Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He was a researcher at the RAND Corporation and served as the deputy director in the State Department’s policy planning staff. His most recent book is “Liberalism and its Discontents”.
Can you define liberalism in simple terms?
The core of classic liberalism is based on several assertions. Firstly, the universality of human dignity. This is based on the human capacity for moral choice. It is why liberal thinkers believe in universal human rights: this argues that no matter what country you live in as a human being, you still are entitled to a society respecting your basic rights. Namely: the right to believe, to talk, to action, and to speech.
Individualism is also fundamentally important to liberal thinking. This has to do with the fact that each of us is a moral agent. We can voluntarily be members of groups, be sociable, or work together in civil society. But those associations really ought to be voluntary and not coerced. Liberalism also believes there is an objective world outside of our subjective consciousness. Finally, as long as you have a rule of law that limits the ability of governments to violate those basic human rights, you have a liberal society.
“Liberalism and its Discontents” looks at moments when liberalism has been contested historically. Could you give some examples?
There has been a constant fight between liberalism and its alternatives. The first alternative is theocratic states. This is where an official religion is defended and promoted by the state. That battle was largely won by liberals over the course of the 19th century. But then liberalism was challenged by various forms of nationalism, which said there were fixed national identities, usually based on some presumed biological characteristic. This challenge on the liberal order in Europe was the long-term origin of the two world wars.
History has shown when the world tries alternatives to liberalism, it then experiences a great deal of violence. This is really what gave rise to the liberal institutions that were put in place in 1945, after the Second World War. They helped shape the political conditions that allowed for the European Union that came later. Right now, people take liberalism for granted. That is problematic because people assume that the world has always been stable and peaceful. They are setting their sights instead on other objectives. About forms of identity, for example. But this has brought about a return to a rise in nationalism.
You also write about “parallel distortions of liberalism” on both the right and the left.
On the right, there was the rise of so-called “neoliberalism” in the 1980s and 90s. Essentially this was an extreme version of market ideology, where there was great hostility to the state. It was represented by Chicago School economists like Milton Friedman, and politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The result was a very prosperous, globalised economy. But there were some downsides. The benefits were not shared, which increased inequality. This created the grounds for the populist upsurge that we saw in the 2010s.
You often champion the benefits of market economies. What is your relationship to neoliberalism?
You cannot have a successful economy without a market economy. A central planned economy doesn’t work. That is pretty clear. But I was never a neoliberal. In fact, if you look at what I’ve written over the last 20 years, it’s all about how critical the state is for long term political stability. The Origins of Political Order (2011) and Political Order and Political Decay (2014) argue that you cannot have a modern developed society when you do not have a strong state. During the 1970s, however, many modern economies were overregulated by the state. It got appropriately dialled back. This happened in the airlines industry, for example, which saw transportation costs fall dramatically.
But it also created economic instability.
Yes. Unlike the real economy, finance is much more streamlined, and it produces a lot more externalities than, say, manufacturing does. [In 1999] US Congress passed The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which basically undermined the Glass Steagall regulatory regime, and allowed the emergence of these very large universal banks who were directly tied to the 2008 subprime crisis, because they were allowed to take undue risks. When the global financial services firm Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008, it basically froze the entire financial system. So that’s an example of over-deregulation that led to some very bad consequences.
What about the distortion of liberalism on the left?
On the left there has been a redefinition of what inequality meant. The 20th-century understanding of inequality was very much defined in class terms. This then shifted to one that was based on a much narrower identity. Many marginalised groups – racial minorities, immigrants, women, gays and lesbians, for instance – argued that they simply weren’t being treated as equally as liberalism had promised. But in some quarters that developed into a principled attack on liberalism. This view said: our membership in these fixed groups is really the most essential characteristic about us. They argue that society should be about defending groups, rather than individuals. When liberalism finds itself [doing nothing but defending] that kind of identity politics, it becomes illiberal.
Has the left become too preoccupied with political correctness?
Many progressives have indeed abandoned basic liberal values. One extremely important value of liberal thought is freedom of speech. You now have certain cases where progressives want to cancel speakers, get them fired from their jobs, or have professors removed from their positions in universities for simply expressing an opinion, which should be debatable . . . This then starts to convince conservatives that they are facing a palpable enemy on the left, leading to a further polarisation of the existing society.
What do you make of former president Donald Trump’s challenge to the liberal system in the US?
There were a lot of things that Trump wanted to do that he couldn’t because of the checks and balances [in the US system]. He wanted to have a ban on all Muslims coming into the US, which was immediately struck down by the courts. He wanted to build this border wall, along the Mexican border, which he never got close to completing. He wanted to invalidate Obama’s healthcare plan and he couldn’t do that. But the biggest threat that he posed was [his attempt] to overturn the 2020 election. Ultimately, though, there were enough officials who were able to put principle above their loyalty to Trump. The problem we now face in the US is that the Republican Party has embraced the effort to overturn the election, instead of repudiating it.
Why do you think liberal values need to be “articulated and celebrated once again”, as you put it?
Liberalism is still an extremely powerful idea. Right now, it’s going through one of these cyclical ups and downs. One reason I wrote Liberalism and its Discontents is to remind people why liberalism has been an important doctrine governing various factors in society, [and that it] allows for an expansion of freedom. Liberalism also has an important economic virtue, through its protection of property rights. Just because we are going through a hard period right now politically [in the world] that doesn’t mean liberalism is dead, discredited, or that it has been overtaken by some alternative political ideology.
This piece is from the New Humanist autumn 2022 edition. Subscribe here.
