good afternoon everyone welcome back to the 2024 mccain conference here at the u.s. naval academy in annapolis

maryland. i am jeffrey macris deputy director of the stockdale and it's a great privilege to welcome another distinguished scholar. doctors francis fukuyama the senior fellow at stanford university's friedman institute for international and a faculty member of the center for democracy development of rule of law. he's the director of dorsey master in international policy professor by courtesy of political science. dr. fukuyama has written widely on issues of development and international politics. his 1992 book the end of history and the last man has appeared i2 over 20 foreign translations. his latest book is entitled liberalism. francis fukuyama received his va from cornell university and a ph.d. from harvard in political science but it's a great honor to welcome to

annapolis francis fukuyama. [applause] i guess it's appropriate in the sense of liberalism, there he is okay. it will be an interesting counterpoint. i consider -- excuse me i had a little motorcycle accident on tuesday and still feeling the effects of out sofi stop and grimace a little bit you'll understand why. inin any event i consider mysela classical liberal. it's important adjective putting classical in front of liberal because i think there has been an evolution of

liberalism in certain directions that are not necessarily implied in liberalism and i think most of the complaints about liberalism actually have to do with the extensions of liberalismhe rathr than a doctrine so let me begin with a definition of what i regard as liberalism. liberals believe in the universal a quality of human dignity. that is to say liberals do not believe that there's a certain group of human beings a certain class that has superior dignity to other groups and that dignity is something that needs to be protected by the rule of law that limitsf the ability of states to impinge on the rights of those individuals and that depends on things like constitutions, checks and balances that again our efforts to limit the power of the state.

now that distinguishes liberalism and something like a theocracy based on a single s religious doctrine and it's also different from nationalism takes one ethnic group or race and places that at a higher dignity to otherhe people. liberalism nationstates that have limited territory of jurisdiction and we can talk aboutis that later. it's divided into nationstates within the confines and liberalism asserts. they are basically three arguments that you can make in a row of liberalism. one is aer pragmatic one and the second is economic. let me go over those.

the pragmatic argument stems from the origin, the historical origin of liberalism. liberalism appeared in the middle of the 17th century as a result of a european wars of religion. after the protestant reformation european roughly the next 150 years fighting each other. something like a third of the population of central europe died in the 30-year war a very bloody conflict and to think at the end of that period a lot of european thinkers decided that they needed to lower the temperature of politics such that politics would not be around a central definition of the good life. they c were competing definitios of the good life and liberal thinkers argued the state ought neutral with regard to it and that means the central liberal virtue is toleration.

you're going to lure the horizons of politics in order to preserve life itself so people wouldn't kill each other over the kinds of sectarian differences that animated european politics in previous generations. it's a means of governing over diversity.iv the reason you want a liberal society as societies are diverse religiously ethnically racially in very many ways in liberalism as a way to allow those different groups to live next to each other peacefully. the moral justification for liberalism really have to do with the protection of human autonomy and ability of human beings to exercise choice. i think that this ultimately has religious roots. if you go back to the book of genesis, adam and even are

instructed not to eat from the of the tree the knowledge of good and and disobeyed god and were kicked out of the garden of eden and thereafter human beings have a kind of intermediate moral status. they are not god and they don't have dignity they are also different than nature in the sense that they can sin in the fact that adam and eve made the wrong choice is in a way which characterizes the moral core of the human being and understand the difference between right and wrong. they oftentimes make the wrong choice but that makes them different than the rest of nature and ever since then liberalna societies have said tt human beings basically want to have that fundamental freedom, who to marry and where to live and what occupation to pursue,

and that is a moral character that is fundamental to the dignity of human beings. if you ask almost any modern person and people use the word human dignity all the time and if you ask what constitutes human dignity and what grounds and i would say it's fundamentally the ability to make moral choices. the final argument really have to do with economics because among theco fundamental rights that liberal regimes protect us the right to own private property, the right to transact, all protected by the rule of law that respects those property rights, protects the ability to transact and to make economic transactions. if you look historically across different kinds of societies the richest societies have always been potentially liberal ones that have protected property rights and that have a

fundamental rule of law that creates the institutional framework within which a modern market economy can arise. this is true even in a place like china. when china opened up to the world in 1978 he gave up central planning. it began to allow ordinary citizens to an effect on private property to achieve the results of p their labor in china begano grow. it quadrupled its output in the next four years after the household responsibilities act was passed that allowed peasants to keep the surplus from their labor. in other words they deduced it into what had been the centrally planned system and that's the basis for china getting rich.

.. and it's a lot less liberal since the rise of xi jinping in 2013. but the prosperity of modern china is their adoption of a liberal understanding of property rights. i have not examines the economic miracle that they did. this is simply the latest in a whole series of economic success stories. beginning with the netherlands, britain, other liberal societies were the pioneers would be first the commercial and then the revolutions because the ability to innovate and provide incentives to citizens to enrich themselves. it has produced a wealthy society. so those of the basic arguments in favor that i think are still

very important. and necessary to keep in mind as of the question is why has liberalism come under attack as it has for both the right and the left? i wouldn't say most, but a surprising number of my students they do not describe themselves as a liberals for they feel liberal society has committed to many economic injustices, inequalities and liberal are too law at corrupting those but there's also a critique that comes from the right that such happy with the fact t that liberalism actually doesn't stop aib common goal for the whole society and tolerate different views of the good and that is religiously diverse, religious diversity and the like. i would say that the sharpest criticisms are not what i regard

the core of classical liberalism, that assertion of the universal dignity of human beings it really has to do with extensions of liberal ideas into realms where they seize to make sense and they have counterproductive consequences there's a kind. of symmetry because these extensions are both on the right and on the left. we begin with the ones on the right. it has to do with what's generally refer todaya neo liberalism. it is not capitalism per se. for some people, neoliberalism is a cynicism and much more restrictive definition that has to do withas the extension of market principles that is associated with economists like milton friedman, chicago school,

counterproductive. it hurt economic efficiency and they havee argued for at across the board removal of the state from economic life. we society this period with politicians, ronald reagan margaret thatcher, ronald reagan, famously said, the scariest words he's ever were from the government. for many europeans culture historyy where the state became the enemy, overregulated disincentivized and the impact of this -- well, we have to be fair about this. neo liberalism taken to a global

level, output between the 1970's and early 2000's that created trade system that worked that way it should. comparative advantage and you're able to trade, you can expand markets very dramatically and everybody gets rich. this is what happened in that period is what the trade theorists tended to under emphasize was not everybody in your society got rich as a result of this process. and in particular low skilled people living at rich societies were likely to lose jobs and opportunities to similarly skilled people in poor countries. in 2001. the other thing was the whole

mantra about taking the state out of the economy was applied in the wrong places. particularly in the financial sector. the financial sector cannot regulate itself. markets do not culminate they do not end in self regulation that protects the interest of society as a whole. we saw this from the sub crime prices at 2008 when banks were allowed to take excessive risks this is the culmination of a whole series of financial crises that began with the sterling crisis in the early 1990s. in the asian financial crisis, argentina, russia, a whole series of economies and blew up because of the excessive movement of liquidity from one part of the world to another. and in a way the peoplehood forbade the theory of globalization of neoliberal economists in the united states

for a hoist on their own when it came to roost in that financial crisis. i think this has been well documented. the rising inequality that has occurred precisely in those countries that adopted these policies first, has exacerbated the feelings of class, conflict, and working-class people been left behind. that in some way is at the root of the rise of populism. the second decade of the 21st century. that is neoliberalism on the right. there's another distortion of liberalism on the left that you might label awoke liberalism. i think when a lot of people criticized liberalism they are not criticizing classical liberalism as i could find it.

they're criticizing awoke liberalism. there are several aspects of this transformation of the way the left thought about inequality. so what defines a progressive is you do worry about social economic inequality. want to per address that. in the 20th century that inequality was understood in broad class terms. a marxist believes the world is fundamentally divided between bourgeoisie and proletariat you need to equalize the outcomes might centralizing the memes of production and so forth in order to solve that problem. as we got to the end of the 20th century the sources of inequality came to be read to redefineda much narrower terms. it was no longer the inequality of big social groups are the proletarian but it came to center on narrower groups

defined by race, ethnicity, gender and eventually inks like sexual orientation. inequality was seen not as much necessarily as economic inequality but inequality of dignity for certain marginalized groups were not respectedthis tf focus mechanism for subsequent groups seeking social justice to

fall into the same category of rights that needed to be corrected and used the same techniques like instead of relying on legislators, relying on courts in order to help achieve those equal outcomes. it involved in arguments over this for the last several years ever since i wrote a book called identity, what's wrong with identity politics and i want to be clear about something. there is a form of identity politics and an illiberal form of identity politics. i have no problem with of the liberal form. i would say it goes something like this. people are treated as members of groups, they are marginalized as

members of groups. this is most true with african americans simply on the basis of their skin color did not have equal rights in the liberal society if you are part of a group that has been mistreated you have every right in the world to mobilize on the basis of your common identities that is the source of your mistreatment and you enter the political system and make demands to treat you equally. that is the essence of martin luther king's civil rights movement. i look forward to the day when little black children will be treated the same as little white children so that is the plea for a marginalized group that organizes on the basis of in identity category to basically demand equal rights to enter into that same liberal society.

and a liberal form is when that identity category becomes a centralized meaning that it's the most important thing anyone can know about you, your skin color, gender, sexual orientation and that membership in a group will trump anything you accomplish as an individual, that is an ill liberal form of identity politics and that's the part of the politics that i think becomes very problematic in a liberal society and you give out jobs, places and universities promotions and of alike simply on the basis of those identity categories that violates this fundamental liberal principle that we regard people in the society as individuals. we may judge them on their

individual characteristics and skills, talent, accumulated abilities and natural abilities. if you treat people simply as members of groups you are violating that underlining premise and that is ill liberal. there's a lot of ways that this can go in terms of the way people are treated. i think that there's a big controversy right now over things like cancel culture or woke culture but i would say in general, and i've argued of this this inmany different forms theg argument that i keep having is how broad and fundamental is this because a lot of conservatives would argue that we are living under a woke tyranny where every institution and the society is dominated by

these identity categories and if you violate the kind of politically correct attitude towards those categories, you're going to be canceled. from my point of view this is not the america i experienced. i think first of all these identity categories do apply to a certain relatively narrow set of issues related to civil rights and related to essentially race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation and the like and that we continue to enjoy liberal freedoms and almost every other regard so you can say whatever you want about president biden or a candidate donald trump and nobody is going to put you in jail. i think people think that we are living under a liberal tierney and ought to go live in a country like russia or china where you cannot make political

statements that contravene those by the authorities. so in that respect there is i think a hierarchy and certain priority of liberal rights of which things like freedom of speech, freedom of association, this ability to speak out on political issues is important and is being eroded by certain parts of the progressive left but i don't think that it is a general characteristic of the society as a whole but that is something that we can argue about. the other thing that has been going on does have to do with that second characteristic of liberalism that has to do with autonomy and the understanding of human autonomy this is the thing that gave human beings dignity in the eyes of god and had to do with of the ability to

make basic choices, but those choices were ones that determined not by human beings, but by god. they existed in a moral framework that they themselves did not invent and moral judgments of them would be made concerning the way they lived up to these imposed rules and that is the essence of let's say martin luther's basic christian freedom. it has expanded pretty relentlessly so that by the time at the end of the 19th century he creates this character who is free because not only does he have the ability to obey the law or not, he can make up the law himself and create the moral

framework and this is what leads to what is sometimes labeled expressive individualism where the individuality expands all the way to your ability to establish the rules under which you are living and obviously you can't have a society if this is the case because what is a society if shared rules that allow collective action that allow people to live peacefully with one another and if everybody gets to make up their own rules, that's not going to happen. this expansion of the realm of autonomy has been growing over time. some of it is actually abetted by changes in technology, so for example if you think about something like gender equality, a division of labor between men and women made sense in the

hunter gatherer society and in many respects industrial societies because the ability to do useful work depended on upper body strength and ability to lift heavy objects and this sort of thing, when you go through the kind of socioeconomic transitions that we have seen in particular to a postindustrial society in which majority of people doing useful work are not out there digging ditches or lifting big bales of cotton or steel bars but sitting in front of a computer for eight hours a day and naturally have a much larger place in the workforce so

they took place beginning in about the mid-1960s was the entry of hundreds of millions of women into the workforce and they already made these into postindustrial societies but now it's happening universally and in this case it is technology that has allowed women to occupy a superior place in the societies because quite frankly women are better at most jobs than men at a certain age. if you can give to a man or woman, they've got identical iq scores you're going to give them to the woman and she will be much more reliable and not to take stupid risks and so forth, so you have these growing shifts

in the nature of gender relations across every society that's undergone this kind of shift. i think that it's wrong to say this is simply an ideological, ideology was part of it into the belief in women's equality was something that complemented the shift in workplaces but it's also something that is fundamentally created by the technological nature of society that we have been living in a so that is the respect in which autonomy has been vetted by technology. i think the latest frontier battle has to do with human biology because when you think about something like assertions of gender fluidity that underlies a lot of the transgender activists agenda, it

wouldn't be possible without the kind of medical technologies that supposedly make this possible, so this is another set of developments that's changed the nature, the perceived nature of what liberalism represents and i think that one of the unfortunate things is that now there are many people in the world, antidemocratic, authoritarian willing to basically take woke liberalism as a substitute for liberalism itself. classical liberalism is all about political rights, the right of people to enter the political marketplace to speak out and mobilize but if you're listening to someone like victor or yvonne, it's all about lgbtq

rights and other is that element of liberalism, but in my view it is unjustified extension of the understanding of the fundamental understanding of classical liberalism to undermine the legitimacy of the liberal project as a whole and that is something to keep in mind next time you're here with the liberal authoritarian leaders criticizing liberalism and liberal societies. this is in fact what he has done. liberal democracy is a combination of liberal institutions on one hand with constitutional checks and balances and democracy meaning

free and fair elections and for the democratic part of the combination liberal democracy. once you attack the liberal party you can undermine the democratic part because you can change the rules under which they occur which also happened in hungary and you will never lose another by gerrymandering and so forth. this isn't based on the critique of classical liberalism but on a critique of certain woke liberalism. it is the easiest to reverse because it is simply based on policies and the united states today you've already seen a very

substantial walking back from neoliberalism and in the 19 '90s you had the washington consensus belief by every economist that you needed to deregulate and privatize. today few people believe that in that extreme and we've actually returned to the 1950s or 60s industrial policies made a huge comeback under the biden administration when the state is being used to promote a semi conductors, batteries, a whole lot of strategic technologies and those are things simply by changes in policy. it's harder to walk back woke liberalism in the sense that because it's embedded in a certain rights and autonomy, people are less willing to give it up but on the other hand i do

think that you already seen the scions of that if you mandate policies that are fundamentally unnatural, they are not going to stick. i will give you one little anecdote in support of this. there's an italian journalist who wrote this nice book last year's with the sullivan institute was a cult that existed in the upper west side of new york city that had a lot to do with artists and very well educated and creative people that were sucked into a cold that believed they were all very much on the left and they all believed the fundamental injustice was in the private

ownership of property of karl marx but the nuclear family and that unless you destroyed the nuclear family, you couldn't achieve a marxist egalitarian society. so in their upper west side hideouts actually tried to do this. they would take children away from their mothers and have them raised by somebody else because they thought the most evil person was going to be the mother who would become a dictator and set the model for dictatorship politically later on in life. it's a hard book to read because the personal costs this doctrine imposed on the cold members that lived in this cult was pretty unhappy children and warped individuals that came out of this movement and if you say what happened to it, wasn't this

the cutting edge of individual liberation. people are deeply unjust and unnatural simply is not true and i think that you get a kind of natural evolution back to a form of social relationship that makes sense both for individuals and often in terms of the darwinian underpinnings of selection and so forth and i think you're also seeing something of a reaction against certain forms of identity politics. the di was not controversial on many campuses and many

boardrooms. i don't know what's going to happen in these areas. these are the areas that drive conservatives crazy but the one thing i want to say is in a liberal society because you can make free choices and you can discuss things and deliberate over appropriate policies, nothing is ever permanent and if something really does not make sense like ripping children out of their mother's arms and having strangers raise them, it's not going to continue and there is going to be an adjustment that may take several years to occur but there is a self protective mechanism that applies to these kind of social changes. some of them because they are rooted very deeply in the changes of technology are not going to be reversed, so i think women in the workplace is something dictated by economic production today that you are

not going to see them simply becoming stay-at-home why his mother's as in previous generations. but others of them i think are much more voluntary and that in liberal societies we can discuss. i would like to defend why liberal societies into the kind of freedom and dignity is the most powerful argument but there's also a very powerful argument that has to do with the alternative and i think that part of the reason we are seeing the rise of these popular nationalist movements all over the world is liberalism has been

so successful with exceptions that produce 70 years of peace and prosperity in north america, europe, northeast asia, societies that have adopted this kind of liberal democracy, and i just think that it's a human characteristic you begin taking these types of times for granted. i had a lien where i said if you can't struggle against injustice then you're going to struggle against justice because what people want to do is struggle and have some higher horizon to struggle against and i think it's become too easy for young people to forget that they are living in one of the most prosperous societies with a greatest degree of opportunity. so what else is new. i want something more and that i think is one of the sources taking for granted these

benefits of liberalism that i just outlined. it's taking them for granted that has led a lot of people especially young people on the left and the right that it's not enough i want more, i want social justice or community, a stronger sense of bonds with fellow citizens and realistically if you look at the societies based on the stronger principles, it doesn't end well. one of the premier societies after its independence in the 1940s right now the nationalist party for one that is based on hindu religious ideology but there's 400 million muslims and christians and a lot of people that are not hindus,

so they are basically left out of the natural identity and that is deeply problematic in a society that has that kind of a history. i don't see how you can run a country like india except on liberal principles. let me see if you have any comments or questions. [applause] for the loss of trust so i would like to know do you look at the

measurement -- and it's taken a precipitous decline so that is one measurement. if you look at the struggles we are having with recruiting that is another indicator that this is no longer an institution people are anxious to join. what are your thoughts on that? >> there are several. across the board with domestic institutions but it's also true of a lot of countries outside of the u.s. where you've seen a similar loss in trust and i think it is due to several factors. the most important, and i think

is technology and the fact so much of our lives have moved online over the past or at least since about 2010, 2011. i think that permits people to live in what one of my colleagues labeled the spoke realities where you can believe things and believe they are empirically supported that are completely false but you are living in a universe where there are thousands, millions of people that kind of agree on the false premise. so have the republican party believes were more than half believes the 2020 election was stolen with a similar percentage they believe that vaccines were more harmful than helpful and i don't think this could have

existed in a pre- internet world in which certain elite institutions had credibility to filter that kind of information. of those of us that have been looking at this phenomenon since 2016 have always said social media, the internet is one of the sources of this and i always thought that it was one of like six different things, economic inequality, cultural conflicts, politicians and so forth. i now think that this is actually of those explanations probably the dominant one that in my mind is causing this lack of trust. when the internet was privatized everybody including myself said great this is going to democratize information and anyone can have access to any information they want. this is going to be profoundly good for democratic societies and it turned out that part of

that was right it did democratize information but good information there's the whole hierarchy of institutions that if wehad to add credibility to empirical factual information and those have been undermined by the ability of anyone to say anything they want on the internet, so that's one issue and the causality is very hard to distribute because there are lots of causes, economic inequality has led to this and managed to seal themselves off and a lot of the world around them that they helped create that causes resentment.

i would say that it's the technology factor that in my mind is central in existing institutions. >> i had a question in regards to that how can we absolve the modern democracies as well as trying to mitigate on the spreading of false information? right now you've got two choices in front of you either you can have the bigger internet platforms, so by the way at stanford we've been looking at this a long time we had the cyberpolicy center that was created and that has looked at

this content moderation. first of all you have to moderate content. there is so much garbage on the internet that if the platforms didn't do basic filtering we would have beheadings, violence, stuff nobody would want to see so there would be a basic function of acting as filters but the big problem comes in political speech because there's a big legitimacy problem with a for-profit company making big basic decisions and i don't think they got the right to do that. on the other hand you don't want the government to do that either. you don't want the government to set up a bureau that says this is factually true and this sort of thing. we came up with a solution i

chaired a group on platform scale three years ago where we came up with a concept that i solution to this problem which we call middle for basically, you know, what's the problem with these big platforms, like, you know, facebook twitter whatever it's called now, google. that's the fundamental problem. it's not censorship. it is a very powerful political tool that, you know, can be used for good for good or ill, so you don't want the government making those decisions and you don't want these big private companies to do that. our view was that the only way to i solve it is by competition and you wanted to create a layer

of outsourced content med ration companies where you could specify what kind of content you wanted to hear or see, so if you're doing amazon search, i only want to buy american, you're looking for political news. i want to hear about environment, i want to hear about the southern border and you would and the important is put the user in control of content moderation so the user can make basic decisions about what came across through facebook or x, whatever, now we actually maybe moving in the direction of something like that

because there's proliferation of platforms, all is necessary to have competition in this space so you've not relying on 3 gigantic platforms for the news. all of there's platforms can reach much broader audiences but you would be in control of what you saw and what other people saw and i think that's what's critical. what's critical is to reduce the scale of the content moderation and increase the diversity and hand back control to individual users and, you know, we got stuck because we didn't see an make model to make this liable but maybe it's just appearing, you know, maybe the market is just providing that itself.

>> something struck me, you said at one point that if something doesn't make sense it's not going to continue referring to -- >> it's probably not going topl continue. >> and i think obscured essay which patrick referred to earlier and you already made i think you made the claim or at least that your belief that liberalism makes sense and my question is basically this, could you make the case just play devil's advocate for yourself, make the case that ity doesn't and do so maybe in light of the case that you made against liberalism that consisted at least in some part

of the essay, suggestion that liberalism ends in boredom. is that still your view that boredom is the point of view which liberalism doesn't make sense or update that in light of subsequent events? >> well, as i was trying to explain liberalism makes sense. it wasn't make sense to a lot of people at every moment. >> but what is there considered argument. >> well, so as i said, there's an adjustment mechanism that has to happen where you tried different versions of liberalism so i think that's the experiment that we have been going through in terms of neoliberalism, woke liberalism and so forth and i think that there is a way of adjusting if these things really don't seem to be making sense or making people happier then, you

know, you are going to try something else and i think that's one of the virtues of liberalism. i do actually think that the boredom at the end of history is driving people towards right-wing populism -- sort of that combined with the fact that you can live in this online fantasy t world where you really completely disconnected with reality, you know, that like i said if you can struggle against real injustice, you struggle against justice. i think a lot of people are falling for. inpl europe, you know, you have all of these right-wingers that say we are living in the journey of the horrible european union. get real, european unions are bureaucrats that make annoying rules and you're living in a free society and you want to

have an enemy and something to struggle against and you turn into the monster that you're dealing with. >> go ahead. >> i was just going say it seems to me based on what you just said it's not simply boredom that's the problem butut the lak of seriousness of one's life and given that you've got no overarching moral purpose. >> in the original end of history i said desire for recognition is important. there are two types. you demand equal recognition to other people but where you want to be seen as greater and those two are intention because obviously if i'm recognized as superior then you're going to be recognized as inferior and, you know, liberal societies to neuter and put it into safe -- i

originally thought that donald trump would be satisfied by having all of the casinos and that would take care, unfortunately, that turned out not to be the case. but i think that there is the side of human nature that demands recognition but in a peaceful prosperous society you don't get it. maybe that's not enough, you know, for some people. [applause] >> our last panel of the day will take place in ten minutes. we'd ask you to get up, stretch your legs and come on back and we will conclude with a look at

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