The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with Francis Fukuyama: Liberalism in a state of crisis

Episode Date: May 16, 2023

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Cold War marked a new era in world politics.  For many geopolitical experts, it was championed as the ascendancy of the western liberal world order over competing political ideologies. It was, as American political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously declared, “the end of history”  and the beginning of long term peace and prosperity. But that post-Soviet optimism did not last long. The past decade has seen a rise in authoritarian leadership, widespread distrust in liberal institutions, polarization on the left and right, and a new war being fought on European soil. On this episode of the Munk Debates Podcast, we’re joined by that same political scientist - Professor Francis Fukuyama - to talk about how the world has changed in 30 years, and whether liberal democracies around the world can withstand the strong forces that seek to dismantle them. Click here for more information about Francis Fukuyama’s latest book, Liberalism and its Discontents   The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/   Senior Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Editor: Kieran LynchBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When you're a journalist and people don't trust you, it's always your fault. These people need to be represented. They are Canadian. They deserve to have a voice and a seat at the table. It is time to go back to the office, and the time is now. Russia had reasons to be concerned. They had reasons to be fearful. We're at an absolute turning point in reproduction. This is the problem with realism. They just treat all countries the same. They don't distinguish between dictatorships and democracies. Hello, among the listeners, Rudyard Griffiths here, your host.

moderator, welcome to this, the latest in our continuing conversations, called the Monk Dialogues. The Monk Dialogues are in-depth questions and answers with some of the world's sharpest minds and brightest thinkers. We go deep into the big issues that are transforming our world and shaping our future on each and every monk dialogue. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, If you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall. Well, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Cold War marked a new era in world politics.

For many geopolitical experts, it was championed as a moment for the ascendancy of the liberal, international, political, and economic order. one where the post-Soviet countries embraced democratic principles and economic integration known as globalization swept the world. It was, as one prominent American political scientist famously characterized the end of history and the beginning of a long-term period of peace and prosperity. But that optimism did not last long. The last decade has seen a rise in authoritarian leadership widespread. and growing distrust of many of our key liberal institutions, the polarization of the public square, and now a new large-scale, destructive and disruptive war being fought in Europe for the first time since the Second World War. Today we're joined by that very same political scientists who prophetically claimed the end of history in the 1990s,

with a new book, a new take on the world as we know it today, 30 years later. He digs deep into the future of democracies, the future of our public square, and the values that we share in common as the West stands off against increasingly competitive and aggressive authoritarian regimes. That prophetic thinker is no other than Francis Fukuyama, and he joins the monk dialogues right now. Professor Fukuyama, welcome. Thanks very much for having me. Looking forward to this conversation. We've spoken together over a number of years about different events, topics, books that you've published that have captured the public's imagination. I thought I might begin with you just at a big picture level to try to kind of tap into your sense of the world as we receive it today.

Let me do that by asking you, what do you think that people right now are getting wrong about international relations, about how. the world works and what we should be paying attention to? Well, I don't know how many people are getting things wrong, but I think that one of the most troubling things that's been going on in global politics over the last 10, 15 years is really a global decline of democracy. Freedom House that publishes an annual Freedom in the World report that seeks to measure the level of democracy and the aggregate has said that that level has been declining for 17 straight years, it's manifest in a lot of ways.

I mean, part of it is the rise of these authoritarian powers like Russia and China. You've got reversals in places we thought were democratizing like Myanmar, Tunisia. And then you've got the rise of populism in the United States and other established democracies, where you assume that democracy was actually very well institutionalized. and safe, and yet there's been a lot of regression there. And so I think, you know, this is not something that people don't recognize, but they may not quite understand the extent of it. And they may also not realize how the international decline is related to the domestic decline. Excellent. Well, that's exactly where I want to go, because I think there's this assumption that democracy's biggest challengers, its so-called detractors or opponents, are really.

outside the country, they're international actors like Xi Jinping or Russians, Russia's Vladimir Putin. Let's find time to get to those two countries and the unique challenges that they represent. But I want to start with you with the internal picture. Where do you see the weaknesses of democracy today in the West? Are they institutional? Are they cultural? where do you kind of focus and locate the internal vulnerabilities of democracy as we experience it at this moment? Well, first of all, we need to do some definitions.

Democracy is a shorthand for liberal democracy. And this is a political system that has really two separate parallel components. The liberal part has to do with constraints on the ability of. of governments to interfere in the lives of their citizens. And it's based on a recognition of the equal dignity of all human beings that doesn't distinguish between national groups, genders, races, ethnicities, and so forth.

Democracy, strictly speaking, is different. It's related to the things like elections that try to make governments responsive and accountable to as large a proportion of the population as possible. And really, and this is what I wrote about in my book on liberalism and its discontents, the liberal part of liberal democracy is the part that's in the first instance under threat.

Because you have a lot of populist leaders like Modi in India, Victor Orban in Hungary, Erdogan and Turkey, and Donald Trump in the United States, who get elected more or less legitimately and then use that legitimacy to erode the liberal part of liberal democracy. That is to say they go after the rule of law, they try to stack courts,

they try to disable the media, basically attacking all of the checks and balances that a true liberal democracy should have built into restrict executive authority. Here's my plan to dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy from Washington corruption, once and for all, and corruption it is. First, I will immediately reissue my 2020 executive order restoring the president's authority to remove rogue bureaucrats, and I will wield that power very aggressively.

Second, we will clean out all of the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them. Once they've done that, then they can attack the Democratic part by gerrymandering or, you know, forbidding opponents to run and this sort of thing. But the real threat, I think, right now, is to the liberal part of liberal democracy. Well, let's talk about why that threat has emerged. Is it a sense of, I don't know, fatigue, a kind of cultural exhaustion with the not-unerrorism? demands that the the liberal part of liberal democracy asks of a citizenry we know what those some of those demands are many of us would find them essential you know some

knowledge of the issues and the society within which you live a sense of responsibility around you know the cornerstones of democratic good democratic practice rule following law obeying voting. Where's this coming from? This kind of lack of engagement, because I would think, Professor Fugamma, that some historical analysis going back a number of decades would suggest that the commitment to liberal democracy, the actual practice of liberal democracy, was more coherent, stronger, more widely shared in our society than it is today. Well, first of all, I think you've got a disarmament.

aggregate the threats to liberal democracy because some of them are coming from the left and some of them are coming from the right. And I think we need to talk about them separately because they have different sources. The populist nationalist threat from the right has gotten a lot of discussion, especially since 2016. And I think there are really two schools of thought. I mean, the first is a economic one that said that with the rise of, you know, what some have labeled neoliberal economics in the 1980s and 90s, you've created a globalized world that has seen increasing inequality. And a lot of people being left behind, you know, the aggregate growth has been extremely strong. Countries have gotten very much richer, but that's not applied to everybody.

and it's created a big divide between those that live in and bustling urban areas and those that don't that live in the countryside or in smaller towns and cities and the like. But there's also the cultural dimension which really has to do with several things. It's the more conservative values that people in the latter group tend to have compared to sort of cosmopolitan attitude by well-educated professionals in big cities. If you look at the United States, you know, the Democrats used to be the working class party, but now they've come to be dominated by urban professionals with good educations. And, you know, that reflects an economic divide, but it also represents a big cultural chasm

because, you know, these different groups have very different attitudes towards things like patriotism, the family, gender relations, and that sort of thing. And I think it's very hard to disentangle the economic and the cultural explanations because if you are in a part of the society that is declining in relative terms economically, you can easily interpret that as cultural decline. And you can blame it on things that are happening in the culture like immigration, which is why anti-immigration has been a consistent theme for all of the right-wing populist parties. But then, you know, that's different from the international geopolitical threat, and it's also different from the kind of threat to liberalism that is taking place on the left. When you look at the phenomenon, let's say, of Trump,

which was probably the most poignant kind of object lesson that liberal democracy has received recently in terms of the threat of populist politics, it seems. It seems to be a very important. It's seemed that part of the risk that Trump represented was institutional. That, yes, he created and led a movement that had these cultural aspects that you've just talked about. But the particular threat that he represented was the overturning of a duly conducted election. Good evening. I'd like to provide the American people with an update on our efforts to protect the

integrity of a very important 2020 election. If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us. To what extent are you concerned about the validity, the vitality of democratic institutions themselves? Because I think many of us simply take them for granted, we assume that they're as strong and coherent today as they were in the past and will be so in the future. What's your take on the liberal institutional structure or context, which are democratic societies here in the West, function within? Well, it's hard to generalize about democratic societies in general because some of them are much healthier than others.

I think for the most part, most European democracies are doing a lot. better than the United States is. In terms of the threat that Donald Trump posed, you know, it was a couple of different things. You know, he began by really assaulting many of the norms that had guided American politics. And it really began with this kind of relentless assault on the legacy media, you know, that this was all fake news, that they were biased, that they didn't care about ordinary Americans, and therefore couldn't be believed, you know, when they asserted factual information and so forth. But this accelerated, you know, in the course of his presidency. And then when he lost the 2020 election, you had this outright assault on probably the most sacred principle in any democracy,

which is a peaceful transfer of power based on a free and fair election. And he wasn't willing to accept this. And he did everything he could to try to overturn that result. Now, you know, you could say that the institutions held. He and his friends filed something like 70 lawsuits trying to contest the validity of various state elections, and he didn't win any of them. So in that respect, the rule of law remained fairly intact, and in the end, you know, Joe Biden became president and so forth.

But the problem is that he's convinced maybe a third of Americans at the 22nd. election was stolen. And ever since that point, he's been repeating the idea that our American institutions are deeply corrupt, that you can't believe any of the facts that you hear. He's fed into the whole conspiracy mindset that has left many of his followers and, you know, and I think many other Americans extremely distrustful about their own institutions. And so that's a legacy that is going to unfortunately outlive him. I want to ask you about some events that have happened since you

first came out with the hardcover version of liberalism and its discontents, the soft cover copy. Part of the reason we're talking today out in May and urge listeners to grab a copy because it's a thoughtful and considered reflection

on a topic that's vital for our collection. focus. One of the things that has happened since the publication of the book is the emergence of machine learning at a level and a capacity that I think has surprised many people, specifically in the instance of chat GPT4. Many people are hypothesizing, Professor Fukuyama, that this technology and the pace and scale with which it is iterating poses a threat. to liberal democracy, the manufacturing of fake news or disinformation at scale, the extent to which citizens will have an increasing difficulty in discerning what, in fact, is public civil

discourse and what is manufactured content, you know, directed and shaped and programmed by thinking machines. do you share a concern? I'd be interested just in your analysis of chat GPT4 and maybe even in the context of the fact that your country, the United States, will in 2024 have a presidential election where this technology looks like

it will be deployed at scale, largely unregulated by government. Well, first of all, I think you're putting together a lot of different technology which have different consequences under a general heading of AI or machine learning. And I think they're very different. I mean, you know, the first technology is simply social media. And basically we're talking about these three big platforms, Google, Facebook, and Twitter.

And that has obviously had a big impact in political discourse because it reduces attention spans, and speeds up and extends the scale of information, which could be good and oftentimes is, but also can be used, can be weaponized by people that want to build distrust in existing systems. And so you've had a deterioration of the common factual understanding of what's happening in the world,

things like whether vaccines are safe and effective, whether Joe Biden won the one, the 2020 election. I think 20, 30 years ago, you would have heard this kind of information on three big national networks, and there wouldn't have been any disagreement, but today anyone can say anything on these social media platforms, and therefore it's harder to develop, you know, people live in parallel information universes. A separate technology is the targeted advertising. I mean, that one, empirically, I'm not quite sure how important that's been, but certainly, you know, all the big platforms use that to get certain messages to certain,

you know, demographic groups. And it may not be able to sway elections, but it could certainly reinforce the kind of filter bubbles that people live in. Another kind of technology, which really does get more into AI and machine learning. is the surveillance technology that the Chinese have developed, where they are able to collect information, very detailed information, from smartphones, from sensors,

from, you know, health data that they've collected and use it to control populations. Now, this capability exists in the West, but it's really held by these big, platforms rather than by the government. And what makes the Chinese version so ominous is that the state clearly uses it to suppress political dissent and to basically steer people in a direction that they want to go. And that is a technology that they are exporting to many

developing countries that also want to have this ability to control their citizens. A technology that is coming over the horizon. And in fact, in many of the respects is already here, you know, are deep fakes in which it's possible to create a, you know, a simulacrum of someone's voice or a video image. And you can have a politician saying something that they never said. And it'll look very realistic. And I think probably within just a year or two, we're going to be in a situation where virtually any digital video or image or sound recording, you're not going to be able to authenticate it. You're not going to be able to tell whether this was something real. And when you think about the extent to which we trust,

you know, so-called photographic evidence, if that goes away, then you've got a big trust problem in general. Now, final different technology is chat GPT. I think that the fear of this thing is just crazy because I can see all sorts of ways in which this technology will actually increase, equality and you know be very beneficial because you know in a way it's it's simply like a spell checker it's a very sophisticated spell checker in the word processing program and I think it will probably be very useful not for high-end writing because you know the you know since it's simply regurgitating stuff that's already on the internet nobody's gonna trust it for factual information

you know when that is really important but on the other hand for writing writing ordinary things, you know, proposals, after action reports, accident, accounts of accidents, you know, thank you letters. You know, in that kind of situation, I think it could actually be an extremely useful technology that will allow a lot of people who are not good writers to actually do useful things in an information economy. So I think, you know, you can't put all this stuff in one basket. I think some of it is, you know, and by the way, in terms of it, you know, and in terms of

In terms of the deep fakes, how are you going to authenticate anything? Well, it may be that you actually need this AI technology to do that kind of authentication because it's only that kind of very sophisticated software that's going to be able to actually detect when an image has been altered or when the providence of a video is not what somebody claims it is. And so like all technologies, it creates problems, but in the end it may also be a a way of solving those problems. It might be our most important monk debate ever.

On June 22nd at Roy Thompson Hall will be convening two of the world's leading experts on artificial intelligence to debate the motion, be it resolved. AI research and development poses an existential risk. Be sure to attend this debate and listen and learn from Max Tagmark and Jan Lecun. Again, top expert. who know AI like few other people. They're going to share their thoughts on how AI will transform our workplace, our society, our democracy.

We'll cover it all the risks, the rewards of AI at this critical monk debate. For more information, go to our website, triple W monk debates.com. We do have tickets set aside for monk members. So grab yours now before this event sells out. We'll see you in Toronto on June 22nd. Second, for the monk debate on artificial intelligence. Just to push on this theme once more because it is just so topical and of the moment, one of the features of chat GPT4 is, in a sense, its ability to pass the Turing test,

that it can fool, for lack of a better expression, people into believing that they're interacting with a human as opposed to interacting with a machine. And we're already seeing applications of chat GPT4 where people are mirroring its text with voice and probably soon as you said video. I just want to try to understand a bit more what that could mean for the public arena within which traditionally civic or we would hope

civil debate happens to inform our liberal democratic values and institutions. As you say, if we're unable to distinguish using our census, which is in a sense all we have, what content has been fabricated by people with their own agendas and missions and, well, let's hope not, but likely nefarious intense versus content that is, in fact, the genuine output of fellow human beings, fellow citizens in a democracy. Isn't that a fairly kind of existential moment for the liberal Democratic West? Well, again, I think you have to distinguish between these technologies. I don't really see how ChatGPT is actually going to particularly scramble democratic discourse.

All it does is help people ride a little bit better and faster than they used to be able to. I think that, you know, the real problem is more in terms of these deep fakes where the authenticity of any particular digital image or video or sound bite is really not something that you can verify. And that, you know, obviously is going to be very threatening because I think, you know, our broad problem that has been exacerbated, by the rise of populism is a kind of universal distrust of everything, certainly of the legacy media, but institutions, governments, universities, things that had been authoritative sources of information have been questioned in the political arena.

And once you are able to doctor an image in a way that you can't really tell whether somebody has been manipulated it or you do a deep fake video, then obviously that distrust is going to get more severe. So yes, that's going to be a really big problem for everybody. And I think that's really why a lot of people now are, you know, urgently working on authentication technologies to come up with ways of actually verifying whether something, you know, is for real or not. Yeah, to direct listeners to, you know, fascinating experiment with chat, GP24, where a programmer created a hour-long podcast between Joe Rogan and Sam Altman of AI. Let's get weird, folks.

It's time to welcome our first guest to the show, and I've got to say this is a big one. We've got none other than the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, joining us today. Sam's been at the forefront of the AI industry for years, and it's an honor to have him on the show. So let's give a warm AI generated welcome to Sam Altman. How are you doing, Sam? I'm doing great, Joe. Thanks for having me on the show. Sam, this whole AI-generated podcast thing is pretty wild.

The problem was that it wasn't Joe Rogan talking to Sam Altman about chat GPT-4. It was chat GPT-4 simulating a conversation between the two people. outputted in voices that were really hard to discern in terms of was that Sam Altman's real voice or Joe Rogan's fascinating how quickly and how fast this is all coming. In the remaining moments, let's shift to the international scene because, you know, there could be an argument that COVID and the pandemic was particularly bad for authoritarian regimes, that they're more brittle, controlled, top-down structures kind of suffered under the pandemic. China, I think, in its lockdowns, a powerful case in point.

Do you think, Professor Fukuyama, that there's reason to be hopeful that we're kind of seeing the limits of authoritarianism in a world of increased complexity, rapid technological and social change? it's simply a better model liberal democracy in terms of its diffusion of power, its ability to manage complexity, its robustness compared to these more fragile, brittle authoritarian regimes like Russia, China. The list goes on and on. Well, I think there's a real problem with authoritarian decision making because, you know, really no leader has enough. information and knowledge to make, you know, good decisions. And you saw two cases, you know, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the zero COVID policy in China, where the policy really seemed to be the product of one person. You know, it wasn't even a matter of consultation within a

very narrow circle of advisors. It was simply, you know, the willful decision of the leader at the top. And it was very difficult for anybody around, around him to, you know, criticize or say, you know, maybe we ought to look for an alternative. And so in that respect, I think that there was a demonstration of the limits of authoritarian government. I mean, a liberal state, you know, has checks and balances. It requires people to consult, you know, more broadly. And because it limits power, it means that there are other parts of the system that can argue and push back against certain kinds of decisions. And so I think that that is a good demonstration of why it's better to live in a liberal democracy than in an authoritarian regime.

You also know, though, Professor Fukuyama, that there's at times a kind of thrall that comes over, of all places, Western democratic populaces who look at these authoritarian leaders and venerate them for their perceived power, their ability to, in a sense, assert what they would claim as some kind of national kind of will. How strong is that aspect of authoritarianism and how it plays out in the liberal democratic West, I think particularly of Europe,

and the extent to which populist leaders like Marie Lapin or Georgia Maloney of Italy, the list is long, kind of venerating these authoritarian governments precisely because of their more dictatorial, more controlled, more structured regimes. Where does that come from? And how lasting do you think it is and how potent do you think it is? Well, like I said, I think Europe is actually doing a lot better. Georgia Maloney is not an authoritarian leader. You know, she's completely playing by the rules.

She's actually been very supportive of Ukraine against Russia. Russian Astak is not simply an act of war or a localized conflict. It's an act against the territorial integrity over a sovereign nation in violation of the fundamental principle of the global order that enables the international community to thrive. And I think that the fear of her coming to power was really overdone. And it could be that if Marine Le Pen is actually elected down the road that she may turn out to be not so much of a threat as people have feared,

I think that the real threat was actually Donald Trump. I mean, he just gave an interview in which he praised Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong-un. He said all of them are brilliant, you know, they're much better than any, you know, Western leader. There's a lot of sympathy in conservative Republican circles now for people like Nayib Buckele, you know, the president of El Salvador, who's jailed something like 5% of the population, you know, gang members. and a real admiration for people that are, you know, tough and cruel. And I think that that's a really bad tendency because you really didn't have this kind of authoritarian envy on the part of American conservatives. You know, this is something that typically was much more common in Europe where you had this old status tradition, you know, people like Francisco Franco who wanted to use,

the military to control society. In Europe, that's virtually vanished. No politician is really calling for that anymore. But now we have Americans that seem to be toying with the idea that you need this kind of strong leadership. And the Republican Party has shifted from being a libertarian party that wanted to limit the impact of government on citizens' lives to a party that now wants to use the government to ban books

and dictate what professors can say and this sort of thing. So I think the much bigger problem is actually in the United States. We begin this conversation with you talking about the historical record, in a sense the decline of liberal democracy as measured by Freedom House and other kind of metrics and measurements that we can think about. As you kind of look to the decades ahead, do you see that decline as, continuing as part of a larger secular trend, could that decline, in fact, be reversed? And if it was, what would have to happen to turn this kind of trend around?

Well, what needs to happen is pretty simple. I mean, the liberals, meaning not liberals in the American sense, but people that want a liberal society need to win elections. You know, you've already seen a fair amount of pushback. You know, the Trump wing of the Republican Party did very poorly in the November 2020 election, which made it three elections in a row where Trump basically, you know, was a weight on the party. And a lot of people began saying, we're not going to win with this kind of an agenda. And I think that he's going to face a similar problem. I'm pretty sure at this point he is going to be the Republican nominee,

but he's going to have that baggage of being a loser when he runs in 2024. So in a democracy, that's how you solve these problems. You win elections. Now, how do you win elections? You mobilize, you know, you do the hard work of politics. You've got to communicate. You've got to have positions that are actually popular, and the Democrats haven't been doing that good a job at a lot of those things.

But I think, you know, fundamentally that's the solution. Now, if you're in an authoritarian situation like Russia or China, then it's different. You know, you need to resist in other ways, but certainly in a democracy, the way you get out of it is by getting power. And the way you get power is by winning an election. To what extent do you think some simple stuff like better civic education in schools? I don't know, should mandatory voting be something that should be copied from a successful liberal democracy like Australia, where it's been the tradition for many years? Is national public service, again, a longstanding tradition in some European societies, Israel, another country? In other words, should we be thinking more about the responsibilities of liberal democracy as opposed to the rights,

where, as we know, the conversation for the last generation or more has been much more weighted towards an expansion and a discussion of the rights that come with liberal democracy as opposed to the responsibilities. Well, sure. I think that most of those ideas are, you know, are good ones. I think that civic education is, you know, is really critical so that you understand, you know, your own society's history and, and basic political structures. In that case, I think actually it's the left, more than the right, that's been the enemy, although right now we're involved in this ridiculous fight over critical race theory, where you have a left-wing version that wants to assert that the United States has been racist from the get-go and that nothing's gotten better, and then you have a right that wants to whitewash,

you know, the whole history of slavery and Jim Crow and so forth. And that kind of points to the problem with a lot of these ideas, that in the United States, very few of them are actually going to work because of the existing polarization. So we couldn't agree right now on the content of a civic education because we don't agree on the nature of the or the narratives, you know, that we want to tell our children about, you know, where the country was and where it's going. Something like mandatory voting, I think would be a good idea, but it's absolutely going

to be opposed by the Republicans because they are. understand that that's, you know, bad for them. National service is a, you know, it's a good idea, but having been an advocate of that in the past, I know that there's actually bipartisan opposition to it. You know, a lot of people on the left actually don't like the idea that the government's going to force you to basically give up voluntarily, you know, a couple years of your life and people on the right don't want the government telling them, you know, what they can do. So, yeah, I think all of these are nice ideas, but I just think, and they'll work in other societies.

But I think in the United States right now, very few of them are actually going to be implementable. One of the characteristics of our liberal democracies today is their kind of heterogeneity, their diversity. Is liberal democracy and diversity endlessly reconcilable? Are there limits to the kind of differences that we could or should not simply tolerate, but welcome in our society? What I'm getting at is I think there's a view. I'd be curious as to your take on it, that the liberal democratic system is designed to create a kind of flourishing of human individuality. I guess through the course of this conversation, I've been thinking the extent to which maybe part of the challenges that liberal democracy faces right now is simply an increasingly

at times seemingly, especially in American politics, hopeless task of uniting just such disparate interests and points of view. And I, identities, cultural, sexual, racial. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. It's a big question to end on, but I just, if you have some thoughts to share, I know I would appreciate them. You know, ethnic and religious diversity is hard for any society to deal with, whether they're democratic or authoritarian. However, liberalism as a doctrine was really a doctrine invented to deal with diversity. and I think in many ways it's the only way that you can peacefully deal with highly diverse societies.

Liberalism originated in the middle of the 17th century after the European wars of religion, where following the Protestant Reformation, Europeans spent the next 150 years killing each other over things like the doctrine of transubstantiation. And so early liberals were the ones who said, let's agree not to agree on these final ends as defined by a particular religious doctrine, but simply value life itself and tolerate people that are different. And I think that that's the winning formula that liberalism incorporates. It's precisely designed to accommodate diversity because the primary liberal virtue is

tolerance. In the 19th and 20th century, the issues shifted from religious. religion to national identity. And again, Europeans fought, you know, terribly bloody wars over these questions of who should rule whom. And the whole liberal world order after 1945 was meant to deal with, you know, the kind of ethnic diversities that had triggered the two world wars. So liberalism is the solution to the problem of diversity. And I think the problem is that a lot of people aren't happy with, you know, with tolerance. You see this on the left where you get a lot of progressives that really do not want to even have to listen to people that diverge from their

beliefs. And you have, on the right, hankering after, you know, national identities, older national identities that are based on race, religion, ethnicity, and this sort of thing, which, and both of these, I think, are profoundly illiberal. So I think, as a lot of, I think, actually the solution, and well, let me just give you one final example, which is India. You can't imagine a more diverse society than India. It's divided religiously by sect, by caste, by language, and the founders of modern India, you know, created a liberal republic to accommodate that kind of diversity.

And now you have a leader, Prime Minister Modi, at the head of a Hindu nationalist party that wants to make Hinduism, you know, the single source of identity for this entire country of 1.4 billion people. And it is going to lead to a lot of conflict. And so I think that, again, there's a good logic for why you need liberalism in order to deal with the diversities of the sort that we have, especially in modern societies.

Well, thank you, Francis Fukuyama, for a far-ranging and insightful discussion today. I've learned so much, as I always do when we talk and read your book. So, again, we'll recommend to listeners and we'll put information in the show notes about how to get your hands on a copy of the paperback edition of liberalism and its discontents by Francis Fukuyama. So, Francis, thank you so much for coming on the program today and spending some time with the Muck Debates community. Okay, thank you very much for having me. Well, that wraps up today's dialogue.

I want to thank our guest, Francis Fukuyama, certainly gave us a lot to think about. If you have feedback or reflections on what you've just heard, please send us an email to podcast at monk debates.com. That's MUNK, Debateswithan S.com. And also a friendly reminder that if you're enjoying podcasts on geopolitics and world events, check out our weekly current affairs podcast at the Monk Debates. It's called Friday Focus. and yes, it comes out each and every Friday. We give you a deep dive into the big issues and ideas shaping the news in the week that was, hopefully leaving you with some new analysis and insights.

You can grab a complimentary episode of Friday Focus in the same podcast feed that you're listening to this program right now, or on our website. Simply go to www.munkdibates.com and click on Friday Focus in the top right navigation. Thank you for lending your time. and attention to our efforts to bring back the art of civil and substantive conversation, one dialogue at a time. I'm your host and moderator, Rudyard Griffiths. The Monk Debates are a project of the Auree and Peter and Melanie Monk charitable foundations. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gerwitz are the producers. Be sure to download and subscribe

wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five. star rating. Thank you again for listening.