robes, chasen buttigieg in i have something to tell you for young adults, and r.k. russell, author of the yards between us. see our complete national book festival schedule online at booktv.org. the library of congress national book festival live, saturday beginning at 9 a.m. ian on c-span2. -- eastern on c-span2. >> and you've been watching booktv. every sunday on c-span2 the watch nonfiction authors discuss their books. it's for serious readers -- television for serious readers. and is watch them all online anytime at booktv.org. you can also find us on twitter, facebook and youtube @book 26. ..

this was written just before the collapse of the soviet union and thehe idea was there did sem to be this process of modernization. that was development. people want to live in modern societies the kind of modern society that we seem to be any at that with liberal democracy and market-based capitalism that socialism. and assist with getting off this train of history one stop before the communist marxist said we would get off. >> professor francis fukuyama you were talking there in 26 about 1992 book the end of

history and the last man. did what you said about liberal democracy, as a standup today? >> guest: yeah, actually that clip was remarkably coherent. since 2006 i think we seen a lot of regression in the progress of democracy all over the world. freedom house, that tracks global democracy has noted we had 17 consecutive years of decline in the aggregate amount of democracy. i think the world really looks different in many ways than it did back man. but the question i was trying to raise was not what could happen in any given decade or short-term period, but really this longer arc. there i think there still an open question as to what kind of destination where heading to as our societies modernize. >> again, you were referencing your book from 1992 the end of

history and the last man. i want to read from your most recent book which came out last year and it's called liberalism and its discontent. "i am writina period where liberalism has faced numerous critiques and challenges and appears to many people a gender by alternative political systems." where would you rank the threat to classical liberalism today? professor fukuyama: i think it is pretty severe but not as

severe as the ones we endured in the 1930's and 1940's, when when you have stalinism and fascism as active enemies, or even if the 1960s and 70s where you had a lot of coup d'états and authoritarian takeovers. but i do think the threat is pretty severe. the geopolitical dimension is important so you've now got russia and china which are consolidated authoritarian states and russia just launched an invasion of a neighboring democracy, trying to prove that democracy wouldn't work in that part of the world, in 2022. and china has been arguing that western democracy is in terminal, some kind of terminal decline. so you've got that extra challenge and you've got the internal challenge of populism in the united states, first and

foremost, where you have politicians and a political movement that really attacks the liberal part of liberal democracy, the rule of law. doesn't want to concede elections and isn't interested in the peaceful transfer of power. so i woulds say yes, we are ina very difficult phase p right no, and if we don't fight back against this, it's going to get worse. >> host: sticking with "liberalism and its discontents," you talked about t national populace on the right and progresses on the left what's the definition of each of those terms? >> guest: i think that the populace nationalism denies the fundamental liberal premise that all human beings are fundamentally equal immoral terms there's an inherent human dignity that transcends your skin color, your gender, other kinds of attributes that deserve

to be protected by a rule of law, by giving your rights, that the state needs to observe. i think a lot of nationalistsna would say and said no, that's not good enough, we are not just generic human beings. we are hindus or we are hungarians or where some particular subset of human beings and we have a special status that deserves recognition above that of other people this is not the first time this has come about liberalism itself got its start in the 17th century after 150 years of continuous warfare in europe between protestants and catholics over how they would use religion to define a particular polity, and that liberal, early liberals is that we need to get beyond that and recognize the fact regardless of our religious confession, we are human beings and it's that characteristic that we need to preserve and we

need a system that allows people with diverse views as to the good life, a way of living together. and so that is a recurring threat. it was religion in the 17th century. it was nationalism inat the 19th and early 20th centuries and so there are these movements that reject that premise of human universality. i think that is really what's attacking liberalism from the right. the threat from the left is a little bit different because i think that manyro progressives n the united states and other advanced countries believe that liberalism really doesn't serve the ends of social justice in terms of racial equality, gender equality, the quality of sexual orientation, this sort of thing. and that they need something

faster they need a system that is more decisive that will protect the rights of marginalized groups and, therefore, they are willing to discard certain liberal principles of freedom of speech, probably first and foremost. i think between these two threats to the one coming from the right is actually much more present. it's backed by a lot of geopolitical power and by state power in many instances. i do think you see it liberal tendencies on both sides. >> host: some of theal leaders that you cite in your book identity who are perhaps national populace include gluten and 31, corbin, would you put modi in there as well? and possibly for president trump? >> guest: definitely modi and trope are charter members of the illiberal group. monitored and itrs was great in

the late 1940s and illiberal bases because it's an unbelievably diverse society come differs religiously by divy task, by geography, by language. as if the liberalism is basically a doctrine that seeks to allow diverse populations to liveiv in peace under a general sense that all human beings should be treated fairly and equally. what modi and his bjp, his hindu nationalist party have been trying to do, is to shift that national identity to one no space of hinduism which then excludes basically muslims andd christians that make up a significant part of the indian population of. i think this is aa for, you know, a lot of violence, which india has already experienced when he was the chief minister and was pushing a similar kind of agenda. i think in the case of donald

trump, he doesn't say this quite so explicitly but he has given permission for a lot of white nationalists to say no, we don't accept this diverse, multiracial, multicultural america as the true america. there is an other, older america, that was found on common religious christian values, that had a certain racial definition. and that is the kind of america that he and his followers see being eroded. he has something less than a universal understanding of who is it that deserves dignity in the world. that is one of the things that is currently boiling -- broiling american politics. >> a term and a meaning that

comes up often in your writing is "political decay." what does that mean? professor fukuyama: political decay's not something i have always used. it does not appear in my 1992 book, because, i just wasn't aware of this process. basically, political decay occurs when you create a modern state that is functional, but it gets undermine, fight elite groups that seek to capture the state and make use of it for their own purposes and protect their positions. it is the tendency of human institutions to get overly rigid. human beings are rule following creatures. that is one of the characteristics that is built into human nature. once you have a set of rules that people follow, they want to continue following them.

the environment changes and what looked like a good set of rules no longer become functional. but then, you are trapped in the system because you are not able to change it, barring war, collapse, crisis. and that i think is the situation that america faces right now. it has a very old constitutional order that has served it very well for more than a couple of centuries. but that order has big problems right now. and the system does not seem to be able to correct itself. part of it is we have a constitution that is hard to amend. also, americans get used to doing things a certain way and they can't imagine changes to those institutions that they pride themselves by. as a result, the system begins to decay and it becomes much less effective. >> i want to read a quote from robert george of princeton

university. this is from may of this year. he was quoted on twitter as saying if polls are to be believed, there has been a precipitous decline in americans belief in the importance of patriotism, religion, marriage, family and community. values that, broadly speaking, throughout our history, have united americans despite our many differences. by the authority vested in me, by absolutely no one, i declare june to be fidelity month. a month dedicated to renewing fidelity to god, spouses and families, our country and our community. i don't know if you saw that, when the professor made that statement but what is your reaction? professor fukuyama: robbie is a friend of mine. we served on president george w. bush's ethics council. we disagreed about many things.

i think that, for example, belief in god, that is happening. there is a lot of data that shows that at least in terms of fidelity to institutionalized religion, there has been a big change. this generation is much less religious than the preceding generations. some of those declines are class based. if you think about something like marriage or bringing children up in a single-parent family, one of the unfortunate things that has happened in american society is that, for well-to-do people, people with higher education, professionals, those institutions have gotten stronger. for well-to-do people, the trend

has been in the opposite direction. instead of latchkey children, you have helicopter parents who are much too devoted to their children for their children's own good. but for working-class people and people with lower levels of education, that delay has continued. that is one of the big divides in our society, there is a drug crisis, and opioid crisis. there is a working-class people that educated people are largely immune to. patriotism is a complicated issue. i think that there is a deep problem. because, americans, i had thought when i was growing up, had come to an identity of national identity that i thought was a good place to be after the civil rights movement. there was a diverse -- divorce

between what defined an american and their race and gender. it was based on liberal values. and i think that is what helped me as a third-generation generation descendant of japanese immigrants who regarded myself as fully american. i hate to say that in the last decade, a number of americans have been retreating from that understanding of american identity to relocate it in a particular race or ethnicity. one of the problems with patriotism is you have to define what is the country, what is the national identity to which you are being patriotic. they both believe in the constitution but they believe in different understandings of what the american constitution

implies. and that means, you know, what's patriotism, evocative during the january 6 riots said ok, patriots, go express yourselves. -- yvonne cut trump during the -- ivanka trump during the january 6 riots said ok, patriots, go express yourselves. which country is it that they really love? i think that is something that has not deteriorated, it has just split in terms of very different understandings of what america is and what it represents. >> professor fukuyama, when it comes to identity politics and critical race theory, which you write about as well, how do those fit into what we are discussing right now? professor fukuyama: there has been a huge shift in the self

understanding of what it means to be a progressive or a person on the left. for most of the 20th-century, it was defined in broad class terms. the fundamental divide between the booze was the and the proletariat. if you are working class, -- as time went on in the second half of the 20th century, that understanding of marginalization began to be much more rooted in specific groups that had been marginalized. i think there is a completely appropriate recognition that the working class was a different experience for white people than it was for african-americans. the differences in workplace experiences between men and women were different. therefore, you have to define inequality in much more specific terms that had to do with identities that were not shared

universally across the society that applied to particular groups. now, in terms of the next book i wrote, "liberalism i think there is a very liberal -- "liberalism," martin luther king said african-americans are being treated as second-class citizens and we want to enjoy the same rights white people enjoy. that is a liberal understanding of universality. i think there is a different understanding that basically has become more entrenched in recent years, that says these differences are much more essential. they are not things that can be overcome. that they really define who you are as an individual.

and that leads to a very different kind of identity politics, in which these circumstances, you have no control over. what skin color you are, what gender you are and so forth become the things that most identify you. and that, i think, is -- it becomes a problem in the liberal society because it means that your group membership is what is important. that is what is going to determine the way the state treats you, how you're going to get a job and how you're going to get into the university. that sort of thing. becomes an illiberal understanding of human society. >> i will read a quote from president -- former president barack obama. "it is very hard to sustain a democracy when you have such massive concentrations of wealth. and so part of my argument has been that unless we attend to that and unless we make people

feel more economically secure and we are more seriously creating ladders of opportunity and a stronger safety net that is adapted to these new technologies as displacements are going on around the world, if we don't take care of that, that is also going to fuel the mostly far right populism that can also potentially come from the left. that is undermining democracy because it makes people angry, resentful and scared." professor fukuyama: yeah, well, i agree completely with that. it's funny, i agree with most of these kind of broad statements and principles that obama has made, both as president and subsequently. in a democracy, you have to worry about not just the equality of formal rights, but the substantive equality.

people begin to lose faith in the legitimacy of the system. i think that some or a good deal of what was driving the populisms of both the right and the left in the 2010s was the inequality that was the byproduct of what is called neoliberal economic policy. what had been pursued in the late 1970's, 19 80's and 1990's, the created a lot of -- that created a lot of inequality. as a solution, i agree with what obama said. you need more redistribution. you need protections that equalize outcomes and not simply opportunities like obamacare, like the affordable care act, that try to provide a certain minimal level of health care for all americans. that is something that every other modern democracy provides for its citizens, except for the united states, up until the aca

was passed in 2010. in general, a more expansive welfare state with more protections for people that, yes, does redistribute from rich to poor, that would go a long way to securing people's belief in the legitimacy of democracy. i think the social democracy that grew in europe in the post-world war ii era that was represented by the american new deal, they were very important in anchoring democracy. so, i have absolutely no quarrel with that. i think the problem, however, is that i'm not sure -- if the problem is just economic inequality, you can remedy that through some fairly easy policies. i think that we have been in the process of doing that.

you raise taxes on rich people and you use that money to provide more health, more education, more social benefits. the problem, i think right now, is that the resentments and the polarization between red and blue is not simply about economic inequality. if it were, you could fix that problem fairly easily. if that were the real driver of the -- if that were the real driver, the populist upsurge should have been bernie sanders and not donald trump. there should have been more intervention in the economy and more protection. but it took this curious other forum in which it was really cultural complaints that rose to the fore, like hostility over

immigration, fights over crt and national identity. what is defining the republican party is not so much economic -- they were actually ok with not dismantling social security. what really is driving the passions are these cultural issues that may have been triggered by economic inequality. i think that is why more social protections isn't going to seal the problems we face in our society. >> since the publication of your book in 1992, have your political views evolved in any way? professor fukuyama: of course. i wrote nine books after "the end of history and the last man." you can trace the evolution through those books. i just don't consider myself as

much of a conservative anymore as i did back when that book was written. and i would say that a lot of that was in reaction to two real-world developments that, you know, i thought had their roots in conservative ideas and lead to very bad outcomes. the first was the iraq war. i originally thought that getting rid of saddam hussein was a good idea. but as we got closer to the war, i became more and more skeptical that this would actually work out well. and sure enough, it worked out much worse than even i anticipated at that time. and i think it did a lot to discredit the idea of democracy. certainly, american democracy promotion. it is still the case in the south, when the united states complains about the russian invasion of ukraine, a lotta people, especially in the arab world say you did the same thing

to iraq, so who are you to be a big hypocrite about this? that was one. the other was the financial crisis in 2008, which i think was driven by a certain interpretation of market fundamentalism that had taken a hold and was a dominant conservative idea of margaret thatcher, ronald reagan and a lot of the american right for that period of time. these were both ideas that simply did not work out. it seemed to me at that point that we were going to have to readjust the way we think about the world. in that respect, i changed my view. now, the other thing that i began to think about that was more perhaps academic than political, the first is this issue that we have already

mentioned, which is the idea of political decay. when i wrote "the end of history and the last man," i had this conception of history that may be you move backwards a little bit but ultimately, the ratchet would allow you to go forward. and i didn't really anticipate the idea, especially in the united states, that you could have a rapid, pretty catastrophic decay in the way that our institutions worked. but perhaps the most important insight that i developed, and this is something that i worked out in the course of these two volumes that i wrote, the origin of clinical order and political decay, really had to do with the role of the state. i didn't appreciate how important just having a state was. i think this was a cognitive problem for many americans. americans just assumed the state

is always going to exist. for many of them, they think you have to protect individuals from the state. the main problem in politics is constraining the state. and they don't understand that if you don't have a state, you kind of end up in a really bad situation. this, i think, was really driven home by our experience in afghanistan and iraq, where you have a collapse of state institutions in both countries. the united states was responsible for creating order out of that kind of chaos. and we had no intellectual resources to figure out how do you build a state in a society where the state does not exist. where you basically have rule by armed militias, a war and violations of basic rights. if you don't have a state, you can't protect peoples security

and their right to simply live securely. that started a whole train of, you know, investigation, academic investigation on my part. because i realized that, as a political scientist, at least in that period, we did not have a lot of resources to understand where states came from. because, like a lot of people, we assumed the state was always going to exist and it was a question of what do you do with it, how do you live with it and so forth. i wanted to go back not just to greece and rome and earlier human civilizations. i had to go back to primate havey or to -- behavior to understand how societies create order. in that process, at a certain point, maybe 8000 years ago you

got the first states appearing in mesopotamia and the nile valley and the valley of mexico. annapolis, a big revelation. that early process of state building and how it was that those states came about that might have some implications for what you might want to do in places like iraq and afghanistan. as -- there is much longer discussion about what happens once you get to the state. i think the distinction between just having a state, which is basically the friends and family, the ruler that imposed their will on the rest of society in a modern state where the ruler believes that he or she is a public servant that is meant to serve the interest of the whole society. to do that in an impartial way is a further evolution of

political institutions that is extremely difficult to bring about and has happened in only a relatively small handful of societies. that is something i simply did not appreciate, the difficulty of creating a state that has low levels of corruption, that can deliver public services and public goods effectively. that is something that is much harder to bring about then democracy. democracy is pretty easy. we've got mechanisms for holding elections, checking whether there are relatively -- they are relatively free and fair. it is much harder to get to that modern state. this is a problem that i label, getting to denmark. unlike bernie sanders, what i like about denmark is not that it is a social democracy -- that is important. what is remarkable about denmark and the rest of scandinavia is

they've got clean and effective government. they've got big states, but they are states that actually deliver on the things the state is supposed to deliver on. health care, education, security and the like. and, the question of getting to denmark is something i really had not appreciated the difficulty of. so, that is certainly one of the things i learned in the years after i wrote the end of history. it has been the subject of a lot of academic work and research i have done in the years since. >> thank you for joining us on this independence day weekend for this conversation with author and professor francis fukuyama. as professor fukuyama mentioned, he has written nine books since his 19 history book. we are going to be focusing on

four of them. -- came out in 2000 14. identity, the demand for dignity and politics of resentment, 2018. liberalism and its discontents came out last year. if you'd like to principate in this conversation, (202) 748-8000 for those of you in eastern and central time zones. (202) 748-8001 four mountain and pacific zones. if you want to make a comment, try the text number. (202) 748-8003. if you send a text, please include your first name and city . we will school through -- scroll through our social media sites so if you want to make a comment via social media, you can do so there.

professor fukuyama first appeared on book tv's in-depth program in 2006. 17 years later, we are pleased to have him back to talk about his updated work. in the origins of political order, dr. fukuyama. you talk about three things. the state, rule of law and accountable government. what are those? >> i think those are the foundations of any modern, just political order. the state is a power institution. it is about generating the social powers so that you can protect the community, provide security both internal and external. you can enforce laws and you can deliver basic services. health, education, infrastructure and the like. that is the power institution. the rule of law fundamentally is a set of agreed-upon rules that

limits the power of the state. answer all rights are rooted in the rulee of law and the fact that the state give it do whatever it wants, and if it is ruled of law rather than rule by law it means those rules are applied to the rulers as well as the ruled. in china they've got ruled by law. the person at the top of the communist party makes the rules and it forces them against the rest of society but that person is not subject to those same rules. the same rules. they are pretty much exempt. if you have a true rule of law it means everybody has to follow those basic rules. and finally the third bill is democratic accountability where the ruler, the identity of the rule is determined by the people through free and fair elections so that the ruler represents the will of the greatest part of the

population. the modern political order is a balance. on the one hand, you got the state which is the power of institution and on the other hand, you've got the rule of law and democratic accountability. they try to limit the power of the state. i think the difficulty of achieving a good political order is that violence is hard to get at. if you're too far over on the state side, pr china. you've got a very powerful state but yous don't actually have constraints on that state so the ruler can do whatever he wants. except for the evil & history. she's in pain gets to set the rules but on the other hand, if all you've got are institutions of constraint and very weak state that's actually the situation in many developing countries you take something like afghanistan before the taliban took over.

they h did hold elections. they had something they labeled the rule of law that their state wasn't capable of providing security. that's the fundamental definition of state, is a monopoly of power over territory. that the disease that affects manyth developing countries so getting that balance right between having a state that's got enough capacity to be effective but also his constraint so it doesn't violate the rights of its citizens and reflects there will, that's what a real liberal democracy aims to be and that something that is quite hard to get right. >> host: when it comes to liberal democracy, what is your hatake on religion? >> guest: well, it's complicated because there is definitely a relationship

between modern understandings of democracy and religious origins. so in christianity there is this belief in human universalism, you know, that all human beings are creatures of god and innocence equal in his eyes. one of the big transformations that happens in the european thought between let's say the protestant reformation in theio enlightenment is that that doctrine becomes separate from its religious context and becomes an assertion about human nature and secular form. early liberals believed that human universalism but didn't connect it to the particular religious origins. there are other ways religion affects the functioning of democracy. so, for example, the traditional understanding of why american democracy was so successful was

the one that was actually outlined by alexis de tocqueville visited the unitedit states in the 1830s and he said americans are very good at this part of association. you you don't need a centralized state to get them to organize, they can doe that in their communits and they learn citizenship by participating in voluntary organizations. certainly at the time he wrote, the vast majority of those organizations were religious in nature, bible studies or temperance movements, of various sorts. the traditionalem sociological argument for why associational life as dense as it is in the united states is that it had to do with sectarian nature of american protestantism where you didn't have a centralized hierarchical church near you with many competing churches that was one of the reasons why

religiosity was stronger in the united states that in other developed democracies because people were not forced to join a church. they didn't have to sign up to the state church pick if he wanted the comfort that a religion would give them, then they could associate with whatever sect wanted to and that created the grounds for democratic citizenship and participation. if you want a recent example, look at the civil rights movement. martin luther king was a baptist minister, and a lot of the civil rights, civil society groups organized church groups where people both african-american and white organized around their churches in order to seek a social justice. in that sense i think religion has been important. however, basic tenet of

liberalism is that we don't have one religion, and we don't have the state tries to impose a single religion on everybody. tolerance, religious tolerance is one of thean foundationalou principles of a liberal society peer that was what drove early liberals to create this form of government that basically was an agreement to lower the temperature of discourse by taking final ends as defined by religion out of the public arena and relegate that to private belief. so in that sense religion is something that is not compatible with the modern understanding of a liberal society. >> host: francis fukuyama, graduated from cornell, phd from harvard, worked at georgew mason and johns hopkins for many years, estelle at stanford. let's take some calls.

mike is in myopic new york. go ahead, mike, good afternoon. i would like the professors opinion and analysis on what he believes china will do in the near term and say for the next 25 to 30 years, and i would like him to give you also give us analysis of the chinese behavior the last ten, 15, 20 as compared to imperial japan from say 1900 through 1941. thank you. >> guest: i think china has been on a roll for some time its modernization after 1930 it has been truly remarkable. it's one of the great economic miracles of human history that goes from this extremely poor country to the second largest economy in the world in such a short time. i think that there is some

evidence that may have actually reached the peak of that growth and action on the downside, a longer-term either stagnation or decline. but they got a lot of momentum behind them and i think they basically want remake world order in ways that will be favorable to them. i don't think that there like the former soviet union where they got this messianic view that there's a certain ideology that has to prevail everywhere, that if it would have to be like i china appear fatal actually care and fact they care in fact, they think many chinese don't think most countries are capable of really emulating them with their respect for bureaucracy, for the kind of internal state organization. but they definitely do want respect. they keep talking about the 100 years of humiliation where china

which have been recognized as one off the great civilizations in the world didn't get that kind of respect and they want to have it. that provides a big challenge to everyone else. now, i think that the comparison with japan, it's accurate in certain ways of. japan was certainly the rising power in east asia in the early 20th century. but they did that in the period when colonialism was the norm among powerful countries, that you wanted colonial possessions and, therefore, they took over korea, taiwan,n, manchuria, othr parts of china. and i don't think the chinese are like that peer their main issue really is taiwan right now because they all agree that i want, and we agree, that taiwan is part of china if you would like to reincorporate that i

would enter think that's going to be the biggest bone of contention if they try to do that by force in the future. but i don't think they are on a roll today and take over a lot of other parts of the world. they want influence. they want respect but they don't necessarily the empire of the sort that japan tragically in the 1930s. >> host: next call for francis fukuyama come from cornelius down in alexandria louisiana. cornelius, did you hear from you. go ahead and make a comment or question call mac first of all happy and blessed fourth of julr weekend everybody out there. peter, as an author yet to look at abraham bolden, has a book called the echo of dealey plaza. he was the first african-american secret service agent for president jimmy durkee tried to prevent the kennedy assassination. he got his pardon last year from

biden. but now my question -- one is at a new book? , i'll be honest with you, i don't know i appreciate the recommendation. go ahead. >> okay. mr. francis, and want you to mike, i was admitted to police officer i tried to fight against the russians. the communist chinese have this built in wrote initiative whether conquering, not conquering but going around buying up everything combined up all the farmland, military bases and small-town america trying to fight against them pick they got a secret base which is military base down there in cuba just like the cuban missile crisis during kennedy. andis you said you were a conservator you left the conservative party get my question for you, president trump try to prevent january 6th, i can prove it, peter.

cash patel had the evidence he tried to give 20,000 troops there before nancy pelosi and mitch mcconnell sergeant ofrg arms which you ordered not to do anything, even democrats have, and said the fbi knew about january 6th coming and did nothing. ray evans was behind all of this stufff come not president trump. president trump -- >> host: cornelius, we got a lot here. let's see what professor wants to respond to. >> guest: well, i mean, look up the january 6th stuff i think the material that is come out of the january 6th committee tells you really much more accurately what happened on that day and i would not trust cash patel word on any of this. in terms of china, the belt and road initiative is driven by a lot of different -- one is just

commercial but the others pick chinese construction companies that don't have a lot of business in china andn want to keep people employed particular to make profits and so they been told to go abroad. they do want to expand their influence.e. i think the use of this initiative for strategic military purposes, it does exist. there are certain facilities they are trying to create but i think the fundamental thing is more a political one where they want to cultivate goodwill in the developing world. it's not working for them very well. a lot of the problems, a lot of their projects have developed real problems. they are not making p money and their casting a lot of countries, pakistan, sri lanka, argentina, montenegro into huge debt crisis.

so in a way they're behaving a lot alike american creditors or european creditors 30, 40 years ago and their generating the opposite of goodwill for their generating a lot of resentment on the part of countries that cannot repay these chinese debts. so i would say that's really the big problem theth chinese have created this initiative of theirs. >> host: "the origins of political order" came out in 2011 it's the first of a two-part volume you dedicated to samuel huntington. who isis the? >> guest: sandra huntington was one of the great political scientists of the 20th century there are many fields within political science where he made a very bigok mart but his first book i think was in many ways most important called political order in changing societies, published initially in 1968.

so up until that point there had been a broad consensus among social scientists, something called modernization the theory, the basically said all good things would go together, that you get economic growth, you would get the spread of individual freedom, you would get rule of law, or democracy, and all of these things would be mutually supportive. huntington was the first major voice to cast doubt on that in response to all of the coups and military takeovers that were going on throughout latin america, africa, many other parts of the world in this time. he said basically all good things do not go together. if you have socioeconomic modernization, you're going to raise people's expectations and if youif don't have a political system that can satisfy those expectations you're going to get instability, violence and social breakdown. i think he was right about that.

he basically understood the importance of the state and so the reason i dedicated the book to him was my two political order books were in a way efforts to update his thesis, to say yes, actually order is a precondition for all these other good things that a society can engage in, and you have to worry about where that order is coming from. that's, as i said, a lesson that many americans failed to absorb. so, for example, the iraq invasion we kind of assumed you can get rid of the iraq estate you could basically disband the iraqi army and all of its security forces and that somehow spontaneously you would still have order and that was one of the biggest mistakes ever made by an american policymaker. that's within led to the chaos,

the militias, the kind of civil conflict that then, iraq descended into in the years after that. i think huntington would not have been surprised by that result i think he would've said you don't start with the state, you are not going to have democracy and you are not going to have a rule of law becauseu need a state to enforce the law. and that's why i thought that was still an extremely important relevant book. it did need to be updated and that's why i wrote that two volume series. >> host: if people were to pick up huntingtons 1968 book or your the end of history and the last man from 1992, still relevant today? >> guest: yes. i think they are still relevant. huntington on the first page of that book says that the soviet union which was still a going

concern at the time he wrote it, is estate and will always be there and that proved to be wrong. so he got a number of things wrong. i wrote the endwr of history ata time when, actually i wrote before the fall of the berlin wall but we were certainly in the midst of something that huntington himself labeled the third wave of democratization that really begin in the 1970s and continued all the way up until the first decade of the 21st century with a number of democracies expanded. that's obviously not the time were living in. there's been a lot of democratic regress, so that was not a pattern that continued for longer than a generation. those aspects were not right, go ahead and finish. >> guest: well, there is one

aspect, however, of what i wrote back in 1992 that continued to be a theme up until my more recent book, especially my identity books, book. and that really concern the importance of recognition and dignity in human affairs. in the end of history i talked about the fact that there's a part of the human psychology or what plato would have called human seoul, there's a a third part. five irrational part, desiring part, but there's this thing that he called -- which is translated oftentimes that spiritedness or anger, and that's the parthu of human psychology that demands recognition. we are notco satisfied just with peace and security and having a lot of food on our table.

we also want other human beings to respect us, and if we don't get that respect we get very angry. all the way back in 1992 i said this was one of the weaknesses of democracy, that people are not simply satisfied by peace and prosperity. what the also what is respect and recognition. and that they lead into the last part of the book, the last man, for the last man was nietzsche, comes from the philosopher nietzsche who said at the end of history when you get to the modern liberal state, people are not going to be satisfied because their lives are going to be flat your there's nothing to aspire to, and people want that recognition of being greater than or seeking just aims, and if they can't aspire to that then they're going to inspire to interest because that's a really critical part of humanal psychology.

inan many respects that's what e are witnessing right now, that people are not content living in the richest and most stable and secure societies in human history. they also want other things. they want their conception of social justice. they want recognition of themselves as important members of society. i think that's been driving a lot of the instability and populism we have experienced. >> host: martin, dayton, ohio, please go ahead with your question or comment, it's a great honor to be talking with you guys. thank you very much. i'm a public school middle school teacher i teach literacy and reading in high poverty p urban district in ohio. kind of a centerleft person. i think there's great purpose in education especially from the switch from brawn to brain. i am very optimistic with my students about living in the u.s., despite all the problems we do have.

there's a real danger and i guess i will call it banding populism, deindustrialization and globalization and things like that they never talk about automation or taking jobs. but what my point is, there's a lot of developing countries that have lifted people out of poverty despite, you hear about a lot of inequality but do you think we will look back at this globalization era and think that a lot of people were helped as well? there are a lot of people migrating from developing countries to the development countries. under the last activities i l dd with my eighth graders is watched and read about the gearing gap people literally walking through the darien gapal from one f continent to get to this continent for a better life and so i tried to be optimistic and say look, take your education, this is still a great country to grow up into i would love to have your thoughts on

globalization and -- >> host: thank you very much. francis fukuyama. >> guest: first of all, martin, let me say i have great respect for you as a middle school teacher because you are doing gods work and if you'rett transmitting some of the optimism to your students, that's also very important. i've always thought that one of the biggest defenses of the general and of history thesis, despite all of the setbacks and problems we had in american democracy, is that if you ask where do people from poor, disorganized, corrupt, dysfunctional societies, when they leave those places, where did he you want to go? did want to go to china, russia, iran? no. they want to come to the united states, canada or europe. i think that indicates that despite our problems there still a lot of opportunity, freedom

and the chance for a more prosperous life that exists in the united states your point about globalization is absolutely right. if you look at the world as a whole between, let's say the early '70s and the financial crisis, global output increased fourfold. all the goods and services produced by everyone in the world quadrupled in that time, and china by itself managed to lift several hundred million of its own citizens out of really grinding poverty. that's been going on many other developing countries in india, and sub-saharan africa and so forth. if you look at the as a whole, yes, globalization is actually a good thing. .. not necessarily a good thing for every person in every country. and what happened in a lot of rich countries is a lot of low skill jobs not outsourced to

parts of the world where people could do the equivalent work but were paid a lot less. i think that set up the kind of inequality that has driven a lot of populism in the rich world. >> and the thing is so it's true that as taken as a whole, the globe did a lot better, but the globe is not a political entity. we're divided into these nation states and in any given nation state, the effect of this globalization was not necessarily a good one because it did create inequalities in many countries so i think that that's really, you know, one of the other consequences. >> francis fukuyama, i want to go back to religious order 2011. i wrote a question in my notes and i don't know if this is legit or not. but i asked myself the question after reading the book, has the

u.s. ever not been dysfunctional? >> well, i think the degree of polarization and the misfiring of a lot of institutions is greater than in other periods of history, but, you know, poe harization has been around for a long time. in 1861 it led to the civil war and 600,000 americans being killed as a result of that conflict. and so, that's a pretty high degree of dysfunction and there are even other periods. a lot of late 19th century polarized until the election and the deepest stain on our national political development has always been the issue of race. you know, that was the original sin in the united states. it took the civil war to get to formal equality with the 13th and 14th, 15th amendments, but

then it took another century for the promise of those amendments to actually be realized in terms of voting rights and citizenship and greater equality before the law. as everybody understands, the social equality and economic equality, we're still not there. so, that's, you know-- that's an enduring problem that the united states has faced. on the other hand, could you actually use those democratic institutions to keep the peace, to get to policies that would progressively make things better? i think, you know, the system has been functional, it's just, it's taken a long time to, you know, let's say get to the civil rights era, but you know, it eventually happened and so i do think that, you know, i guess the other question you have to ask yourself is, is the united states functional compared to what other societies and it remains the

case that as an economic growth engine, you know, the u.s. has really been unparalleled. i think that a lot of people have been predicting american decline relative to other powers in the world and it just hasn't happened. even after covid, i mean, all the countries coming out of covid. the united states actually looks pretty good despite, you know, our elevated rates of inflation. i mean, we have extremely low rates of unemployment. we continued to be incredibly innovative and you look at the whole ai revolution and it's not happening nearly as fast in china which is now subject to much more severe problems and much lower growth rates than we have. but also compared to europe and japan. so, i do think that, you know, there's something functional going on in the united states that continues to be impressive and it continues to be a beacon

of attraction for a lot of people that aren't fortunate to live in this country. >> so the arc of history over this 250 years, a net positive? >> to justice, i think the original phrase. so this is the thing that i find really frustrating about our discussions, about crt and the way that we teach our history because it does seem to me that you can keep two ideas in your head at the same time. the first idea is that there was this original sin of slavery and then segregation, jim crow, institutionalized racism and that that, the effects of that continue up to the present day. that's just a fact of history. but it's also the case that, you know, there has been progress over those centuries and that, you know, the situation of african-americans is simply not the same as it was, you know, in 1619 or you

know, whatever earlier date that you pick in human history that there has been progress and actually realizing the promise of the declaration of independence, you know, that all men are created equal which now includes all women and a lot of people that had been excluded at the time that those words were penned and that is my understanding of american history, you know, that we have a basic problem and an enduring one, but, you know, our liberal institutions have actually been able to deal with them, not as fast as, you know, we would like or hope, but, you know, again, compared to other societies that have been through war, revolution, you know, to get to a place that's not as good. i'm not sure it's something that is uniquely terrible. >> david, tulsa, good afternoon to you. caller: thank you for this

program. it is the best program on television and there's not a close second. i'd like to ask your guest any kind of -- his definition of critical race theory, his thoughts on it and the role that it's playing in politics today. >> well, i guess you know, there's a version of critical race theory that was established by people like derek bell. i mean, there's a school that extended critical theory in general to racial issues that, you know, in many ways centralized race as a characteristic of the united states and, you know, i think elevated its importance and durability. and you know, that interpretation of american history is what i just said minus the progress.

you know, that it really argues that, you know, the progress is-- has really been more apparent than real and that the fundamental reality is, you know, is the continuation of systemic racism that's baked into all of our institutions and the like and if that is what defines critical race theory i just think that it's wrong. you need a more balanced understanding that admits both the racism, but also the possibility of progress both in the past and for the future. now, the problem, i think, in the united states is that a lot of republicans have latched onto the most extreme assertions of crt and said that, you know, this is characteristic of the way that everybody on the left thinks about that particular issue and they've-- you know, i think exaggerated

the importance of it to the point where, you know, even books talking about rosa parks and the civil rights struggle, you know, are not acceptable reading for young people because that's all lumped into this crt category. i think that's just ridiculous. i think you absolutely have to teach young people about, you know, the terrible things that happened in our racial history in the united states. the real point where that becomes problematic is where you say there's basically there's nothing that can be done about it because it's such an ingrained feature in our system that has denied the possibility of progress both in the past and the future. but you know, unfortunately, that view where you kind of strike a kind of balance is not suitable to the polarized politics that we have today and i think that's a really

terrible thing because you should be able to criticize that racial history, but also believe that there are certain advantages to our system. >> the next call for francis fukuyama is from lucerne-- pardon me, lucerne valley, california. this is john. hi, john. caller: hi there. this is for dr. fukuyama. you spoke previously about organized religion and virtues such as dignity, fidelity and temperance within the civil context. i've been working to ground these types of moral virtues within a more basic incontinuational, behavioral foundation as outlined at the motivation solution.net.

that's my website. i just wanted to ask you, have you worked on any such scientific types of behavioral, psychological synthesis in your political-- >> thank you, john. francis fukuyama. >> well, i don't know how you define scientific -- so the least read book of the 10 i published one i put out in 1988 or 89 called the great disruption. i took on the argument that religion is necessary for moral order and decline of religion across the west explains the rise of all sorts of dysfunctions, crime, family breakdown and the like and my basic argument i would think might be close to what you might be suggesting is that human beings are intrinsically

social creatures and religion, you know, is one method that is used to bind people to certain moral codes and standards, but you don't need religion to do that because the human instincts for conformity to rule is so strong is that it's going to-- that spontaneous social order will reassert itself and you don't need formal religion to do that. if you want empirical demonstrations, europeans are less religious than americans. pollster ask do you go to church or believe in god they say no, but the crime rates are lower than the united states and even in the united states if you want to look at the highest rates of social dysfunction, they actually occur in the bible belt in, you know, places where overt religion is the strongest.

so i think that there are many -- well, one more example to prove this. east asia. east asia does not have organized religion, they've got various forms of shamannism and so forth, but don't have a transcendental views, but japan, korea, taiwan are relatively functional or extremely functional, you know, very well-ordered society. so, i would say that, you know, i believe that there are a lot of things in human nature that promote social order. among them is religion, but it's not a seen sinaquenon. if you want to make a comment.

for those of you in mountain and pacific time phones 202-748-903 for text messages only include the city and first name it is, a text from greg, dr. fukuyama. the british empire likely had the most experience creating states where a modern state didn't exist. what's your assessment of that history good and bad? >> well, i think that it was a good legacy where the british actually succeeded in creating a state and you know, the primary example of that would be india. i mean, india had a state before it was conquered by britain or the subcontinent did, but the british created some modern institutions that really survive to this day, so the indian administrative

service was originally the -- you know, the british-indian civil service. you know, their army came out of the army that was created by the british under the -- so that was case where having ruled india for a couple hundred years they actually had the time and energy to create state institutions, but unfortunately, in many other places they didn't leave behind anything particularly remarkable. nigeria was a british colony that never had anything comparable to the state institutions that india did. you know, one of the dysfunctions of contemporary nigeria, it has an extremely weak government that really can't enforce rules and you know, provide basic order and there are many other cases of that. in some instances, you know, the british participated in a kind of divided rule strategy.

they knew they couldn't create a centralized order and in order to protect their positions they basically tried to play one ethnic group off another and led to different dysfunctions once these countries received independence. kenya is an example of that, where in a certain sense, the major kenyan groups that compete for power were, in a certain sense, promoted by britain as a means of, you know, again a kind of divided rule strategy and one of the defects of kenyan politics, this competition between the five or six major ethnic groups for political power so i would say the british legacy has been very mixed and i think, you know, it's important when colonial powers actually create state institutions, but britain's record on that is not

great. >> another text message from earnest in hopewell junction, new york. is it time to modernize the constitution and how would we do this? >> well, yes. i think that basically there are many features of the constitution that really do need modification. you know, probably the one that's out there the most prominently is the electoral college which means that a very small minority of american voters actually determine who gets to be elected and you know, there are other aspects of the constitution that really overrepresent, you know, smaller states. i mean, that was done deliberately by the founding fathers that wanted to get the ascent of the smaller states to the constitutional order in the first place and therefore gave them in effect a kind of veto power over things that would diminish that, but it's led to, you know, the fact that

california with 40 million people gets two senators and, you know, wyoming with less than a million people gets two senators and just leads to big distortion in the fair representation of voters and so i would think that, you know, one of the things you'd want to do is modify that system so that it was actually more democratic and distributed power, you know, to people in proportion to their numbers of the population. the prospect for doing that right now is almost zero because among other things, the founding fathers made it extremely difficult to modify the constitution. you need big majorities, not just in congress, but in each of the states or you know, among the states in order to bring about an amendment and that's one of the reasons why there have been so few amendments and particularly in this polarized period the

prospect that you get enough consensus on modification that you could actually get the super majority i think is small. so i would say that there are other institutional practices that we have that are not rooted in the constitution, that we could actually implement much more easily, you know, for example changing our eelectoral system from a winner take all plurality system to ranked-choice voting would make, for example, third party bids much more feasible than they are under the current system and that's something under the control of individual states and municipalities and doesn't have a constitutional basis. so, i would think that actually focusing on things that can be changed rather than, you know, pie in the sky changes of the constitution are really, you know, what we ought to be focusing on right now. >> michael, broward county,

florida, please educated with your question or comment for dr. francis fukuyama. caller: yes, dr. fukuyama, it's nice to hear you speak. you're one of the last true optimists, and a national institution into a liberal democracy. two questions, might that liberal democracy be liberal logical democracy? i think a lot of libertarian populism is based on the fact that they see the lack of a need for government when we can communicate? because hierarchy is about communication that's why we have pry mate primate hierarchy, maybe we could have efficiencies run by ai, but are we going to 0 destroy centralized government and if we would have chaos or a strong centralized government that would develop as you say the programs that will evolve into

the literal software programs that will drive that logical future democracy in the future and i want to add, too, this is going to blow your mind, if you look at all the poems written, the billboards, the movies, all the dramatic and plays there's not one single with unthat's 100% fully optimistic and positive about the future and that is where culture meets biology because that's an internal projection of what's going on in our heads and outside world is culture. culture is literally biology. >> all right. michael, we'll leave it there and get a response from our guest. >> well, if you want an optimistic movie you can watch mary poppens, but watching that over and over is going to get pretty boring and i think that's why every movie involves some drama or some, you know, conflict. i think that you know, there's-- so being a liberal, a classical

liberal, as i consider myself does not-- it's not the same as being a libertarian. so libertarians basically think that government is bad and they're going to try to minimize the role of government in every aspect of life, and i just think that that is a big mistake. and it gets back to the point i made earlier, which is that you cannot have a modern society if you don't have a modern state that is able to enforce rules, that is able to deliver services that the people want to protect the community and so forth and this, especially, at the scale of a, you know, country that's nearing 350 million people, you can't do that without-- that's not going to come about spontaneously. you're not going to get people to simply, you know, band together on a horizontal basis to protect their communities or if they do, what you're going to have is dissent into, you

know, militias and war lordisms and that's a lot less good than having a monopoly of force by a legitimately democratically elected government. so i think that, you know, every society has got to be some mixture of centralized hierarchy plus, you know, bottom up spontaneous, you know, cooperation and you can't-- if you have too much of the farmer, you get a dictatorship and if you have too much of the latter you get an anarchy situation. i think that modern technology, particularly the internet, has raised the possibility of that grass roots cooperation, you know, a great deal. for all of the complaining about social media and the internet, it's still the case that social media provides opportunities for grass roots organization and mobilization that simply didn't exist before and that's the reason that the

countries like china and russia want to squash, you know, the ability of people to communicate with one another on this horizontal basis. you know, so that's something that actually technology is providing for us, but it can't just be that. right? you do have to have a more hierarchical system to impose a certain set of rules and defeeng defining what the rules are in politics. francis fukuyama's latest book, liberalism and discontent. and pat, thanks for holding, you're on the air. caller: thank you. i'm concerned about globalism. not so much the globalization of industry, but the need for liberal elites, educational government, industrial elites, think they can tell everyone how to live.

the world health organization wants control over u.s. policies vis-a-vis, you know, plagues and whatnot. as government goes away from the people, government works best at a local level. as more and more comes out of washington and then out of davos, the world economic forum, can american freedom survive globalism? thank you. >> thank you, pat. >> i think you're vastly exaggerating the power of what you call globalist institutions. you know, world health organization is just an advisory body. they put out, you know, concurrences about, you know, what the current state of the scientific evidence is on something like pandemic control. they have no power to enforce that and i don't think it's right that they aspire to that. no country is delegated responsibility for its health policies to the who. it's simply an advisory body

and those are still done at a national level and i think, you know, overall, if you look at basically all of the existing international institutions, you know, they're like that. the countries have simply not been willing to give up degrees of sovereignty in international bodies in ways that give the bodies authority. certainly not the u.n. organizations. now, the one part of the world in which this has happened is europe. the european union in economic policy does delegate substantial authority to european institutions. they did that voluntarily. they think they're better off as a result of that. it has created a bit of a backlash when the eu does things that people don't like or don't understand, but fundamentally, i think that europeans are kind of happy with that. but you know, we don't live in europe and you know, who isn't

going to do anything, but issue toothless what they think are health policies, but certainly, american health authorities are free to accept those or reject those and that's exactly what happened during the covid pandemic. so i really think that we should be careful about exaggerating how powerful these international bodies really are. >> i do want to go back to your book, political order and decay from 2014. you write decay is not the same thing as civilizational decline. it does not have to be either terminal or irreversible. decay has to do specifically with institutional rigidity and capture of the state by elites and that's the line i wanted to ask you about. capture of the state by elites. >> well, so that's the respect in which i kind of agree with

the former caller not on a global level, but in terms of american politics because we have interpreted our constitution in a way that does not allow the state to regulate campaign finance and money and politics which other democracies do, it's basically a free-for-all where, you know, rich operations and also, rich individuals can, you know, simply buy political support to protect themselves. so, you know, for example, just one example is the carried interest provision that has allowed hedge funds and other financial institutions to get taxed at a much lower levels as individuals with the tax that. and the only way to explain that, you know, their capture of, you know, certain members of congress through their lobbying and so forth that ends up, you know, ends us up in that kind of situation. and i think that, you know, it's gone to really

extraordinary levels. it's not a complete control by oligarchs because otherwise you couldn't explain either bernie sanders or donald trump himself and why they did as well. because that was not actually the choice of the majority of corporate america, let's say. it does mean that we do have excessive elite control of the mechanism of american democracy. i think that you could vastly reduce that control if you actually had serious campaign finance legislation, but again, you know, given our polarization, that's something that we're simply not able to get to, but like i said, other democracies do this quite effectively and i think we could, in theory, do that as well. >> david, hopetown, florida, good afternoon to you. caller: good afternoon, peter. as always thank you for c-span.

professor fukuyama, good to speak to you today as i did in 2016 on this very program. my observation is, you talked about health care being one of the functions of the state. yet, every time the state has tried to expand its role in health care, it seems that the people revolt against it. in 1965 we passed medicare. in 1966 the republicans made big gains in the house and 1968 richard nixon was elected president. in 2009, with obamacare or affordable care act as you call it was passed and in 2010, son of a gun, the republicans made big gains in-- >> so what's your point, david? >> the point is maybe the people don't want all of this

big government grab of our systems, particularly health care. >> thank you, sir. we've got it. >> well, so every other rich democracy in the world has had a government mandated and sometimes government-run health care system that provides a minimal level of health care to all of its system, citizens. there's a good economic logic for doing that because if you don't actually have to worry about losing your health insurance, you don't have to then worry about moving to a better job with a different company, moving to a different state and so forth, you know, which is what we've got with this patchwork of state led plan and some of which are more generous and so on and so forth. there's a good economic logic between having this and what i would say is that, yes, you're right, there's been a lot of

american resistance to this. this is one of the, i think, unfortunate manifestations of american exceptionalism. so, american exceptionalism can be interpreted as being exceptionally good or bad or dysfunctional and i think this is one of these cases where there's a deep political culture of distrust of the state that i think americans carry to path logical extremes and in cases where there's actually a really good function for the government to actually provide a certain service, we resist it because we just think that all of government is bad. and so, this has manifested in this conservative labeling of obamacare, the aca, as socialized medicine and that if we adopt this we're going to have socialism in the united states. if that is the case, then the united states is the only rich

democracy that's not socialist, right? because every other one, you know, japan, korea, germany, switzerland, norway, you know, italy, every one of these countries has a universal health system mandated by the government and i think that this is a function of modern government and it's kind of the peculiarity of this american anti-statism that, you know, leads us to kind of constantly reject it. >> professor fukuyama, are you still in the classroom and if so, what's your take on the evolution of students over the last 30 years. >> yes, i definitely am still in the classroom. you know, one of the things i'm not looking forward to it all of the applications and personal essays that i have to go through every spring as we admit students to our programs

that will now be written by chat gpt. i always thought all along most of the essays i had to read were written by a computer, but now they're literally written by a computer. i'm not sure how to deal with that. i teach in a very diverse and international program. i run a masters program in international policy and you know, about 40-sometimes almost 50% of our students come from other countries so it's a little bit hard to characterize them as a whole. i do think that, you know, there's probably been something of an increase in a certain kind of intolerance and a certain kind of entitlement on the part of students. i wouldn't say-- i would say my students are less subject to this than in other parts of the university, but you know, that's been a

change that i think is a change for the worse. on the other hand they come incredibly well-prepared because, you know, i think our higher education institutions really do a great job in teaching people a lot of basic, you know, skills and information. there are areas where i think they could do betterment for example, american universities have basically given up on teaching civics and basic knowledge where the political system works. we need to remedy, but on the whole, i like my students. >> donald, pilot mountain, north carolina, you're on with francis fukuyama. caller: good afternoon. what a privilege to get a chance to ask you a question, professor fukuyama. my question is based on my rereading of explaining post

modern by steven rc hicks and he does an excellent job of debriefing the intellectual history of marxists and anti--- or i should say anti-enlightenment thought. and my question to you is, if you could just do free verse on this, to what extent to you see post modernism driving the left and the right and their criticism of modern experiment with the united states and overall with globalization? thank you for taking my call. >> yeah, well, i'm glad you posed that question. chapter six of my last book, liberalism and its discontent is actually all about that particular issue. so i think that, you know, at the core of a lot of post modernist critiques is a critique of human cognition.

the liberal enlightenment began with this believe there's an external objective world and we human beings can understand and then manipulate that world through something we call modern natural science and the scientific method, but that has come under attack by post modernists and i think the attack really begins on the left. you really had this-- i know a lot about this because i actually spent a couple of years of my life, you know, i went to paris and i studied with jacques, and i met michelle as an undergraduate. i few a lot of the french thinkers and whose thoughts migrated to the united states and took hold in the american universities. one of the central critiques made by michelle was a critique of modern science and in a series of books he said in the old days a ruler, if he didn't

like one of his subjects, he'd have him killed. today we can't do that, we have to use gentler, and in the case of incarceration, homosexuality, a number of areas he argued quite persuasively what appears to be a scientific consensus actually represents the hidden interests of an elite that's trying to buy compliance and loyalty among their subjects. and he then generallylized that to say that basically, you know, the whole of science is really not about any search for objective truth, it's simply about power and that the powerful want to use this technique as a means of enhancing their power. and i think that, you know, this is true in many instances. you have this whole period in

american history, there's scientific racism where a lot of, you know, supposedly scientific observers talked about racial hierarchies and this was rooted in biology. so there's no question there have been examples of this, but to broaden this to the critique of natural science and say that everything is represented and represents the power of elites manipulating things behind the scene is really to undermine the entire enlightenment project that makes science possible. what's happened, i think, during the covid epidemic, this idea that had taken root in post modernist circles on the left and formed a lot of progressive thought migrated over to the right where there's then a general critique of science and the public health authorities i think in retrospect made a lot of

mistakes and that's the way that science works and you don't know what the cause of covid is, how it's transmitted, what's a good, you know, protection against it. i mean, all of this stuff, you know, a lot of the times they got wrong, but this then fed into this general narrative that this was actually, you know, that vaccines and masking and all of these other measures that public health authorities were recommending actually represented a gigantic conspiracy on the part of hidden elites to basically manipulate people and you know, render themselves more powerful and this is exactly the post modernist argument. it's just that it's transmuted from issues that the right care about and i think that both are destructive. the whole modern world is made possible by the possibility of

science and our apprehension of something like an objective truth that we never get completely right, but we, you know, use experimental techniques to get closer and closer to that truth and if we didn't have that, we wouldn't have much of the modern economic world. >> mike, detroit. please go ahead with your question or comment. caller: oh, yeah, you know, i just-- when it comes to critical race theory and some of these other strategies of the democratic party, you know, this is all about divide and conquer and obama was talking about how he's going to fundamentally change the nation and everybody is looking around and going into what? well, he didn't fundamental any change the american people which are good-hearted welcoming people, but he did fundamentally change the democratic party. there's overwhelming evidence that this is, you're talking about criminal corruption, political corruption, please

down use our children, and sedition and treason through the identity politics, you know, they want a one party system. and this is existential threat within our country. you know, forget about statism. globalism and socialism has a lot to do with the ideology of the democratic party. >> mike, i think we've got the point. let's get a response from dr. fukuyama. >> i just completely disagree. a lot of the identity politics that i myself object to is believed by a certain, you know, very progressive wing of the democratic party, but you know, that party rejected, you know, the most left-leaning candidate in 2020, bernie sanders, and it picked a candidate that it thought was more centrist. obama doesn't believe any of the stuff you're attributing to. if you go back to his speeches

he's a classical liberal, classical in my sense, believing in the universality of human dignity. no group ought to be held up above any other group and the objectives of something like civil rights movement ought to be integration into an american mainstream. he was not this, you know, mad identity that our politics shifted and people take crazy statements made by individual professors or one extreme wing of the democratic party and all believe that. that's nonsense. there's much more diversity in that than you're giving them credit for. >> professor fukuyama, what are you looking for in the essays

for students applying for your class? what appeals to you? >> it's interesting because the part that i think tends to get written by the computer is, well, i founded an ngo at age is an and learned mathematics at 17 and did this and-- you know, they're kind of ticking all the boxes that, you know, they think admissions committees are looking at. i think that, you know, the more useful kind of things are descriptions of their personal struggles. now, the problem i think is going to be that chat gpt is going to be perfectly able to come up with, you know, this kind of a narrative in the future, but you know, sometimes you can actually verify things that people say come from an underprivileged background or they really have had to struggle with really bad family conditions or you know,

personal experiences that were, you know, traumatic or whatnot and they managed to keep the ship righted and get through all of that. you know, i think that that's something that i take seriously and that's why i actually think that all of this ai stuff is dangerous because you know, once you identify what your -- what the reader of the applications is looking fore, you know, you can get the computer to deliver up at that sort thing whether it's true or not, but, that's what i -- that's what i, you know, focus on. >> so let's go to the other side of the coin, which is perhaps if you have a bias or two, mike from detroit, completely disagreed with with a he had to say. if he were in your class, would that affect his grade? >> no, look, i mean, as a professor you can't let these kinds of partisan disagreements affect the way that you

evaluate a student. first of all, in my teaching, although, you know, i'm talking about political institutions and you know, that does in a way that does have implications for your partisan choices. you're never going to grade somebody basically just on those partisan outcomes. you know, you're going to grade people on the basis of did they actually use evidence, did they make coherent arguments. did they actually cite, you know, credible sources when they're putting forward the case that they're making. is there logical consistency, those are the things that you look for and whether that benefits, you know, one partisan side or the other, i think is, you know, is not what you make judgments based on. >> elizabeth, oklahoma city, thanks for holding. you're on with francis fukuyama. go ahead. >> professor, a great honor to

hear you and speak with you. my concern is the, i guess, historical ignorance of so much of the american population and the growing lack of interest in history among colleges, the decline in the number of students now studying it. and i use it as an example, if you would, for a dangerous precedent. for example, in mortimer's book time travelers guide to english history restoration givers away the english treated their servants and those english moved to america and carried that trait with them and the sort of lack of inability. the lack ofability to understand the evolution of practices is worrisome and i wondered if you could comment. thank you. >> yeah, well, i'm worried about that as well. i think that learning history is part of the task in civics

education because if you don't understand where your institutions came from, historically, you're not going to understand how they operate in the present and i'm afraid that a lot of schools and in particular, a lot of elite schools like stanford and the one that i'm at have gotten rid of that basic education in, let's say, american institutions. there used to be a required culture course that was required of all stanford students up through the late 1980's, that basically starts with a hebrew bible and goes through a lot of the great western thinkers. i mean, it was a western culture course culminating in the federalist papers and the american constitution and marks and freud and more recent

thinkers. the university got rid of that in the 1980's as a result of pressure from, you know, crit exxon the left that said why the emphasis on western institutions. we should be studying china, india, the muslim world and that's reasonable. i think that you do need this basic understanding of other civilizations, but it shouldn't come at the expense of understanding, you know, those western institutions that are the basis for, you know, our commonly held beliefs in our own american democracy. and that, you know, is simply not taught in many, many schools today and i think that that is one of the reasons that you can get away with making so many bad, a, historical arguments in the political debates because people don't understand their own history. >> in fact, you write in

origins, i'm paraphrasing, a lot of historical writing has been characterized as o-d-t-a-a. what does at that mean? >> those letters stand for one damn thing after another. where a lot of history is just the recitation of this king came to power and then he was deposed by that, you know, upstart and this happened and that happened and there was a war and so forth. and you don't actually have an effort to draw a larger narrative. you know, what common patterns do you see in history. what kinds of institutions develop over time, you know, what was their impact that would actually be useful in thinking about the present. and so, the thing is that you say, okay, we should study history, but there's so much history, you could spend four years studying, you know, the

history of the late roman republic in the sixth century, right, and still not exhaust most of that literature. so you have to be, you know, you have to be much more focused on the kind of history. i actually think that ap world history and ap american history classes continue to try to do that. they try to focus in on what are the certain basic number of facts that you really need to know to be sort of conversant in those areas. and a lot of universities have given up on that. i find my students remarkable, but the ones that know facts about the way their own society develop them, they learned them in ap high school history courses, but not anything that they took in university. >> every guest that appears on in depth, we ask what they are reading and what is some of their favorite books. here are the answer from

francis fukuyama. neil stevenson terminal shock and the inheritors, the fifth risk, octavia butler, and professor fukuyama is reading tara isabel burton's "self-made". she's a social observers and her book is modern identity, in modern times we believe we have this unique self-inside each and every one of us, and we need to cultivate that self and she gives this history of basically self identification, but in the end, amounts to just self promotion and she goes back to the renaissance and carries it up to the kardashians in the present and

although she tends not to be terribly judgmental, but in the end she thinks that this is not a healthy trend, that we should constantly be looking within ourselves for our bearings because we're social creatures and we need to connect to other human beings. so sometimes, the most important thing is not the deepest buried in our soul, but actually the way that we relate to other people, but it's a very interesting book because, you know, it kind of reveals this common thread of self-creation that expands over many centuries of at least western history. >> it never fails, i get an e-mail after this segment and saying that i ran through these books too quickly. so we're going to show the favorites again. are there any on there that you want to speak to? >> well, i really like neil

stevensonson. i like science fiction in general. and i've always loved his books bah because they speak to the political issues. snow crash was written in the early '90s. it's about an america where the federal government had been reduced like many libertarians hope to just the territory on which federal buildings stood, but everything else was controlled in these burb clafs where you need passports and visa to go from one suburban subdivision to the next and a fantasy about this libertarian world that was envisioned by many people. termination shock is his latest book, really about global warming and it's about the fact that a single rich individual in texas is able to pump enough sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere he can actually change the weather pat trns,

patterns in the indian monsoon in china and how the world deals with climate change when that kind of technological possibilities exist. they're kind of book ends to this long period between the '90s and the present where our concerns have shifted from disliking the state and wanting to live in a libertarian paradise to worrying about things like global warming. >> along with neal stephenson, the inheritors, the fifth risk and octavia. and last call from grand blanc, michigan, please go ahead we have about two minutes. caller: thank you for taking my call. professor you mentioned you studied denmark. denmark's history. i'm going to suggest a dutch republic, which was founded in 1581 included seven independent

provinces and as part of their constitution they are the first country that had religious freedom. this was a problem for the pilgrims and that's after they left england went to the dutch republic, but discovered that their children were being exposed to other religions. so they left for america. >> all right. we are going to leave it there. thank you so much. professor fukuyama. >> well, you know, i had a visiting professorship at a danish university so i felt i knew denmark better. i've been to the netherlands a lot and i could have picked getting to the nether lands, but denmark it was because i knew it personally. >> i want to finish with this quote from your book, identity, the deened ma --

demand for identity and the global surge that began in the 1970's, what samuel huntington labeled the third wave of democratization has gone into a global recession. our present world is simultaneously moving toward the opposing dystopias of hyper centralization and endless frag mentation. different parts of the world are seeing the breakdown of centralized institutions. emergence of failed states and polarization and growing lack of consensus over common ends. social media and the internet have facilitated the emergence of self-contained communities walled off not by physical barriers, but by belief in shared identity. francis fukuyama of stanford has been our guest for the past two hours, we appreciate your coming back on in depth, 17 years after your first

appearance, thank you, sir. >> thank you very much for having me. >> be up-to-date in the latest in publishing with book tv's podcast about books with current releases plus best seller lists, as well as trends insider interviews. you can find about books on c-span now, our free mobile app or wherever you get your podcasts. >> c-span shop.org is c-span's online store. browse our latest collection of c-span products, apparel, books, home decor, and accessories. there's something for every c-span fan and every purchase helps support our nonprofit operation. shop now or anytime at c-span shop.org. >> weekends on c-span2 are an