization tool to demand equal treatment for marginalized groups,

African-Americans, women, gays and lesbians, and so forth. But there's another version of identity politics that says that identity is the most essential thing that you can know about someone, much more so than any individual characteristics they've got. And therefore, people need to be seen not as individuals, but as members of groups. And I think that's a profoundly illiberal view. And it also goes together with an attack on other liberal principles, like freedom of speech, like due process, where the need to bolster the dignity of, you know, marginalized groups is so important as a matter of social justice that

you're willing to override freedom of speech by canceling or, you know, deplatforming people that don't support your particular position. So I think that's really the kind of cultural threat that we face. I think, you know, the big argument, I think, is not that this, whether it exists or not, And I think the real argument is how widespread it is and how dangerous it is, because many people on the left tend to say, well, yeah, there's these cases that are exaggerated by the right-wing media and it makes it seem like an epidemic. I think my position is kind of in between. I do think that it does certainly get, you know, every time some college professor says some really stupid thing or journal rejects them, you know, an article for one of these reasons, it does get played up endlessly in the media. But there is a real problem.

And being at a university, you can see that, that there's a lot of self-censorship on a lot of topics. People are not willing to say certain things that they know to be true because they simply don't want to become the object of a lot of attention from kind of left-wing students. And so I do think that that's had a negative impact on academic freedom. I am not going to sucker you into a conversation about cancel culture when I invited you on the show to talk about China and Iran and Russia. I am, though, interested in your analysis of this movement as a historian, no matter where you are on the ideological spectrum. And the truth is, you know, I don't really, I don't podcast that often about sort of cancel culture, social justice, woke. But I'm interested in it as almost anthropologically.

I'm interested in the fact that clearly, since 2014, 2015, or thereabouts, something has changed in the way that Americans talk about census categories, men versus women, non-whites versus whites, gender identity, sexual identity. Something is clearly changed. I'm interested why you think the change happened when it happened. Why do you think this period around, say, 2014, seemed to mark the emergence of this new identitarian movement? I don't have a good answer to that.

I don't think that this is completely new. I'm old enough to remember the 1980s. In 1987, Jesse Jackson came to Stanford. and led a march, you know, saying, hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go. And, you know, there's a big movement, you know, to make race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, you know, central civil rights issues and to, you know, in effect, counsel people that didn't go along with that, with that agenda. And then in the 1990s, you know, people turn their attention to getting jobs. you had the internet boom, people wanted to get rich. They weren't, you know, students at least were not as politicized,

but then these issues became much more sensitive again in the 2010s. And, you know, towards, you know, as you said, after about 2015, there were obvious triggers that really inspired this. So the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police in Minneapolis was a huge trigger that, you know, got many people upset and, you know, rightly so. And the tendency of these movements, which I experienced in these earlier years, is to, you know, generalize from specific injustices that you see being done to other people to focusing on perceived injustices right in front of you, you know, and going after the closest authority figure that you can find, which is usually a professor or a university administrator or, you know, something of that sort.

So I do think that, you know, this also comes and goes in waves. And it's interesting, we're kind of replaying a lot of our earlier history on a very rapid scale. So George Floyd leads to defund the police and then, you know, the actual defunding of police in Seattle and Portland and San Francisco and so forth. Then crime rates rise and then there's a big backlash, conservative backlash. That's exactly what happened in the 1960s. You know, after the civil rights movement, you had the riots in Detroit and Washington, other places. You have this big surge in crime because of this great sensitivity to police brutality. And then you had the election of Richard Nixon, you know, who wrote on a kind of anti-crime, you know,

hysteria way. I mean, it wasn't hysteria. There was a lot of crime going on. And, you know, it led to a conservative comeback. So I just think that we've been through this kind of cycle before. I hope it corrects itself. But, you know, maybe that's the nature of democratic politics that we, you know, we can't ever find the correct, you know, balance between these different goods of, you know, social order versus social justice. That's an interesting way to put it.

It's interesting because in thinking about all the various elements that make up what I'm right now calling the Identitarian Movement, there are some elements of it that strike me as examples of, you know, pure moral progress. So, for example, if in maybe the 1950s, someone who was for interracial marriage might have been called, might have seemed whatever woke was at the time, right? Because it was an unpopular position to be for interracial marriages. But you've seen extraordinary progress on that, on that point. Extraordinary, what I would call unambiguous moral progress. I think you could say the same for something like the rights of gay marriage. I think you could say the same for acceptance of transgender people and transsexuality. You could say even the same for

something that's more material, like the wage gap between male and female earners that do the same work in the same year, 20s, 30s, 40s. And then there's other issues like the question of, you know, is it racist to teach Western civilization or something? It seems more cyclical. Like you have, it has an outburst in the 80s. It sort of dies away. It has an outburst in the 90s. Political correctness was a buzz term in the 1990s. No one really talks about it in those terms anymore.

It goes away a little bit. It comes out again like a cicada, except now it's called wokeness rather than political correctness. And then maybe it'll dissipate again and just come back. So I don't even know if there's a question here. It's more of just a statement that some of the things within this movement are more like linear progress, more like sort of the Higalian Fukuyaman theory of history. And some of them seem more cyclical, maybe just the way that we freak out about certain things.

I agree with that. All right. Well, let's end on agreement. Frank, I really appreciate it. And hope to have you back in the pod very soon. Great. Thanks very much for having me. Thank you for listening.

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