Why I Can't Stop Thinking About 'The End of History'

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Love that. I'll have to get the app. New York Times Games subscribers get full access to all our games and features. Subscribe now at nytimes.com/games for a special offer. Friends, this is Fukyama's 1989 essay, The End of History.

Is remembered as this triumphless argument, harolding the permanent victory of liberal democracy. After it, anything major that happened in the world, you would get these people saying, well, I guess history didn't really end, did it.

“I remember this, particularly after 9/11, this week, of course, is the 25th anniversary”

of 9/11, but this was such a terrible misreading of Fukyama's argument, because if you

actually read his essay, and particularly if you read the book that came out of that essay, he is saying something very different. The book was called The End of History and the Lost Man, it was anything but triumphless. Liberal democracy might win Fukyama thought. It might become the way most states organize themselves, but it might win a top of cramped

and partial vision of a human soul, one that believed in our ability to consume, but had little room for our desire for recognition, for greatness, for daring, and no political system without room for those parts of ourselves would be stable for very long. You cannot build a good society, a top, a flawed vision of human nature.

My view is that very few books and politics are as insightful, or as important for understanding

where liberal democracy went wrong, why figures like Donald Trump keep rising and why the opposition to them seem so won and unspiring so often.

“So this is a book that I think needs to be cleared of a sin that didn't really commit,”

because it has something to say to us now. Fukyama is a political scientist at Stanford University, he's written many books since that one, including a two-volume series on the nature of political orders, a critique of the neoconservative world that he was once part of, and a defense of liberalism from its attackers, but his new book is a memoir in the realm of the last man.

And so I wanted to begin with that idea of the end of history and the last man. I wanted to begin by rediscovering the book that made Fukyama famous, so we can hear what it has to say about the world we now live in. So I want to begin the conversation in your most famous book, a book I'm a huge fan of, which is the end of history in the last man.

So this is built on an essay that comes out in 1989, it's a few months before the Berlin Wall Falls. The book comes out after the fall of the wall, give this moment where liberal democracy really seems to be triumphant. The end of history has become this highly meaned and many ways simplified concept.

So what was it? Well, this was not my phrase, it was a phrase of the German philosopher Hagle, and he meant history with a capital H, so we would use the word development or modernization today, but it's directional, it's progressive, things are getting better, human reason is prevailing in structuring societies, and the question of the end of history was not

“the end of events, it was to what objective does this historical process seem to be leading?”

The Marxists took that same concept of history, they believed in history also, but they believed that the end was not a liberal society, it was a communist utopia, and that was their guiding star in their political movement, and my observation back in the late 1980s when Gorbachev was in the Soviet Union was that we weren't going to get there, we were going to stop at the penultimate stage, which was some version of liberal democracy and a capitalist

economy, and for me that was the practical end of history that it really emerged. So this is more the way to think about the term the end of history is the end of the process

Why do you think we were going to stop there?

Well, I didn't know that we were going to stop, but all of these big systematic competitors had either self-destructed or had been rejected by the people that once followed them, and

“I think the challenge that I was trying to make was to ask people, "Yeah, can you locate”

something that's better than this outcome?" Not necessarily that, you know, our society is perfect, obviously is not, but is there an alternative form of political and social organization that you think will make people in the end happier and lead more filled lives? And to this day, I've not seen anyone really posit that. Well, what the Marxists thought, and you talked about this in the book, is that a capitalist

system has within it a contradiction that will inevitably lead to its undoing, which is you have this class conflict. And if a small number of people at the top who are exploiting the great mass of workers, beneath them, and liberal democracy is lying when it says that it equally or even reasonably a portions freedom, that the, you know, as a famous line goes, that the fact that the

rich in the poor men are free to see upon to the bridge is not an equality of freedom.

“So why are you not convinced class is such a dangerous contradiction?”

Well, it could be, especially with the rise of technology, but, you know, for much of the period after 1945, you didn't have pure capitalism, you had basically in most advanced countries of form of social democracy, and I think the democracy part of it was absolutely necessary because unless you provide certain social protections, unless you do a certain amount of redistribution, the inequality and the society is going to become intolerable.

And for most of that period, you actually had rising real incomes for working people. And so even though there was inequality, you had political stability because everybody

could buy into it. Now, I never argued that this would be true for all time, and I think

that the nature of technology is changing such that the degree of inequality has grown. I think globalization has also contributed to this, and unless you moderate those inequalities through political means, you're just not going to have stable democracy.

“So one of the things that I think is fascinating about the way you frame this in the”

book, is you try to move the foundation for liberalism, off of some of the philosophers we normally give it to Hobbes and Lock and on to Hagle. And one of the ways you do that is to say that Hobbes and Lock had this much more narrow vision of what a liberal society or even just a justice society is trying to achieve, which is self-preservation, it is simply almost existing at a reasonable level of material

well-being. And you say Hagle understands that the human soul better than that, and that the human soul wants more than that, it wants recognition. And the fundamental question for liberal societies, the one that will decide whether or not they are the end of history, is whether they are actually able to spread recognition around society equally enough, not just freedom, recognition being seen, being valued enough to survive.

So tell me a bit about that move, that it's actually recognition that is at the center of political life. Well, this is an idea that goes all the way back to Plato, soccer, teason, the Republic

asks, well, we have reason, we have desire, but isn't there a third part of the soul

that he calls Thumos, which can be translated as spiritedness or pride, and it's a non-material drive that people have, that they want other people to acknowledge their humanity. So I have these, I invented these two Greek words, isothemia and megalothemia. Isothemia is basically, you know, it's the foundation of a liberal society that everybody by virtue of being born as a human being has a certain base level of dignity that has

to be recognized by the rest of society. We recognize that in a liberal society by giving people rights, and that means that you are seen as a human being that has, you know, some share of the power of the community, and that generates a huge amount of resentment if you feel that other people are being recognized in a way that you are not.

And that really, I think drives a lot of democratic politics, just to give you one example in the gay marriage movement, you could have solved the economic problem of gay couples by giving them, you know, inheritance rights and that sort of thing the ability to pass

because gay people wanted to have acknowledgement that their unions had just as much dignity

“and just as much value as that between a man and a woman, and I think that was the fundamental”

drive that led to, you know, the legalization of gay marriage. So that's just an example, but I think, you know, civil rights, Ralph Ellison wrote a novel back in the 1950s about, you know, the experience of African Americans that had moved from the south to the north, you didn't have official legally sanctioned segregation, which you had was the invisibility, that's where the invisible man and the title comes from that

white people in the north simply didn't see a black person as a fellow human being. And that was really what I think generated the deep, you know, resentment and distrust that existed in northern cities and in racial politics. One of the really interesting sections of the book to me is where you talk about the ways in which material politics and politics of recognition can blur into each other, that there are

many places where people would, they have a level of material wealth that say in another country

be amazing, but in the country they're in because it puts them further down the scale of recognition.

It for them is a terrible injury. You have Adam Smith talking about this. It much of what people want from wealth is to be seen.

“It isn't simply to consume. So tell me a bit about that side of it because I think that also”

makes sense of some parts of our economic politics too where you'll sometimes have so much self-satisfied liberal say, well, actually if you look on a chart, you know, people have been getting richer and it's better than it was in the past and maybe antibiotics now, but actually if you understand that part of what people want from even the money they make is to be seen and recognize a certain way in society, that that actually contains within it

and never enoughness, a constant instability because there is always a certain amount of inequality

of recognition in society. Well, to expand a little bit on that Adam Smith section that you referred to, he says the rich man glories in his wealth and the poor man is unseen as invisible to his fellow human beings. That's really the pain of poverty is this invisibility to other people and I think that's still operates. And I think if you think about our politics, a lot of it is about recognition rather than simply the distribution of material resources. A lot of populism today

is driven by people who feel they're invisible. You know, the world is run by educated elites and they don't listen to the concerns of people like them and they don't recognize them as being fully equal because they don't have the educations or the sophistication. And I think that that unequally distributed recognition is actually at the base of a lot of our problems. I think something you see, you see it in some cases on the left, I think walkness,

had a lot of this in it, but you see it in some cases on the populist right, which is, I don't have a word to make up for it, but a desire to invert status in a society. So a belief that your white privilege or your wealth and your riches

“make you suspect and should be, you should be treated as suspect until you say proof yourself”

otherwise. On the right, this can take forms of attacks on their chosen, you know, elites, journalists and cosmopolitan and you know, populism has a lot of this in it. The people who have been judged excellent or who have attained power, there's an effort to sort of alter the moral valence of that power in the way society sees them. And actually see the last couple of years as in some ways of fight between these, some of the radicalization of the tech right comes from,

you know, their feeling of, well, we did what you wanted, we made our money under capitals and we built these great companies and now you hate us and that pushed them into a very, very different and eventually quite scary politics. No, that's absolutely right. I think that your judgment of the moral character of the people you don't like then blends with resentment if the fact that they are unjustly recognized and that's really the source of many of the forms of backlash that we see

in our society, both on the left and the right. You don't want to be seen as lesser than other people and you get very resentful when you're treated that way. And the inversion, I think, is simply a demand that that's stop, you know, that you'd be recognized at least as the equal. So just because you've made a lot of money doesn't mean that you're a bad person. The real anger comes from people that feel that they're victimized, that they are marginalized, you know, as a result of their

previously privileged positions in the society. So you'd find there the version in which

recognition is equal. They said you invented another word. Yes. Okay. Megalofumia. Megalofumia. Yeah. Megalofumia. So that is the desire to be recognized as greater than

“other people. And I think that this is obviously a threat in a democracy because a liberal democracy”

is based on the premise that all people all citizens are essentially equal. But that's not enough for a certain group, a certain subset of human beings. They want to dominate. They want to be more than others. It takes oftentimes a very negative form of political domination. So you want to be a dictator or an autocrat. But it's also necessary because you can't have any kind of human excellence if you didn't have the desire to be better than other people. You know, if you

want to be a great pianist or, you know, a football star or, you know, a great artist, I think that's also driven by a certain kind of desire to be recognized, you know, as better than other people. So I think that you can't have a society of perfectly equal recognition. That has to be the basis

“for social cohesion. But you also can't have a dynamic society without people that want something”

more than that. Now, I actually wrote about Donald Trump in the original book The End of History in the Last Man. He comes up a few times. Yeah. And, you know, back then, I thought, well, one of the virtues of living in a capitalist democracy is that this desire for unequal recognition can be satisfied just by becoming rich. And it's a way of bleeding off that energy. Little did I know that, you know, 30 years later, that wouldn't be enough for Donald Trump

and that he would want political power as well as, you know, fortune. So that brings us to the other side of the book, which gets talked about somewhat less. And maybe the way to get into this simply to say, who is the last man? So the last man is the creature that Friedrich Nietzsche, the other great German philosopher of the 19th century identified as the product of the end of history.

A person that was satisfied with the things that liberalism provides, basically peace and prosperity,

but had no further aspirations, no desires for a better vision of the world, nothing, that they would risk their lives on behalf of. And for Nietzsche, it was really that extraordinary ambition that was really what made a human being, a human being. And instead, in a liberal society, you got this very flat world where everybody has to tolerate everybody else and nobody wants to think of themselves as better. So there's something interesting here. One of the constant critiques

of at least a portion of the right towards liberalism for that matter towards socialism is that it's fundamentally built on a lie and that that lie is a quality. And the form of a quality that is a lie can take different versions, right? You can have people who see racial qualities of lie and they get obsessed with race and IQ and things of that nature. You can have people who see just individual quality as a lie. Obviously, some people are either more morally good than others,

other people are more talented, more capable, they work harder, but that many on the right see it as a dangerous lie that a society could or should be equal and that the particular danger of that lie is that it blunts ambition. It pulls down those who would strive for excellence. And I certainly see a much of the sort of tech-right reaction in the last couple of years in some parts of the new right and how they look at society a sort of sense that this happened. This is

why so many on the right are rediscovering Nietzsche. Who is there in your title? The sort of

originator of the last man idea? No, that's right. Well, first of all, let me just defend the

idea of universally quality because I do think, you know, and ultimately, if you look historically it derives from a certain Christian interpretation that human beings are fundamentally equal. There's a passage in Galatians that says there's neither June or Gentile, Masternorslave, male nor female, but all are equal in Jesus Christ. And, you know, that fundamental insight,

“I think has a real meaning because there's a core, something in one of my books, I labeled”

factor X that makes every single human being recognisably human. So I think that there is something really genuinely to be protected in this idea that every one of us has a certain moral core that is of great value and needs to be protected by the system. But it's also true that it leads to a

fact that different people pursue different ends that they have different visions of the good life.

The reason you created liberalism in the first place in the 17th century was the Wars of Religion

in which people killed themselves over minor theological differences. And there was a lowering, deliberate lowering of the human horizon to mean survival. You know, the right to life is superior to the right to the good life. But this does take away something people want to live the good life. They want to have higher aspirations. If you look at modern America, we don't ask that much of citizens. You obey the law, you pay your taxes. And that's fine. You don't have to sacrifice.

You don't have to take any grave risks on behalf of the society as a whole. And I think that there

is a part of the human psyche that actually wants that kind of life. You know, that feels flattened

if they don't have the ability to, you know, to, you know, as the declaration says risk there,

“you know, their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor for a cause. And that's why I think you”

get these jokers on January 6th, just up in Camo, pretending that they are these patriots that are defending, nobly defending this way of life. I think that, you know, you, you have that striving for that degree of sacrifice. And it doesn't exist in our society. And so you invent a cause. So why in the original essay, do you end on saying that the end of history will be a sad time? Well, I think it would be sad precisely because of that lack of risk and of a

vision of a noble future that, you know, you are willing to struggle on behalf of, I have another line in the original book that said that if you're living in a society that is peaceful and democratic because of struggles of an earlier generation that were successful, then you're going to struggle against peace and democracy because what you want to do is struggle for struggle's sake.

“And I think it's that impulse that, you know, really drives a lot of extremist politics and”

disturbs the, you know, the potential stability of a, of a liberal society. It's also a generational thing. You know, it's clear that the people that want most desperately to live in a liberal society are people that live in dictatorships. You know, there's genuine joy when communism fell in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. You can see this in all the people that get on boats, you know, desperate to get to out of a poor corrupt, you know, destitute country and to get to

America over to Europe. And so, you know, there is a real enthusiasm for liberalism on the part of people that don't have it. And I think that we do go in these generational cycles where, you know, once you have it, you take it for granted and increasingly you look for something further. And so, you're not living in a dictatorship any longer. So you think Brussels is the dictatorship that you have to struggle against. So there, there may be kind of a rise and fall in the support for liberalism.

But in the end, it's going to be the most stable outcome that, you know, the human society can achieve. So, thoroughly, burst wall in our own perceptions that we are frequently surprised to discover

“how totally non-economic, most political life is. And I think that's a bridge to something”

worth talking about this week. This is the 25th anniversary of 9/11. I think the first time

I remember a lot of people all of a sudden saying, well, I guess the end of history wasn't the end was actually 9/11. And it tacked on America from people coming out of an ideology that was fundamentally non-economic. That was religious. It was very much concerned with recognition and humiliation, people willing to launch attacks in which they knew they themselves would die. And, you know, one of the things that I think has come since then is that politics has been driven externally and

internally by I think people whose motivations are much more about recognition. And liberalism, as you say in the way this quote continues, does not even have a common vocabulary for talking about the prideful and assertive side of human nature that is responsible for driving most wars and

the resumption of recognizing that side of politics? Well, it certainly forced the recognition

that there were other people around the world that were driven by very non-economic factors. You know, if you're willing to be a suicide bomber, you obviously feel that there is a completely non-material cause that you're, you know, that you're serving. I don't think that it directly

“challenged liberalism in the way that people thought at the time. I think that radical Islamism”

is not an ideology that's going to ever conquer the world. Certainly not at this point. It's only takes root in relatively poor disorganized societies that are Muslim to begin with.

So in that sense, it was different from Marxism, Leninism, that genuinely had a kind of universal appeal

in many different societies. And so I think that the direct threat that here was an alternative to liberalism that was very powerful was simply not true. And in fact, in the years since 9/11, it's kind of faded. What I think 9/11 triggered was actually the Western reaction or overreaction to both Afghanistan and to Iraq, that then set in motion a lot of other, you know, I think very dangerous trends, militarization of foreign policy. I think the

beginnings of a surveillance state, you know, in the United States because of the fear of terrorism,

and also because the war has never resulted in a good outcome in either Afghanistan or Iraq,

great cynicism about American power and the use of American power that led directly to the emergence of people like Donald Trump. So you were in your conservative at that time. You signs in the early letters arguing through removal of Saddam Hussein, and then the Iraq war itself led you to break the neoconservatism broadly. Why? Well, I don't have a problem with the use of force to get rid of a dictator. I mean, we did that in World War II with Germany and Japan, and that was a very positive

outcome. What I had been spending much of the 1990s studying was actually the use of power in developing countries that were culturally quite different in Central America, you know, in Southeast Asia, in other places. And I was very skeptical whether the United States itself had these staying power to really transform a very different society. In my view, we tried to do this in the Philippines in Nicaragua in Vietnam in many other places. And, you know, the American public gets tired after about

four or five years, and then they give up and the society's left worse off. And I was very worried that the Bush administration would succeed in getting rid of Saddam Hussein, but then would be at a loss and how to actually create a stable country in its wake. And it was worse than I anticipated. They were even less prepared, you know, for that long-term effort when they did the invasion. And that was the real problem that I had with it. One thing you talk about in the memoir

that you've released is you described that as kind of a reckoning with how much of your own thinking can be generated by who you're around, what social circles you're moving in. Tell me about that sort of meta realization. Yeah, well, you know, they're coming out of the Enlightenment. We have a certain view of human cognition that says, well, human beings take in empirical information, they process it,

“they draw inferences, and that's how they end up believing that certain things are true,”

Jonathan Hate, the social psychologist, wrote a very interesting book about what he called motivated reasoning. He said, that's actually not the way that human reason works, that we start with the conclusions that we want to believe in, and we use our enormous cognitive abilities to marshal the evidence to support those views. And I have to say that that Enlightenment view looks less and less true, you know, when you watch the politics of the present day, and it

was true for me as well. You know, I moved in a, in this neoconservative social circle, you know, I wrote a lot for commentary magazine and, you know, other publications in that genre. And my own sense of, you know, who I was was very much shaped by the approbation of, you know, people that

“were also in that movement, and that's what made it hard to break with them, because it means,”

you know, not just changing policies, but it means changing friendships, and that's what happened. One thing you saw right after 9/11 in that period of run-up to war in Iraq, particularly,

celebrating the return of a pneumatic passionate politics, this view that America had become

decadent and soft full of metro-sexuals and management consultants, and here finally we had a

struggle again, a clash of civilizations, you know, a reason we needed this manly Texas rancher as our president, looking back some of the rhetoric on this has a real quality of the absurd,

“but one thing I think you also see is that the Iraq war, the highly aggressive reaction”

America had for a long time afterwards, it's done very lasting damage to our politics. I see Trump is a direct descendant of it. And there is this constant belief, I think, on the part of some intellectuals that violent struggle is an enobling thing for societies, and that I look at, you know,

certainly in, you know, more modern times Vietnam and Iraq, and I see Israel right now,

and I think the dangers of having your politics become profoundly oriented around violence, around reprisal, around struggle, around these kinds of more war-like virtues, is also very, very present and visible. So I'm curious what lessons you take, not just about the question of in what cases can America export democracy at the point of a gun, but what does it do to a polity? When it sometimes gets the wish of people who think that we've grown soft and calculating,

and all of a sudden we have this return to the virtues or the vices of war.

Yeah, you know, I actually talked about that in the last few chapters of the end of history,

in the last man that, you know, there are certain thinkers, including Haguele, that kind of felt that every now and then you had to have a war to recharge our batteries, so to speak, and to get a serious about things. The trouble is that technology has moved on, and that's just impossible. I mean, it's not just nuclear weapons, you know, you can't have a little war with nuclear weapons, but conventional weapons have become so destructive that the

negative impact of any kind of conflict right now is so potentially devastating, that that's simply not an alternative. And so I think for a successful society that wants to bleed off that

“meadow through me, uh, you need to find, you know, peaceful outlets for that kind of ambition.”

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and something worth paying for. Subscribe now for a special offer on all of our games at nytimes.com/joingames. I want to talk about the politicians who follow this Obama and Trump, and maybe the place to start,

“because I think this is almost the more interesting question for liberalism is Barack Obama.”

I'll begin broad, which is how in the broads drive America, do you now see the Obama presidency? Well, I think it was well-intentioned, but in a certain way it wasn't ambitious enough, and I think that's probably what a lot of his progressive critics think that he said very soothing things about post-racial America, just his very presence as president. He was an affirmation of that, but it didn't really change any of the underlying social and economic inequalities of

we're driving the racial divide in the United States, and one of, I think another perfectly just criticism was he was too bought into what we now call neo-liberalism with the kinds of economic advisors that he

that was producing oligarchs and very large wealth inequalities, which you could have addressed through anti-trust, through different tax policy, but under Obama you saw this problem that I described in a couple of my books as VTocracy, that we have a constitutional, very complex, constitutional system built around checks and balances. The essence of liberalism is the rule of law

“that there should be rules at govern and limit executive power, but I think that the American”

government at that point had become so complex that it became really hard for anybody to do anything, either in a conservative direction, which frustrated Reagan, but also in a progressive direction, you know, issues of climate change really require fairly strong controversial decisions, because you have clashing interest, and you know, somebody's got to resolve those, and so I think that

the underlying institutional problems were really never addressed, you know, take the filibuster,

is completely non-constitutional limitation on the power of Congress, and you know, you could have gotten rid of the filibuster, but even that relatively low hurdle, you know, was not even attempted in that period. The other thing I think that I would criticize Obama for more was that in the absence of the ability of the government to take on frontly many of these challenges, because it didn't have the power to do it, you have the flourishing of a certain kind of identity

politics in civil society, and that, you know, was not, I don't think that was the core of his presidency, but it certainly, you know, took hold in that period. I do think it took hold in that

“period, but I think it took hold for reason not unrelated to what you're describing, which is”

one of the ways I think about what has gone wrong in liberalism, because I think quite a bit has, and I think liberalism right now, even though I'm a liberal, has real exhausted feeling to it,

is my one line on this is that first liberalism captured the institutions, and then the

institutions captured liberalism. And what I mean by that is that liberals in many cases built, America's political institutions, they certainly, as liberals and became like the reigning ideology of the universities, liberals became the people who staffed to these institutions, and so then the liberals became the people who owned their failures, who governed with the horizons of what these institutions could achieve, and if you are the defenders of the system

that doesn't work, if you are, if your moral ambition is boundaryed by what failing institutions can achieve, you're not going to have a very exciting political philosophy.

“You're absolutely right about that. I think that, at this point, for me, it would be absolutely”

wrong to think that we need to go back to the pre-2016 world, because that world was one in which

the government was basically hobbled from doing anything ambitious. I think what propelled Trump

to power was the belief that it was too constraining, and so he simply wanted to become a dictator violate all sorts of rules in order to get things done, but you need a little bit of that in order to do progressive things. It takes ten years to get the permitting done to do a transmission line to get power from the middle of the country where alternative energy is produced to the West Coast where it's consumed, and that's the product of this kind of proceduralism that

was ushered in by people basically on the left, so you're right that they created this institutional straight jacket, and I think one of the big challenges is how to go back to a stronger government that can actually do good things. Well, this proceduralism is I think a very biting tension right now, because on the one hand, much of the critique that liberals, even the left, has of Donald Trump, is the evisceration of procedure. Right. He wants to build a ballroom.

He just bullrows his e-swing, and on the other hand, and that's true. I mean, he is eviscerating procedure. He is firing inspectors general. He is doing all kinds of things that properly you are not supposed to be able to do under our system of government. It is very, very hard, I think, to become very spun up about violations of procedure and not then accidentally wrap yourself as a defender of procedure, and so if procedure is both the problem in the sense that it is being

ignored, but also a little bit when you're in power, the problem in the sense that it is being overly followed. That doesn't leave you a very comfortable place to stand. I think if a Democrat

especially if it's a more progressive left-leaning Democrat, and they're going to find

themselves up against these same procedures that have hobbled Obama and Biden. Biden wanted to have high-speed internet in rural areas, and he was completely unable to produce that in the three years that after the passage of that act. So they're going to want more authority, and they're going to

“have to, in a way, look a little bit more like Trump. I think the trick is going to be to fundamentally”

stay within the law, but to modify the law in ways that grant essentially more power to the government to do things. And I think that's going to be a hard thing to sell because the immediate charges, oh, you're just acting like Donald Trump. But in fact, he was responding to a real problem

as real institutional problem in the way that American government was operating.

You were to book in 2021 that I think introduces an interesting tension into this, which is called liberalism and its discontence. And that book ends on a call. I wouldn't really call this stirring call. I think it's hard of a stirring call for this for moderation, as the answer for what is yelling, liberalism, a sense of temperance. Here I ask you, you know what you think of the Obama presidency, and what you fundamentally say to me is it wasn't radical enough. I ask you about American

institutions and procedures, and you say liberals are going to have to be more like Donald Trump. They got to get rid of the filibuster. I've been arguing for ending the filibuster for a long time. I can tell you a certain indeed people do not experience that as moderate. So I'm curious how you think about resolving these. I guess as one hand, you're right that there is a contradiction there. You know, the same vices that characterize bad dictatorial governments will also come to

characterize good progressive ones. You know, people have been complaining about the Supreme Court over turning Humphrey's executor. This is this rule that allowed Congress to set terms under which your president could or could not fire an executive branch official in a multi-member, you know, commission. Roosevelt wanted to fire this guy William Humphrey's that had been a commissioner for the FTC because he felt that guy was getting in the way of his new deal agenda, progressive

agenda. So the very same constraint on executive power that we're now criticizing, you know, a conservative Supreme Court for overturning was something that progressives wanted. I just think that that's kind of built into, built into our politics, that the same set of institutions can

“either be good or bad depending on the goal that you said. So you have to, you know, have a good”

set of ends that you're trying to achieve, but you also need power. Let's talk about the man who stepped into some of the failures here are some of the resentments here, which is Donald Trump. As you mentioned, Trump appears a couple of times in end of history in the last man, but when he emerges into politics, he emerges as something other than simply an icon of capitalist success. He emerges as somebody bringing over new nationalism, or a new belief in borders,

belief in maybe more traditional hierarchies in America. And over time, he emerges in your telling as somebody who is either proposing or modeling a different form of government, a different regime, not just a different leader. You've described him as repatriimmonializing. Yes. What does that mean? So let's begin with another bit of psychology. It's not natural to favor a well-qualified stranger over your relatives or your friends. It's a very natural human

desire to want to reward friends and family. So most states in human history were patrimonial

meaning that they basically were run for the benefit of the rulers. It was the rulers household,

the friends and family of the ruler that were given privileges, and were able to enrich themselves.

“And the reason you went into politics was to enrich yourselves. And I think that every”

society that has managed to create modern state institutions that are impersonal has had this constant backsliding temptation because the rulers themselves would like their friends and family to be favored. Just one simple historical example. The Ottomans had one of the weirdest ways of getting to a modern state. They literally captured young boys in the Balkans brought them to Istanbul and trained them to be administrators and generals, but they couldn't have families

to have children to have families so eventually assault and gave in. And you're back in the whole

“nepotistic patrimonial world that the Ottomans had briefly managed to get beyond. We're doing that”

right now. Instead of professional diplomats handling our Middle East policy, you get Jared Kushner and Steve Whitkoff, two friends and family of Donald Trump and you're paying the price for it, because a modern state really does need kind of meritocratic, you know, impersonal people running the state apparatus. Be surprised how easy it was for Trump to begin to build or rebuild that structure in a system that seemed just choked with rules and procedures to keep that from happening.

Yeah, totally astounded that the American people don't seem to really care that much. I mean,

maybe in the fullness of time, there'll be some accountability, but yeah, I would not have expected that the degree of corruption that exists in the current administration would have been tolerable to, you know, mainstream Republicans, for example, when Trump sort of ran back in the 2020 for election. Much more so than in 2016, he ran an assembled coalition as a candidate of courage and thumos and passions, you know, this really took hold after the nearly successful assassination

attempt with his bloody fest in the air. You saw a sort of rallying around him as a almost mythic

man of history figure. I think a lot of that has drained out of the system. Now, as he seems a little

bit more ridiculous, dangerous, campy, you know, spending his time on the ballroom. But is there something to be learned or be seen about what at least some people wanted to see in him? What they thought he might represent, they felt to them like it was missing. Well, I think it's all about power, you know, I think that many of Trump's defenders currently would say that we still, you know, that the Democrats only produced weak leaders and we want a strong leader. They'll excuse the

“corruption by saying, well, okay, maybe you're getting corruption, but that's the price you have to”

pay to have somebody that really wanted to close the border and was able to do that. And they'll look past, you know, all of the other institutional depredations that have happened under him because they want that, that strength, that's something that I wouldn't have expected in American politics, because really our system is really designed to guard against, you know, that kind of leader. There's a famous letter of Alexander Hamilton that anticipates Trump perfectly. He said there will be a point in

American politics where some person with great oratorical skills will come and rally people, again, you know, in favor of his own personal power. And that, you know, was part of the reason they designed this complex constitutional system. By the way, I'm not completely pessimistic. I think our institutions actually are going to hold at the end of this story, but, you know, we're being taken for a very dangerous ride and, you know, in the meantime. You wrote, I forget when they actually came out,

but these two books about the origins of modern political states. And the central question in those books was about, how do you get to Denmark? How do you get from, you know, more rudimentary forms of human organization to the advanced, efficient, fair, neutral state sort of both metaphorically and literally represented by Denmark. And I remember, you know, reading those books at the time and thinking that that statement made sense. And as I was thinking about them again for this conversation,

some part of me when I frame the question, how do you get to Denmark? It no longer felt like the right question that Denmark does not feel like the future. I mean, one, Europe itself does not seem all that stable. You just saw the AFD posting a huge result in regional German election. You have foreign populism rising all across the continent. But also the generalized sense of the Europe is falling behind that it is itself being somewhat choked by rules and procedures that, you know,

China is roaring forward. If you were writing those books today, if you were thinking about

“the formations of states and the pathway that are traveling, do you still see Denmark as a goal?”

No, absolutely. I mean, the reason I liked Denmark was not for the same reason as Bernie Sanders. It's not because it's got this huge welfare state. It's because it's run confidently and I just don't see any period in human history in which competence in state administration is not a virtue.

has been, you know, more stable than ours, but they've really closed off immigration. Despite the fact that they're still, you know, coalition with, you know, with social Democrats in it. And some people, my colleague David Leigh-enhardt, among others, is argued that

“that's why their politics have been more stable. Yeah, they basically merged liberalism with them”

or closed border nationalism. Yeah. But the thing is that they could actually do it confidently and they could actually achieve those goals. So again, I just don't see any, any circumstance in which having a competent modern public administration isn't going to be an advantage. That's how

countries get rich in the first place. And that's how they manage the different crises that hit

them, you know, at later points like pandemics and financial crises. If we didn't have a really competent set of financial managers in 2008, I think we would have been in big trouble. I'm not saying that that we don't want competent administration. We do. And I'm not saying that that isn't very hard to achieve it is. But I want to try to push you towards it, the question I'm asking here, which is whether or not, again, with your more thumatic hat on, I think the

conversation around Europe has changed a lot in the past decade or two decades. You know, we've gone from, I remember this spade of books in the early 2000s about whether or not the European Union was a future. And now Europe seems very left behind in a lot less stable, politically. And you have this sort of strange competition between an America that is operating in a

reckless chaotic, high-risk way. And a China that is showing incredible capacity to build a, you know,

21st century manufacturing and innovation juggernaut that is operating under a much more authoritarian form of politics. It takes risks, but in a very calculated way. And somehow the idea that, you know, what you're trying to do is get to where Europe is. I mean, Europe feels a little bit like it's getting a lot of money. I am not trying to get to where Europe is. Europe is, you know, if you're talking about over-excessive proceduralism, that's Europe. Basically, their bureaucrats make so many rules.

You have member-state level rules. And then you've got the whole Brussels bureaucracy. And, you know, anybody operating in Europe will tell you that, you know, complying with this mountain of rules

that they establish is why they don't have a big tech industry. You know, for example, one of the

things that Mario Drague and countless other reformers have recommended is actually get a single market. That was a whole point of the European community. You can't have large-scale companies in Europe because every one of the 27 member states has all these niggling little rules. So they're not there. They're not a model that's hard to sell across the countries. It can sell across the way. It's very easy to sell in America. And for that reason, they have put limits on their own economic productivity by, you know,

by the fact that they don't have competent administration that could actually make a uniform playing field for European. Okay, but I want to stop here because I want you to try to resolve

“this tension more for me. I think I think when I say that, I remember telecounty economists saying”

something of this nature, where you said, "Look, you meet people who work in the government in Europe." And almost to a person, they are on average, they are competent, they are cultured, they can say more to you about literature and books than the person in the same position in America can. And yet the outcomes are not that good. The Europe is struggling. Why? What is it about these competent governments that is not leading to more competent governance?

Well, that indicates they're actually not so competent. I don't think competence is measured by the number of rules that you pile up. At some point, I think competent governments have to cut back on those rules and rely on the common sense and the discretionary judgment of, you know, the people running those systems. So I don't think that it's the case that they are actually competent. There's a point at which, you know, you're trapped in an institutional system that sees

“legitimacy lying in further rulemaking and, you know, I think legitimacy really comes from outcomes”

and they're at a point where they're not getting outcomes because they're choked by, you know, by this compliance, this rule compliance mentality that they've developed. The New York Times app unlocked. Everyone knows the times is behind a paywall. Only subscribers have access to all the reporting. But what if you could explore the times

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“One thing that I think is shifting the politics of America and Europe simultaneously,”

trying as a little bit of a different case here, is that the platforms on which we politically communicate and the platforms in which we shape what we see politically have changed. We've moved from, you know, people, maybe read the newspaper in the morning or they watch. It's a nightly new show to this much more inarchic, algorithmic, social and beyond social

media environment. I never think it's an accident that the populist right begin to surge

across the world at the time that political communication went algorithmic. I'm curious how you see this in terms of some of these theories. And probably the way social media is a constant measuring of recognition. Are you seeing me? Are you liking me? Are you, you know, in the politicians get this constant feedback? It shifts how they act, how they think, how they generate a sense of how they're

“doing. Where does this fit in some of your theories of political orders in the human soul?”

Well, you know, ever since 2016, we've been having this prolonged debate about where all this populism is coming from. And everybody gives this list of seven or eight things, economic inequality, globalization, incompetent leadership. And then they say at the end, and also social media, I actually think that technology exemplified by social media is really much more important than most of the other explanations that you can't explain the timing for the rise of populism.

And in particularly, you can't explain the particular nature that it has taken without social media. For example, a lot of the, what it means to be a conservative these days, a populist conservative is to believe in conspiracy theories. And it is much easier to promulgate, in fact, they're incentives for promulgating conspiracy theories on a completely unregulated internet. You know, that the way you get followers, if you're an internet influencer, is to say more and more outrageous things, your

credibility is not measured by whether you actually have done the fact checking and have these institutional safeguards for the reliability of your information, it's how many likes you get.

“And I think it's absolutely been at the core of a lot of the radicalization of the politics of,”

you know, countries that have gone online in that period. So something that has been kind of lurking in our conversation is China. And it's at the beginning that the end of history was about this question of would we come up with ways of organizing a complex society that were more successful, more desirable than America? I've seen you in more recent comments and interviews begin to grapple with the possibility that China represents a model that actually is working and could appeal on

wider scale. I think you said something like we're a third of the way that actually being the

more successful model. So tell me what you think China both represents as a form of political organization where it differs from liberal democracy. And what you then think that means for it as a possible model of what other countries and societies are going to try to, sure. Well, I think a liberal democracy is based on having a competent state that is limited both by a rule of law and by elections. And China has the competent state very competent, but it doesn't have either a

rule of law or elections. And therefore the quality of governance there depends entirely on the quality of rulers. One of the things about Chinese civilization is that, you know, Confucianism, embodies bureaucracy as one of its foundational cultural characteristics, educated people should be the ones that rule. And to this present day, that's where Chinese party codgers are recruited from, you know, the best and brightest in society. So they've got this tremendously competent state.

The problem, I think, and so I've, it's not just recently, I've thought all along that this is the only alternative political and social system that has a chance of being competitive with liberal democracy precisely because they can deal with modern technology. They can be at the forefront of technology and as a result of economic growth. The question is, is this a sustainable model?

their economy is based on doubling down on this export driven, you know, model that made them

rich in the first place. That's not a sustainable model. They've got big problems in their property

market. They're going to have huge problems with unemployment, youth unemployment. There is already extraordinarily high levels. And so I don't think you can take the sustainability of either their economic or political systems for granted. The reason, the reason I started saying these things about China versus the United States is because the American model has deteriorated. Right. Yeah, I'm not sure you can take this thing. Well, they have our model for granted. No, that's right.

No, absolutely right. It seems to me we've got an administration that is doing everything it can think of to weaken the United States, vis-a-vis China attacking the scientific establishment, attacking allies being, you know, completely capricious and arbitrary and economic policy. I mean, this is not something that a competent state does. But maybe day two, night two things we were just talking about in the last couple of minutes, when people talk about our model,

they tend to mean in their head whether it's America, Europe, a particular form of governance. But something that you just stood at a few times there is that that form of governance took hold and flourished in a particular historical context, the post-war context, and a particular technological context in particular way we communicated. It was a, you know,

“a period of newspapers and radio and TV and and I think one of the open questions about us”

is whether or not these contingencies were fundamental, whether or not there was something in the way a particular form of government connected to a particular moment in communications, technology, you know, a certain level of globalization, and the question that's coming or maybe is already here is how all of these models operate in a different particularly technological area. How they adapt to, social and algorithmic media, how they adapt

to don't adapt to AI, how they adapt to don't adapt to globalization. But I'm curious how you bring

those things into your framework. Oh no, look, I've never said that liberal democracy was the best

system under all possible technological conditions. I think in fact, the nature of the technological

“horizon determines the kind of politics you can have and I think for that reason, you know, AI is”

going to be very threatening to our democratic system. I wrote a book in the early 2000s actually about biotechnology, where I was arguing that if you could actually, you know, through something like CRISPR Cas9, if you could modify the human gene line to modify human nature, you would attack some of the basic premises of modern liberalism because you could create different classes of human beings, you know, in a way that didn't exist before. And now you can combine the biotech with the AI

and produces really very science fictiony, but, you know, entirely conceivable outcomes that are going to be completely toxic to the maintenance of the kind of egalitarian society that we've seen. We've already seen this concentration, this extraordinary concentration of wealth, you know, in the technology sector. And that by itself is also something that is very difficult

“for democracy to deal with. So yeah, I think that it's all contingent on the nature of technology”

at any given point in time. One way to look at a political system is that it is a collective technology for absorbing and responding to information. And it works better or worse depending on how well it's able to do that. And I think increasingly we're seeing the way our system is absorbing and responding information is degrading. AI is very much a system for absorbing, collecting, aggregating and then responding or reacting to information. And I've not seen any particularly convincing

descriptions of how you might integrate that capacity more fundamentally into a political system. But it's a little bit hard for me to imagine there won't be more profound experimentation around that that that that maybe the set of systems we can imagine operating which were more bounded by the way human intelligence worked and the speed of human beings working with each other is not the boundary. And the you know, the world is going to be opening to strange things in the next 10 or 20

years. Then we're imagined in our 20th century political science, if not always in our 20th century

science fiction. Yeah, well I think that modern government is going to have to rely on AI

human beings to you know absorb all of the inputs that that they need to. I think the real danger is in agente AI where human beings delegate certain powers to machines that can then operate autonomously. You know, it's very interesting at the frontier of computer science these days. They're more like zoologists that have just discovered new species and they're trying to observe how it behaves and they're different conditions. But they don't really know what's happening on the inside of the

machine even though they're the ones that you know built it. And they're trying to make that new creature more powerful. Yeah, as fast as they possibly can. Yeah, they don't know what that will do.

“Yeah, I mean it's kind of a crazy race that's going on right now. I think that's really the danger”

is this likelihood that we will over delegate and then you know the machine will develop values that may not really align with you know the ones that the creators hoped it would. I mean we already have this hugging face incident a couple of weeks ago where the machine did something that was completely supposed to be off limits and that's just the beginning. I think of you know more stuff like that to come. This is a point others are made but the

fear was always that the AIs would take agency from us. What's obviously happening is we are

handing that agency over as fast as possibly can. And I talked with people these labs working on self-improvement. They don't even necessarily think self-improvement is a good idea. They just even if it's not a good idea if the other labs or the other countries are going to do it, they want to get their first. And I guess this would be, this is a place where I wonder about your perspective it's so much of what we can or can't do in terms of regulating AI is dependent

on these at least perceived race dynamics between the US and China between firms and other firms. This doesn't feel to me like a problem without human precedent but it is a problem coming at a time when the government of the US is pretty erratic and our confidence in our governing capacities is pretty low where China is trying to catch up with us where there's a lot of M&V between the two countries. I'm curious how you look at this more international relations based

aspect of it. Well, just on a domestic level, the state capacity problem comes back because you can't regulate this technology if you don't have people in the government that understand it at least at a level that they can really get a hold of what's going on and you know, make put some controls in place. On the international question, obviously there's a geopolitics of AI that's driving everybody forward. You know that they're too worried about what China's going to do.

“I think some of that worry is a little bit misplaced because as far as I see it, the Communist”

Chinese party is not a bunch of libertarians that say, "Oh, great technology. Let's just let it rip." You know, we're not going to try to control. They're going to try to control it. If you create a model that is really good at breaking into the most classified computers, your government runs, they're not going to want to see that get out. You know, they're not going to want to have Chinese citizens have that capability. So I'm not sure that there's no basis on which you couldn't

get some ground rules laid down despite the competition between the United States and China that put some limits on this and I think it's going to be absolutely necessary because even a

big powerful country like the United States can't do this simply on its own. One thing I've heard

people worry about is whether or not even if you could imagine a deal, whether or not that kind of deal would be verifiable trustworthy. People will say, "I agree that China's not going to want a self-improving model able to break into classified computers running wild." But at the same time, they'll say, "But China's probably more likely than we are, given the way they can wall things off from their media, etc." To say, "That seems like a

quite powerful weapon to have." Let's actually bring the very best scientists into the government. Let's give them the resources they really need. And let's have them create something on our behalf that we can use the way we want to use it. So do the extent this is a powerful weapon. A state that is good at creating things is going to try to create that weapon internally,

“and so you can't trust the deal. You have to simply act as if the other partner's untrustworthy.”

Do you buy that? I'm afraid that a lot of that logic is inevitable.

Yeah, I do not know whether it's possible to control this technology. Even a powerful state like

China is going to have trouble doing that. And when you have a globally competitive world, there may be certain things that you can't really get the capacity to deal with. Yeah, maybe it's going to be the end of the soul. I want to avoid ending there on whether or not the guys will kill us all. I'm curious, given what you've seen in the politics of this era, it does not look like

the government is proving to be popular, even if it is not maybe as unpopular as well,

“might have imagined. So what do you see as a, as a kind of answer to some of these trends?”

Well, I think that's pretty simple in countries where you can still have free and fair elections. You win elections, because that's the root political power. The model for this was really the Hungarian election last April where Orban had been in power for 16 years. It really turned Hungary into an authoritarian country in the midst of the European Union. But Peter Magiar had the political skill to organize a very broad coalition and not just squeak out a narrow victory,

a massive victory that was a very great procudiation of Orbanism. I think America has a chance

of doing something similar, probably not as decisive, but certainly it could send a very powerful

message in the midterm elections that are coming up in November. And if the polls are to be believed, you know, it could really take place. What is the goal of liberalism? Here I don't mean classical liberalism in its long history. I mean American liberals, you know, the left of center, not quite socialist part of the Democratic Party. What is its moral goal? At this point,

“what way does it actually want to change society? I think people look at Trump and they know what”

he wants to do. I think they look at Bernie Sanders or Zormom Donney or AOC and they get a sense of of where they feel the problem really is. I'm not sure they exactly could answer that, so well, for, you know, your generic mainstream liberal Democrat. Well, I don't pretend to speak on the half of that category of people. I can tell you what my vision of it would be, which really has to do with this whole question that I've been quite preoccupied with, which is state capacity. I would

like to see a government that can actually set, you know, generally accepted not radical goals, universal health care, building high-speed rail, doing all of these things, but actually being able to accomplish it in a reasonable amount of time. I got preoccupied with NASA recently because between John F. Kennedy's announcement that they were going to go to the moon in 1961 and actually landing on the moon in 1969. It's only eight years. In the 2000s George W. Bush announced that they were

going to go back to the moon. That's when the whole Artemis program got started. They finally,

well, he said they were going to do it by 2015. Here it is, 2026. They finally got a rocket to go around the moon, but it didn't actually land on the moon and will be lucky to land another human being by 2030. And so something has gone wrong in the ability of the American state to execute the very good, you know, intentions that it announces. And I guess maybe this isn't a moral vision, but it's a certainly a vision for a different kind of politics. I would like to see

in America that can actually announce a goal and actually get it done in a reasonable amount of time at a reasonable cost. Well, this is a very core argument of abundance. So I'm thrilled to hear

“you say some of this. I think one thing is struck me about the reaction to abundance and it's argument”

for a much stronger state. Was that many people came back to me and said, well, what is the vision of the good life here? Is it just more stuff? And I'd say no, no, we want more homes, we want more clean energy, we want more public infrastructure, we want more medical breakthroughs so we can have cares. Right. These are all things that have already been identified as goals. This is what liberalism is already trying to achieve. And I'm saying it should be able to achieve it. But after hearing

again and again, like the need for a vision of the good, the point, which is philosophical magazine, you know, devoted whole issued liberalism is, you know, vision of the good. I began to take more seriously that people felt something was absent and lacking. You know, the way I take some of the thematic arguments you're making in end of history in the last man and apply them to modernity is not just that people want to fight in wars. I don't think most people do want to fight in wars.

I don't think most right wingers want to fight in wars. I think this is cosplay. We do have wars and they're horrible. And they're not things that society is excited about having a new draft in order to send its young men and women to fight in, for instance. What I do think, though, is that people want to believe they are engaged in some morally ambitious project to change the world in which they live. That is not all people want from politics. Many people just want

low prices, but there is a level of politics that has a intense energy within it and that any movement that cannot operate on both, right? You can have a politics of dissolved energy, a can't

work when you try it. But, you know, politics is driven by the people in it with a kind of energy to change things fundamentally. And so if you don't have some answer for them, some answer of them will create that they are involved in, and that kind of beats in your own heart, too.

“I think your politics is not going to be successful, particularly in the modern attention”

environment where energy and enthusiasm and outrage and inspiration are the coin of the realm. I'm not so sure that you can't do that in a liberal society. If you think about John of Kennedy himself, I think you can. I just think you need a liberals and that wants it. Yeah. Well, I mean, it seems to me there's a lot of challenges out there that are achievable within the context of a real liberalism. For example, current distribution of wealth and power

in the United States is something that could be changed. You know, you don't have to have these tech oligarchs running around, you know, donating hundreds of millions of dollars to election campaigns so that they can get outcomes favorable to themselves. Having a state that can actually operate in this very difficult and very threatening technological environment is a plenty ambitious goal.

“I think it's just a matter of articulating to people why it's necessary and how it's achievable.”

Just in the government being able to master and control AI rather than the technology controlling and mastering the government, I mean, that's a huge challenge that. And for that matter, human beings.

Yeah. All right. Right. So then always have a final question. What if your books

you'd recommend to the audience? Uh, the first two are ones you're doubt this familiar with. One is Jennifer Paulka's recoding America. I think she is the most insightful in a way critic of what's wrong with the American bureaucracy, but she does it from a sympathetic standpoint. She understands why bureaucracy and government are necessary and how, you know, it could actually be reformed to do things

better. The second one is Mark Dunkelman's why nothing works where he puts everything in a bigger

historical context, the swing between uh, Jeffersonianism where power is pushed down as far as possible to the people and a Hamiltonian vision where the government itself is the, uh, is the engine of change and he argues that we've been in a Jeffersonian period ever since the 1960s and we need to switch to a more Hamiltonian perspective. Uh, the final one is written by an old friend of mine

“Bob Wright, uh, the god test. Um, I think it actually, you know, he's been covering artificial intelligence”

really since the 1980s. He interviewed, uh, Jeffrey Hinton way back then, uh, he's got the best

explanation of how L.L. M's work for a layperson that I know of. It's in case in a ultimately extremely

optimistic, uh, sort of almost metaphysical theory about uh, the progress, not just that humans have made, but all the way from single cell to multi cell to, you know, different forms of animal life, but it's an argument, you know, for seeing a broader pattern, uh, in the human story that, uh, artificial intelligence actually plays a positive role in. Thanks, Fukiama. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ezra.