[inaudible conversations] >> good morning, everyone. welcome to the texas book festival, or welcome back if you were here yesterday. it's great to have you here in the c-span booktv can't.

and i remind you again at the end but our author francis fukuyama will be in the book signing tent afterwards signing books and the books are available for sale in one of the other tents so go buy the book and then, medium and get your book side sign at the end. the format i think we would do for this is frank and i will talk about 25, 30 minutes conversation and then we will open it up to the crowd for 15 or 20 minutes for q&a, and i think it looks like there are two mics but probably the best bit is when it's time to ask questions is to come up, lined up behind the first mic. if are not close enough i may nag you to be closer because we're being televised live in the people at home all over the country who are watching who want to hear your question as follows us. it's a great privilege to introduce francis fukuyama and i'm just going to read his bio and then we'll get going. so francis fukuyama is olivier

nomellini senior fellow at stanford universities freeman spogli institute for international studies and director of its in our democracy, development and the rule of law. he's taught at the school of advanced international studies at johns hopkins university and at the george mason university school of public policy. he was a researcher at the rand corporation and served as deputy director for the state department's of policy planning staff. he's the author of political order and political decay, "the origins of political order", the end of history and the last man, trust, america is at a crossroads, and now this book, while we're here today, "identity." so i want to start, frank, by sq but something we were talking about earlier, which is i was a little surprised that you took on this issue of identity and identity politics. you were telling me this is something that goes back to the

essay and book you wrote many, many years ago that a think was the work that really first brought you to national international tension. do you want to talk about its origins in the end of history and bring us up to the present? >> sure. in 1992 i published a book called the end of history and the last man. a lot of people have criticized the concept but they actually didn't read the book. [laughing] if they had, and they particularly didn't read the last third of the book which was the part about the last man. the individuals that my phrase become from the philosopher hagel about the evolution of human societies and the question was, what lights light at the f that evolution which we today would call modernization or development? my argument was that for one at 50 years progressive intellectuals the end of history was communism. that's what karl marx argued, and i said it didn't look like we're ever going to get there. look like we would get to some

form of liberal democracy tied to a market economy. but the last part of the book about the last man was this is nietzsche, friedrich nietzsche last man, the man or the human being that emerges at the end of history where your peace and prosperity, democracy but yet know aspiration to you have no satisfaction of this in a hearing that people have for something greater. and i said this is going to be a problem for democracy in the future because peace and prosperity, it's great when you don't have it as an authoritarian or very poor country, i want you can take that for granted people what something extra. there's this part of human personality that the greeks called -- spiritedness or this belief that got in inner sense of dignity that is not being adequately recognized by other people in the surrounding society.

this is the driver of a lot of phenomenon in the world, beginning with democracy itself. if you live in an authoritarian country where you were treated like human garbage, this is the origin of the arab spring. there is a tunisian vegetable seller named mohammad assisi who it is vegetable cart confiscated by the government by the dictatorship. he asked what is cart was picking nobody would talk to him so he doused himself in gasoline and set himself on fire and notionally the trigger of the arab spring because people recognize that's what it's urging governments do. they treat their citizens like human beings deserve at least and answer the question of where's my vegetable cart? but it's also i think the source of some less nice phenomena like nationalism where people believe their members of a nation that is not politically recognized and so they demand that it be

recognized. that's a legitimate demand in many cases. ukraine were georgia, places like that, but it can easily turn into an aggressive desire to dominate other countries. finally in our society, in an established liberal democracy, we are blessed to enjoy and citizens recognition, recognition of our dignity, our constitution and declaration of independence, given to us by granting his rights to believe the freedom of speech,, dissociation and ultimately to vote. but this oftentimes isn't enough for people. they don't want to be recognized simply as generic citizens. they want to be recognized as members of particular groups and oftentimes these groups are based on historical oppression or marginalization. and so in modern liberal

societies i think we've had this process of people seeking recognition of their inner identity. in the u.s. this begins in the 1960s with the civil rights movement for african-americans, with the feminist movement come with the lgbt movement. all of these groups, soft recognition -- sought recognition for themselves not -- rather as members of minorities that had been discriminated against which was a perfectly legitimate and reasonable thing to do. but this is part of a larger process of thinking about yourself in these more particular ways that in some ways conflict with the belief in a liberal society that essentially we're all equal citizens. >> i mean come as since the answer is content which is it but can you talk about the motive for writing this specific

book, which i think as you said you may not have written had thinks that taken particular turns over the last few years. there's some consequence of that you were talking about that motivated you to spend a few years writing a book. >> absolutely. that was simple. it was the election of donald trump and 2016. also the brexit vote in britain, that same year. and then the rise of a number of populist politicians all over the world, including victor or von in hungary, or the launch us his party in poland, are present or to want in turkey. for politicians represent a form of identity politics but it's a right wing form of politics in contrast to the progressive identity politics that we are familiar with and the united states. these forms of identity i really built around either ethnicity or nations. victor or von in hungry says

hungarian national identity is based on him. ethnicity, ethnicity. meaning if you're not an ethnic hungarian but if you live in budapest are some are not part of the nation. i think in many ways that the phenomenon we were seeing in the united states where you have a president that is perfectly happy to feed off of racial resentments and i think has encouraged a great deal of nostalgia for a time when america could understand itself is essentially a white european descended country. that's a lot of the explanation for his popularity among his core supporters. this obviously is very problematic. i think given the de facto diversity of the united states today and it's the general challenge to democracy because what a lot of these populist politicians do is claim a kind of charismatic authority from having been elected, having been

popularly elected. of course donald trump was not popularly elected but leave that aside for the time being. and then using that men to attack basic institutions because a liberal democracy is not just about voting and getting elected. it's also about a constitutional separation of powers, institutions that prevent the executive from simply doing whatever he wants. and if you're elected as a populist you say the people elected me. i have made it from the american people to do their will -- and mandate. one of these institutions gets in my way, i'm going to attack it and try to undermine it. that i think has been the kind of threat that we've been under over the last couple of years where you've got a president that has attacked the mainstream media as enemies of the american people whose attacked his own fbi come his own justice

department, is being politicized. simply i think as a way of avoiding personal accountability for his own actions and the like. it is not just the united states. this is going on in many other countries around the world. almost every european country now has a big and growing populist, nationalist party that's nipping at their heels. the most recent one was italy where you now have a populist government that came to power in the last year. so this is a general problem that we are in and that's why i wrote the book essentially. >> it's interesting and i think you deal with this in a really nicely sort of discriminating in a good sense nuanced way in the book. we are all asking questions and this is a lot of what the book is and what you worked on over many decades is what makes the country work. there's maybe a recognition of the fragility of a a liberal

democratic country of diverse society such as ours and we didn't have a few years ago. what's tricky it seems to me that maybe you can expand on this is you are saying the stuff donald trump does, the kind of real america or not real america, also the stuff that's happening on the left in terms of every sort of increasing kind of functionalization or identification of different groups that need their interest represented, that seems to have according to your argument the road. nobody needs to. >> we need some kind of overarching story of what it means to be american or hungarian or british to hold the country together and be a foundation for a functioning liberal democratic order. what makes the country work as opposed to what erodes it enters at that edit assemblies look similar? >> in my view you cannot have successful country of any sort

if you don't have some overarching sense of national identity. national identity is not a popular term in many circles these days, but if you want proof that this really important just look at the contemporary middle east. in the middle east today you got holsters of countries, libya, iraq, syria, afghanistan, somalia, yemen that it basically fallen apart as states because they do not have a sense of national identity. in every single one of these countries people are more loyal to the ethnic group, their sex, the region, their tribe and they are to entity called, let's say syria or iraq and the result has been -- sacked -- state code, civil war. half of the population pushed out as refugees were killed. and so that's kind of the endpoint of a decline of national identity. in a democracy you also need

national identity because i democracy does not mean that your cultural uniform. it doesn't mean everybody agrees but have to agree on certain basic things. they have to agree on certain basic institutions. they have to agree on the legitimacy of those institutions and they have to be willing to accept failure through those institutions they don't get their immediate goals. that's the only condition under which a democracy can work. i think american national identity has been weakened over the years and it's really, it's the work of both the left and the right. on the left there is a certain come as a set i think identity politics in this country has perfectly legitimate reason lot of existing social injustice. but there's a certain interpretation of that kind of identity politics that says the essence of the american order is

patriarchy or racism for the whole country was built on the foundations and it continues to this day and there's really not much we can do about it because it's built into the dna of the country. but the other form of identity politics is down to one voucherizing on the right, which is to i believe drag us back into an older understanding, and ethnic unrest in american identity. this is something that i think was a big achievement that we arrived at something i would label a creedal or a civic identity. if you think about what the american identity was before the civil war, it was basically raised on race because black people, native americans, women, they could not vote. so the united states fights a civil war in which 600,000 hundred thousand people are killed, and at the end of that we passed the 14th amendment

that says all persons born or naturalized in the territory of the united states are now considered american citizens. this is one of the most important achievements in terms of redefining american identity to make it nonracial. women continue the excluded until the early 20th century and other groups don't get to share in that but it was an important turning point. take another 100 years until that reality of nonracial citizenship is actually realized it takes until the civil rights movement for that to happen. by the end of the 20th century we had arrived at this understanding of americanness originally built around the constitution, the bill of rights, the declaration of independence, the rule of law,, believe in the rule of law which i think was an important achievement that gives american something that they hold in common. which really now extremely

troubling to me is the rise of the kind of right-wing white nationalism that says no, actually you do want to go back to this ethnic understanding of what it means to be an american. that's not possible in the united states. it's just not possible because it's too diverse society. now i think the threat is really coming from the right, more powerfully right now than it is from the left. >> do you feel like i think i was really struck by when you were talking about, and this is towards the end of the book, about a need to research with more confidence this national identity? one of the things which i agree with but one of the things that makes you sometimes a little bit pessimistic, and i have a lot more conversation with folks on the left to her sort of come from my perspective or maybe from yours, guilty of some of the erosion of this than i do with the right, it's hard to

say, so the left perspective is america is fundamental in its dna a racist patriarchal columbus imperialist country. and i would say well, a country can't hang together on that narrative. they might save maybe not but it's true. so do you want to tell the truth or do you want to tell a story that makes people happy? in a way feels like what you're saying is actually influences of i went to tell a story that is opry on a different access maybe then truth or something like that. >> well, no. i think you can actually be truthful about that progressive story and not have to tell lies about it. i don't think when you are teaching children or students about the history of the united states that there's any respect what you need to cover up the actual injustices that are

characteristic of american history. we had slavery. we've had gender discrimination. we've had all of these things but there is this long-term progressive story that as as a result of political struggle basically over decades, many of those things were eliminated and we don't live in a perfectly just society today, but i would not trade the situation of an american in 2018 for the situation of an american in the year 1858, or 1920 when the ku klux klan was actually much, much stronger than it is today and you still had complete racial segregation throughout the south. both of these stories are correct. you can tell people about the real injustices. you can tell people things actually have gotten better and that there still work to do that's our story, is that

struggle to make things better. >> do you think of another think along this line and i think this speaks to both sort of the folks on the left us talking about but the folks we have stereotypically talked about as donald trump voters which is maybe white working-class voters who feel left behind left out by the national narratives. what you have to offer them? in some ways where asking them in the construction of this entity to take a hit, to take it to your asking people around being african-american or being part of this white as snow national identity, to subordinate that to this other thing that a lease and some very fundamental ways they don't feel embraces them. so in order for them to take that hit what is the care you are offering? >> i don't think you have to take a hit. take something like black lives matter. this begins in a a reality whih is police violence, especially in african-american

neighborhoods in american cities. that's the problem and it needs to be addressed and that has ta correction in the behavior of loose fibers around the country nobody is denying that's important. but it's not an either/or choice but it's not as if either you corrected that particular injustice or you think about something like an overarching integrator american identity. you can do both at the same time. you really can do both of them at the same time. one thing that liberals often times don't appreciate is the fact that the identity politics on the right actually there are certain aspects of it that are legitimate, in my view. there's also things that need to be addressed. for example, you look at the white working working-class. there's been a lot of attention ever since the 2016 to the fate of the white working class. white people in the united

states are not the uniformly privileged group. if you are a coal mine in west virginia, if you working-class person, a guy lost their job or your making half the money or father was making doing very different kind of work, it's not the case that you're being respected and it may be that you've lost this respect that you thought your parents had pics or maybe that loss is very painful, but it's not as if elites in the media, in politics, the people that been running the two political parties up till now have really done a whole lot for you. kind of appreciating that you can be disrespected or ignored in a variety of ways in this country, , and by the way, i'm t trying to pose a moral equivalence between these different forms of disrespect or injustice because some of them are obviously much more severe

than others. but i do think one of the problems and when the underlying reasons we are so polarized is kind of a failure to actually look more carefully at the groups that are on the other side of the polarization and the kind of appreciate the waste in which disrespect can happen. look, one concrete example, right, the cdc, their most recent estimates are that 72,000 americans died of drug overdoses in the open road epidemic in 2017, right? this is a lot of people. this is a really lot of people. twice as many as get killed in traffic accidents and the really has that been a lot of attention paid to this really intellectually the 2016 election because this was happening to a group of americans that were not being terribly well covered up till then. there are problems i think on both sides. >> to go back to this concept of

cognitive miss pronounce it -- [inaudible] you are saying we need somehow define a national narrative that is may be embedded in laws but articulate in various political narratives that speaks to the people both sides of -- whatever the moral equivalence or lack of equivalence, you can't have a functioning society unless you're above functioning democratic, unless you're above some minimum threshold of members of the society feeling as though they are being seen and respected as human beings. >> that's right. it's all about pride. one of the things i think medical scientists now recommend some a lot of their empirical research is that people do not vote rationally. they just don't vote rationally. they both based on a partisan affiliations, and the partisan affiliations are driven by a sense of community, a sense of

pride and a certain membership in a certain identity. and so it's all quite irrational. i think politicians that simply speak to peoples economic interests or a kind of rational calculation as to what policy should benefit them don't understand that if you don't appeal to the pride as well, you're not going to get them to vote for you. so that that's something that s to be carefully cultivated. unfortunately i think donald trump was actually quite brilliant and synthesis a large group of americans kind of white working-class americans who felt the pride had been hurt by policies from the past. but that doesn't mean you can't come up with a different kind of narrative that would be much more inclusive than the one that he's trying to tell that would appeal to americans pride because i do think there is that progressive historical store

this to be told about the united states in 2018. >> so maybe the last question and then we can go to the audience so folks want to start lining up behind the microphone up there. one of the things i felt was was nice in the book is you don't just diagnose the problem and then leave us kind of depressed and, you know, convinced that we are all doomed. you actually spent some time talking about, you don't get detailed but you spend some time at the end talk about what kinds of measures you think it bring us back towards a national identity that sustained ask. could you talk about what you think some of those come with some of that might look like? >> so first of all i actually think leadership matters and i think we underestimate the degree to which these narratives about national identity can actually be shaped by the right kind of politician, i think that

unfortunately we've not had a politicians really articulated this kind of sense of creedal identity on talking about in a way that is been terribly appealing. but that doesn't mean you couldn't do that. citizenship should mean certain things, and so the one thing you can do is to begin talking about it. in the education system we don't actually teach civics anymore. if you look at poll data, the number of high school students they graduate from american high schools that actually can identify one of the ten, the original bill of rights, writes in the bill of rights, that can identify the three branches of government, it's appalling how ignorant people are of their own political system. so that's something we could do a much better job about and that if they understood the constitution properly, maybe they would recognize it something they have to defend individual to think it's really being under attack.

the other the area is immigration. this gets to a lot of sensitive issues, but it seems to me that there are things, a real policy solution to the current immigration deadlock has been on the table for the last 20 years. it's just that i think i get this on both the left and right have prevented it from coming about. and i think it's essentially a trade-off that you basically have to provide the undocumented immigrants better in this country and the been living here peacefully and don't have criminal records, just to provide them a route to citizenship. there's just no alternative to that. the trade-off for that is you have to take seriously -- [applause] >> we will see to get claps on the next part. >> wait for the other side. [laughing] >> the other side of that deal is you actually to take

enforcement seriously in the future, you know, there are a lot of people and let the so we don't think it's an important issue and actually i think the democrats themselves, that is one of their big weaknesses, that they have not been, they've got articulated i think a sustainable position on this question. i don't think that you can really even have a democracy if you cannot define who the people are. that means clear rules for citizenship and how you get citizenship and who gets the right to vote, and it does mean control over your borders as you look for. that's been the trade in every comprehensive immigration bill going back to the 1986 reform. we cannot get to it because activists on both sides on the right, you get this big group of people that is dead set against what they call amnesty and on the left there a lot of people

to really don't want strong enforcement measures. i think it was the only way to ultimately solve this problem. and by the way, if you could solve it it takes away this huge cultural shtick that people like trump had been using too bad a more progressive candidates. that i think is an important thing we have to accomplish. >> i i suppose depressing to thk that maybe the reason why they are not agreeing to that kind of grand bargain is because it want to let go of that shtick. let's go to the audience. make sure close to the mic so we can you. >> speak about this whole narrative process is just wondering, are both right and left the various activities of people attend to steer the narrative in politics and otherwise using fear and how really affected using fear in trying to steer the narrative whether it's -- and how we break

that cycle or get past it it seems the leading both sides everything. >> i think it depends if the source of fear but use the fear comes from some kind of a social injustice, right? if it's the fear of police violence or the fear of sexual assault, these are all issues that have very specific ways of being addressed. they do need to be addressed by policy. i think that however national identity and democratic politics cannot simply be based around fears and their mitigation comes sfb based on hope and a certain sense. i think it's that hope that's a positive agenda that we really

have been addressing. obama talked talk to and i this actually why a lot of these white working class people voted for and why he was elected twice. it's kind of disappeared from the narrative of a lot of politicians. some combination of real policy efforts to address these real injustices, combined with attention to integrative identities that will actually bring people back together, i think that's the right combination it's not an either/or choice. i think we can do both of those at the same time. >> first of all i'd like to push back on the fact that someday get told trump is a genius. that's not a new, the southern strategy is not a new playbook. that's what it is. but anyways, specifically addressing you said about syria and iraq and of his other things. how can a national identity exists in a nation that is a fundamentally set up by imperial

powers? >> so i didn't call donald trump a genius across-the-board. [laughing] i mean, he's obviously very ignorant of policy and not thoughtful and so forth, but he does at this very intuitive sense of what a certain social sector and the united states feels and thinks. and he did that and what with r politicians did not so that's the sense in which i was saying he had a very good political instinct which by the think he continues to exhibit and so i think if you're a democrat you ought to be a little bit careful about underestimating that. but the question, so of course these nations were set up by imperial powers. just like in sub-saharan africa, if this regional actually alleged organized itself based on sort of indigenous social

forms, he wouldn't have states that offer you have tribes, ethnic groups, a lot of social units that were really not viable any kind of modern international order with some exceptions, iran, egypt, turkey. these are actually real nationstates, but the others really are not. but they don't have much choice. you're not going to get to any kind of stability unless you can create some form of national identity. i was in iraq in late august, and there's been this ongoing struggle because part of the solution to this factionalism is to try to create some kind of sense of the overarching iraqi identity. there are some politicians that are trying to do that, but others are perfectly happy to simply push the sectarian agenda to their particular communities.

so you tell you what the alternative is there to having a national story. we can't undo 150 years of colonial legacy. you can't undo it. as a practical policy going forward, you need something like national identity. >> so we should prop up dictators like moammar gadhafi? >> no. i think we should try to do what venture do in iraq and afghanistan, actually have a nation based on democratic principles. >> the person want to say is on the immigration debate, malcolm gladwell is podcast revisions that history has an episode about, a ghost of history immigration and basically he argues for less enforcement of the border as a solution, that when those more enforcement, that cause people to stay or in the united states and not being able to freely go back to anyway, the question i had though was about, so if you

have, like, for example, if you have the rights and a politicians on the right using, say minorities struggles as a wedge issue, how do you think that these minorities should struggle to get more rights, nor recognition? or are you saying should they just kind of the quiet for a while? >> no. i mean, i guess it really depends on the specific way in which you articulate your agenda. for example, i really like the affordable care act, right? i think that was a great example of a general social policy picketed great benefit for african americans as well as for rural whites that were not getting adequate access to health care. and i think that's the kind of,

that's my idea of a well targeted, the fact is it's not targeted. it is rather targeted against an economic group that doesn't have health insurance that includes people of different races, ethnicities and so forth. that by itself is one of the biggest things that was done for a lot of minority groups in this country who simply did not have good health care. i'm not opposed to specific remedies that are based on gender or race or ethnicity in cases where that's clearly the source of the problem. but i do think, look, i mean, just to put this in plain political terms, i think the democrats right now, and by the way, so i will say this quite unashamedly and i'm not saying this as a partisan. i think they really, really have take back the house at least on

november six because i just don't think -- [applause] and by the way, i was a registered republican up until 2010. i just think our checks and balances are not going to work if you don't have an electoral check to what's going on now and that's why i'm saying that's very important. looking down the road i think that the democrats, if they're going to actually govern the country in the future have to make this basic strategic choice about whether they double down on the existing identity groups were all other activists live, that's the way to get out the vote for elections, or whether they want to try to attract some of the white working class and of the voters that have been leaving the party for the public over the last 30 years. i think as an electoral strategy that identity route has worked pretty well for them but i don't think it's actually a good way of governing the country i think that's the big choice that is

now in front of that party. my preference is to go the second group, the more integrated one. i can see the pressures for trying to do that. actually bernie sanders was more in my camp when he started his campaign by emphasizing economic issues over identity issues. even he ran into this bus all resistance because as i said, the activists within the identity groups. that's the basic strategic choice i think that's faced by the democrats now. >> you talked about -- thank you. [laughing] >> you talked about syria earlier as an example of what happens when there's no national identity. i think your analysis of how the syrian war started is wrong. the battle in syria in 2011 was a political battle.

a lot of people demanded democracy and a were people who did not want democracy, the people who were in power that repressed it with an iron fist. during this uprising there were kurds, sunnis, alawites all demanding and inclusive system for civilians. there was a lot of slogans and thinks using the protests were people are saying we're all syrians come syrians are one, this kind of thing. i wonder if you can expand on this kind of straight up. >> unfortunately, in syria there is a relatively small group of people that were fighting the assad regime that were liberals in the western sense that actually wanted a tolerant democratic syria. i know a lot of them. i have worked with a lot of them. a lot of them are my friends. wish it were more of them but, unfortunately, in that country there are a lot of other really powerful groups that basically wanted a particular version of

islamist politics or a lot of foreigners that were coming into the country that definitely did not want a democratic syria. so you know, the assad regime was terrible. you're right, it begins with the assad regime. they would rather see half the population either killed or flee the country rather than give up political power. that's a matter of national identity. the assad regime is loyal to the alawites sect. it is loyal to the sect breath and any notion and all of these other sunnis and kurds and other people should be part of a greater thing called syria. okay about that here all the care about is the survival of the alawites and then that sets off every other sectarian group in the country to somebody sent only their sect an oddity called siri. that was the basic problem. >> they also tortured and killed many alawites. >> they did, of course. of course.

>> pie. in 2012 the republican party sort of had this speedy could you lean in. >> us in 2012 the republican party famously had this autopsy where they said concluded they were two races basically, to at the immigration and the need to change. they didn't and it turns out that was right thing to do for them electorally they won in 2016. is it ever going to be bad for them? they continue to win on these sort of policies is it ever going to -- >> i think it's bad for them right now, right? they are trying to govern the country based on pretty extreme policies that are popular on it with about one-third of americans, and they're opposing that as national policies. i don't think they're doing a good job right now. now, the question is when does

become so apparent to enough people that this is not a good set of policies on which to govern that they actually vote in a way that changes the electoral electoral college? one of the things i think to worry about in the future is already in the past 20 years we've had two reflections in which the loser of the popular vote has actually become president. both of them republicans if you look at the electoral map, for the next several presidential electoral cycles, that may happen on a regular basis because all of the big population gains that will ship the demographic balance are all occurring in california, new york, eleanor, places that are reliably democratic already. furthermore, as the country continues to organize, a lot of small states, these rural states like wyoming and montana and so forth, which continued to get two senators compared to california that has 40 million

people and two senators, so the unrepresented fitness of the senate is already very, very skewed and is going to continue to get more skewed as time goes on. i don't think this is this is a for stability in the future because there's going to be this increasingly evident divergence between popular will an electoral outcomes that's consistently going to favor the republicans. so you tell me at what point this rings people out into the streets or provokes a really big upset. my prediction is if dollar trump wins again in 2020, at actually a popular vote against them exactly going to be more than the 3 million that happened in 2016. so we're heading for a big constitutional crisis i think on precisely this issue. >> i want to push and something. i will go to you, but it seems to me this book and maybe i'm

projecting because i'm a person afflicted spends time criticizing the left and it seems this book is more aimed at the left that that is at the r. but i almost kind of assumed implicitly because you think the right is a lost cause, which i do, frankly i do, too, which is that the right is not going to find the will, its leadership, it's constituency will not find the will to get off this corrosive path so the only hope in a sense is that the left broadly speaking, the democrats, but find a way to articulate a message that will defeat electorally, politically this kind of corrosive -- do you agree? feel free to disagree but is that why the book is poor and and maybe your critique is more aimed at the left? >> i don't like more of the critique is in at the left. i have one chapter where i'm trying to explain the origins of identity politics in the united states.

i do think its origins are on the left. >> maybe i was projecting. [laughing] >> but you know, as i said the book was written because donald trump became president. i don't think it's, that scenario outlined is necessarily the case. elections really matter at a think a lot of republicans that are lined up behind trump, if they lose, if the american people really start rejecting the republican party, as they may on november 6, they will begin to realize this is really a losing cause and their loyalty may start to weaken. but you can't vote for nothing, you know? you can't vote for nothing, and so i do think the democrats, this midterm election, i'm not that worried about because all the candidates are kind of chosen locally. there's a lot of diversity say more conservative democrats running in swing states where it's sort of a tossup.

but in 2020 they have to pick one standardbearer. that's good to be a really tough choice because the party really is split between the progressive wing and a more centrist wing. you have to choose one person that's going to represent the whole party. i really do have a worry that as bad as or bill kristol seem at that point, if they don't have a good standardbearer, they may lose again. >> i i think we have time for maybe two more questions. >> early on he spoke about this drive towards actualization -- actualization. i guess being driven as, from finding groups to promote rights be on the freedom of speech and the right to vote i guess it's the word beyond that stuck with me. so in my personal experience not

every vote counts the same and not all speech, not every voice counts the same. if the tree falls on the one hears it, did it really fall? my seven year olds voice was a victim doesn't count the same as the local governments voice. so i'm wondering if you believe that in restoring the integrity of our generic rights, freedom of speech and the right to vote any more fundamental, more fundamentally, that we can reduce factualization that way, and wrestling with take a hit -- how do you move towards one another with these assumptions? doesn't make sense? >> quite honestly, the biggest misallocation of power complicity with the role of

money in american politics. [applause] so what's going on in the world is as globalization has progressed to every single country has developed a layer of oligarchs. extremely which people here in this country there kind of distributed. there's ones in the left and ones on the right, that even if they all agreed with you politically, that's still a big problem because concentrated wealth, concentrated as it is today leads to concentrated political power. i think you can't really restore the equality -- you'll never get to society where every voice is actually equal. but you can serve and make it less unequal that it is any think it really has to begin some out in the realm of campaign-finance. unfortunately, the supreme court has made it extremely difficult to legislate about. i think we actually had a project at may center at

stanford to try to get ways where you could strengthen the representativeness of elections in the nomination process without having to go to a constitutional amendment. it's pretty difficult but i think there are certain things that can be done. if you don't solve the basic problem, your seven-year-old is never going to have nearly the adequate voice that he deserves. >> right. she. >> sorry, she deserves. >> what is a program at stanford? >> we had a program called american democracy in comparative perspective where we came up with a number of reform ideas that don't require a constitutional amendment. because given authorization given how hard it is to change the constitution i think those sorts of things are off the table now. >> i want to thank you, frank, for come here thank all of you and i will remind you -- [applause]

just a quick reminder to everyone. frank will be in the signing tent so buy his book. get it signed come have a minute to talk to have great texas book festival. >> thanks. >> thanks very much. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]