liberalism and its discontent. >> humankind over the centuries has seen an evolution. we go from hunter gatherers to agricultural societies up through the industrial revolution. there is a process in which social institutions become more complex. they develop certain features. marx said this process would culminate in a communist utopia. i think most progressive intellectuals for the 100 50 years after the communist manifesto believed the history

would be communism. my argument was we did not seem to be going there. this was just before the collapse of the soviet union. the idea was there was this process of modernization. people wanted to live in modern societies but the kind of modern society was liberal democracy and market-based capitalism, not socialism. we are getting off this train of history one stop before marx said we would get off. >> professor francis fukuyama. you were talking in 2000 six about your 1992 book, "the end of history and the last man." what you said, does it stand up today? >> that clip was remarkably coherent. since 2006, i think we have seen a lot of regression in the progress of democracy all over the world.

freedom house, which tracks global democracy, has noted we have 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 then. but, the question i was trying to raise was not what is going to happen in any given decade or short-term period, but really this longer art. i think there is still an open question as to what kind of destination we are 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, "liberalism and its discontent." "i am writing this book in a 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 we had stalinism and fascism as active enemies, or even in the 1960's and 1970's, where you had coup d'etat's and takeovers. i think the threat is pretty

severe. the geopolitical division is important. you have russia and china, which are consolidated, authoritarian states. russia just launched an invasion of a neighboring democracy, trying to prove that democracy would not work in that part of the world in 2022. china has been arguing that western democracy is in some kind of terminal decline. you have that external challenge and you have 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 and does not want to -- the rule of law does not want to concede elections and is not interested in the peaceful transfer of power. i would say we are in a

difficult phase right now. and if we don't fight back against this, it is going to get worse. host: sticking with liberalism and its discontent, you talk about national populists on the right and progressives on the left. what is a definition of those terms? professor fukuyama: i think the populist nationalism denies the fundamental liberal premise that all human beings are fundamentally equal. there is 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 you rights that the state needs to observe. i think a lot of nationalists would say that is not good enough, we are not just generic human beings. we are in these -- hindu or

hungarians, we are some particular subset of human being and we have a special status that deserves recognition above that of other people. and, you know, 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 the protestants and catholics over how they would use religion to define a particular polity. liberals said we need to recognize regardless of the -- our religious confession, we are human beings and it is that characteristic that we need to preserve and we need a system that allows people of diverse views a way of living together. so, that is a recurring threat. it was religion in the 17th century. it was nationalism in the 19th

and early 20th centuries. so, there are these movements that reject that premise of human universality. i think that is really what has detracted liberalism from the right. the threat from the left is different. i think many progressives in 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, equality of sexual orientation, that 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. i think between these two threats, the one coming from the right is actually much more

present. it is backed by a lot of geopolitical power and by state power in many instances. i do think you see a liberal -- illeberal tendencies on both sides. -- illiberal tendencies on both sides. >> -- professor fukuyama: modi and trump are charter members of that group. modern india was created in the late 1940's on a liberal basis because it is diverse religiously, by caste, byte geology and language. they said liberalism is a doctrine that seeks to allow diverse populations to live in peace, under a general since that all human beings be treated

fairly and equally. what modi and his hindu nationalist party have been trying to do is shift that national identity to one based on hinduism, which excludes basically muslims and christians, who make up a significant part of the indian population. i think this is a real formula 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. our rights are rooted in the rule of law. the fact that the state cannot do whatever it once, and if it is rule of law rather than rule by law, 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 community -- of the communist party makes the rules and enforces them against the rest of society. that person is not subject to those same rules. they are pretty much exempt. if you have a true rule of law, it means everybody really has to follow these basic rules. finally, the third pillar is an aquatic accountability. the ruler, the identity of the ruler is determined by the people. through fee -- free and fair elections so that the ruler represents the will of the greatest part of the population. a modern, political order is about -- is a balance. on one hand, you've got the state, the power institution. 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 balance is hard to

get out. if you are too far over on the stateside, you are china. you have got a very powerful state, but you do not have constraints on that state so the ruler can do whatever he wants to do -- he except for the people impress wu in -- the people impress -- e vil empress wu in chinese history. if you've got a weak state, that is the situation of many developing countries. you take something like afghanistan before the taliban took over. they did hold elections. they had something they labeled the rule of law, but there state was not capable of providing security. that is the fundamental definition of a state, a monopoly of power over territory. that is a disease that affects

many developing countries. getting that balance right between having a state that is not enough capacity to be effective, but also is constrained but does not violate the rights of its citizens and reflects their will, that is what real, liberal democracy aims to be. that is something that is quite hard to get right. >> when it comes to liberal democracy, what is your take on religion? >> well, it is complicated because there is definitely a relationship between modern understandings of democracy and the religious origins. in christianity, there is this belief in human universalism, that all human beings are creatures of god and in a sense, equal in his eyes. one of the big transformations

that happens in european thought, between the protestant reformation and the enlightenment, is that doctrine becomes separated from its religious context and becomes an assertion about human nature in a secular form. early liberals believed in that human universalism, but did not connect it to the particular religious origins. i think there are other ways that religion affects the functioning of democracy. for example, the traditional understanding of why american democracy was so successful was the one that was actually outlined by alexis to toefl when he visited the united states in the 1830's and he said americans are very good at this art of association. you do not need a centralized state to get organized. they learn citizenship by

participating in voluntary organizations. at the time he wrote, the vast majority of those organizations work religious in nature. they were bible studies or early temperance movements of various sorts. the traditional sociological argument for why associational life as dense as it is in the united states is that it had to do with this sectarian nature of american protestantism. where, you did not have a centralized, hierarchical church. you had many competing churches and that was one of the reasons why religiosity was stronger in the united states, but in other developed democracies because people were not forced to join the church. they did not have to sign up to the state church. if they wanted the comfort religion could give them, they could associate with whatever sect they wanted to.

that created the grounds for democratic citizenship and participation. if you want a recent example, look at the civil rights movement. martin luther king is a baptist minister. a lot of the civil rights, civil society groups that organized work 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 actually has been important. however, basic tenant of liberalism is that we do not have one religion. and, we do not have a state that tries to impose a single religion on everybody. tolerance, religion's tolerance is one of the foundational principles of a liberal society. that is what drove early liberals to create this form of

government, that basically was an agreement to lower the temperature of discourse by taking final hymns as defined by religion out of the public arena and relegate that to private belief. in that sense, religion is something that is not compatible with the modern understanding of a liberal society. >> francis fukuyama, graduated from cornell, phd from harvard. now at stanford, let's take some calls. mike is in my topic, new york -- mike is in new york. >> i would like the professor's opinion and analysis on what he believes china will do in the near term and area policy and say for the next 25 to 30 years. i would like him to give his

analysis of how china's behavior in 15, 20 years compares to imperial japan through 1900 to 1941. >> thank you. >> i think china has been on a roll for some time. it's modernization after 1978 has been remarkable. it is one of the great economic miracles of human history. it goes from this extremely poor country to the second largest economy in the world in such a short period of time. i think that there is some evidence that they may have actually reached the peak of that growth, are now on the downside of a longer term either stagnation or decline. but, they got a lot of momentum behind them. i think they basically want to remake world order in ways that will be favorable to them.

i do not think they are like the former soviet union where they've got this messianic view that there is this certain ideology that has to -- they do not care. i think many chinese think most countries are capable of emulating them with their respect for your accuracy, for their -- four bureaucracy. they want respect. they keep talking about the 100 years of humiliation, where china which had been recognized as one of the great civilizations of the world, did not 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 is accurate in certain ways.

japan was certainly the rising power in east asia in the early 20th century. but, they did that in a period when colonialism was the norm among powerful countries, that you wanted colonial possessions. therefore, they took over korea, taiwan, manchuria, other parts of china. i do not think the chinese are like that. their main issue really is taiwan right now because they all agreed that taiwan -- and we agree -- that taiwan is part of china and they would like to reincorporate that island. i think that is going to be the biggest bone of contention if they try to do that by force in the future. but, i do not think they are on a roll to take over parts of the world. they want influence, they want respect, but they do not want necessarily an empire of the

sort that japan tried to create in the 1930's. >> next call for francis fukuyama comes from cornelius in louisiana. go ahead and make your comment or question. >> happy and blessed fourth of july weekend to everybody out there. peter, as an author, you ought to look up the name w.a. bolden. he was the first african-american secret service agent for president kennedy. he tried to prevent the kennedy assassination. he got his pardon last year from biden. that would be a great -- >> cornelius, is that a new book? >> i will be honest with you, i do not know. >> i appreciate the recommendation. go ahead. >> mr. francis -- mike, i was a military police officer.

the communist chinese have this belt road initiative where they are going around buying us everything that -- buying us our farmland, military bases, small-town america is trying to fight against them. they have got a secret base, which is a military base in cuba, just like the cuban missile crisis during kennedy. you said you were conservative. now, you left the conservative party. my question for you, president trump tried to prevent january 6. i can prove it. terry patel has evidence he tried to get 20,000 troops there before below oc and mitch mcconnell's sergeant of arms were ordered not to do anything. if the democrats had come out and said the fbi knew about january 6 coming and did nothing.

ray absent was behind all of this stuff, not president trump. president trump -- >> cornelius, we've got a lot here. let's see what professor fukuyama once to respond to -- wants to respond to. >> [laughter] look, the january 6 stuff, the material that has come out of the january 6 committee tells you much more accurately what happened on that day. i would not trust cash motels word on -- c ash patel's word on any of this. the belton road initiative is driven by a lot of different motives. one of them is just commercial. you've got these big, chinese construction companies that do not have a lot of business in china. they want to keep people employed and make profits. they have been told to go abroad. they want to expand their influence. i think the use of this

initiative for strategic, military purposes, it does exist. there are certain facilities they are trying to create. i think fundamental thing is more a political one, where they want to cultivate goodwill in the developing world. it is not working for them very well. a lot of their problems, a lot of their projects have developed real problems. they are not making money. they are casting a lot of countries -- pakistan, sri lanka, argentina, montenegro into a huge debt crisis. in a way, they are behaving a lot like american creditors or european creditors 30, 40 years ago. they are generating the opposite of goodwill. they are generating a lot of resentment on the part of countries that cannot repay these chinese debts. i would say that is the big problem, that the chinese have created through this initiative

of theirs. >> the origins of political order came out in 2011, it is the first of a two-part volume. you dedicate it to samuel huntington. who is he? >> samuel huntington once -- was one of the great political scientists of the 20th century. there are many fields within political science where he made a big mark. his first book was in many ways one of the most important. it was called political order in changing societies, published in 1968. up until that point, there had been a broad consensus among social scientists, something called modernization theory. that basically said all good things would go together, that you get economic growth, you would get the spread of individual freedom, you get rule

of law, you get more democracy. 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 parts of the world and this period of time. he said basically, all good things do not go together. if you have socioeconomic modernization, you are going to raise people's expectations and if you do not have a political system that can satisfy those expectations, you are going bit instability, violence and social breakdown. i think he was right about that. he basically understood the importance of the state. the reason i dedicated that book to him once, my two political order books were in a way efforts to update his thesis. to say, yes, order is a precondition for all the other good things that this society

can engage in. you have to worry about where that order is coming from. that is, as i said, a lesson that many americans fail to absorb. for example, in the iraq invasion, we assume that you can get rid of the iraqi state. you can basically disband the iraqi army and all of its security forces and that somehow, spontaneously, you would still have order. that was one of the biggest mistakes ever made by an american policymaker. that led to the chaos, the malicious, the -- the militias, the civil conflict. that iraq descended into in the years after that. i think huntington would have been surprised by that result. i think he would have said, you do not start with a state, you

are not going to have democracy and you are not going to have rule of law because you need a state to enforce the law. that is why i thought that was a still important and relevant book, but needed to be updated. that is why i wrote that to volume series. >> if people were to pick up sam huntington's 1968 book or your the end of history and the last man from 1992, are they still relevant today? >> yes, i think they are still relevant. huntington, on the first page of that book, says the soviet union -- which was still a growing concern at the time he wrote it -- is a state and will always be there. that proved to be wrong. he got a number of things wrong. i wrote "the end of history" after the fall of the berlin

wall. we were in the midst of something huntington himself labeled the third wave of democratization that began in the 1970's and continued until the first decade of the 21st century, where the number of democracies expanded. that is obviously not the period we are living in. there has been a lot of democratic regrets. that was not a pattern that continued for longer than a generation. so, those aspects were not right. >> if i would -- >> ok. >> go ahead and finish. i apologize. >> there is one aspect about what i wrote in 1992. that continued to be a theme up until my identity book. that concerned the importance of

recognition and dignity in human affairs. in "the end of history," i talked about the fact there is a part of human psychology -- or what plato would have called a human soul -- there is a third part. you have a rational part, a desiring part. what, there is this thing that he called themos, translated oftentimes as spiritedness or anger. that is the part of the human psychology that demands recognition. we are not satisfied just with peace and security and having a lot of food on our table. we also want other human beings to respect us. if we do not 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 they also want is respect and recognition. that led into the last part of the book, which was about the last man. the last man was nietzsche, it 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. there is nothing to aspire to. people want that recognition of being greater then or seeking. if they cannot aspire to that, they are going to aspire to injustice, because that is a critical part of human psychology. in many respects, i think that is what we are witnessing right now, that people are not content living in the richest, most stable and secure societies in human history. they also want other things. they also want their conception of social justice, they want recognition of themselves as

important members of society. i think that has been driving a lot of the instability and populism we have experienced. >> martin, dayton, ohio. go ahead with your question or comment. >> it is a great honor to be talking with you guys. thank you. i am a public school middle school teacher. i teach public literacy in a high poverty area in ohio. i am a center of left person. i am very optimistic with my students about living in the u.s., despite all of the the problems we have. i think there is a danger -- i will call it banning populism -- the industrialization, globalization, things like that. they never talk about it with automation taking jobs. my point is, there is a lot of developing countries that have lifted people out of poverty.

you hear about a lot of inequality, but do you think we will look at that 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 developed countries trade one of the last activity sided with my eighth graders was, we watched and read about the darien gap. people literally walking through the darien gap from one continent to get to this continent for a better life. i try to be optimistic and say, if you get your education, this is still a great country to grow up in. i would love to have your thoughts on globalization. >> thank you very much. francis fukuyama. >> martin, i have great respect for you as a middle school teacher because you are doing god's work. if you are transmitting some of that optimism to your students, that is also very important. i have always thought that one of the guest defenses of the

general in and of history thesis, despite -- general end of history thesis is, if you ask, where do people from poor, disorganized, corrupt, dysfunctional societies -- when they leave those places, where do they want to go? do they want to go to china, russia, iran? they want to come to the united states, canada or europe. i think that indicates that, despite our problems, there is still a lot of opportunity of 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 1970's and the financial crisis global output increased fourfold.

all the goods and services produced by everyone in the all the goods and services in though world quadrupled in that timeframe and sat -- china managed to lift its citizens out of really grinding poverty. that has been on in other developing countries, india, sub-saharan africa, so forth. when you look at the world as a whole, yes, globalization was a good thing. the problem is it was 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. the thing is, it is true that, taken as a whole, the globe is a

lot better but the globe is not a political entity. we are divided into nationstates. in any given nationstates the effect of globalization was not necessarily good because it did not create -- it did create inequalities in many countries. i think that is one of together consequences. >> francis fukuyama, i want to go back to the origins of political order from 2011. i wrote a question in my notes. i do not know if it is even legitimate or not. i asked myself, after reading the book, has the u.s. ever not been dysfunctional? francis: i think the degree of polarization and the misfiring of a lot of institutions is greater than in other periods of

history. but polarization has been around a long time. in 1861 it led to the civil war. 600,000 americans were killed in that conflict. there are other periods. a lot of the late 19th century was extremely polarized until 1896 election. you know, the stainyou know, the of race. for those amendments to be realized. social equality and economic equality, we are still not there.

that is an enduring problem that the united states has faced. on the other hand, could you use those democratic institutions to keep the peace, to get to policies that would progressively make things better? i think that the system has been functional. it has just taken a long time to, let's say, get to the civil rights era. but it eventually happened. i guess the other question you have to ask is, is the united states functional compared to what other societies? it remains the case is that as an economic growth engine, the u.s. has been unparalleled. i think a lot of people have been predicting american decline relative to other powers of the world. even after covid, all of the countries coming out of covid

the u.s. looks good despite our elevated rates of inflation. we have extremely low rates of unemployment. we continue to be incredibly innovative. look at the ai revolution going on. there is a lot happening. nearly as fast in china, now subject to much more severe problems and a much lower growth rate than we have. i think there is something functional going on in the united states that continues to be impressive and a beacon of attraction for those that are not fortunate to live in this country. >> so the arc of history over all is a net positive? >> that was the original phrase. this is what i find really

frustrating about our discussions about crt and the way we teach history. because, it does seem to me that you can keep two ideas in your head at the same time. the first is that there was the original san of slavery, then segregation, jim crow, institutionalized racism. and the effects of that continuing to the present day. that is just a fact of history. it is also the case that there has been progress over those centuries. the situation of african-americans is not the same that it was in 1619 or whatever earlier dated that you. in human history that there has been progress in actually realizing the promise of the declaration of independence. that all men are created equal, now including all women and a lot of people that had been excluded at the time that those

words were written. that is my understanding of american history. that we have a basic problem, an enduring one. but, our liberal institutions have been able to deal with them not as fast as we would like or hope. but, again, compared to other societies that have been through war, revolution to get to a place that is not as good, i am not sure this is something that is uniquely terrible. >> david, tulsa, good afternoon to you. >> thank you for this. this is the best program on television and there is not a close second. i would like to ask your guest, any -- and he kind of touched on it now. this definition, his thoughts on it, the role is playing in politics today.

>> well, i guess there is a version of critical race theory that was established by people like derek bell. there was a school that extended critical theory in general to racial issues, race as a characteristic of the united states. i think it elevated its importance and durability. that interpretation of american history is what i just said minus the progress. it really argues that progress is something that has been more apparent than real and the fundamentally -- fundamental reality is systemic racism baked onto all of our institutions and

the like. i think that is wrong. i think you need a more balanced understanding that admits both the racism and also the possibility of progress both in the past and for the future. the problem is a lot of republicans have latched onto the most extreme assertions of crt. and said that this is characteristic of the way everybody on the left thinks about that issue. and i think the importance of it, to the point where books, you know reading for young people because i think that is ridiculous. i think you absolutely have to teach young people about the

terrible things that happened in our racial history in the united states. the real point when that becomes problematic is where you say that there is basically nothing that can be done about it because it is such an ingrained feature in our system that, you know, has denied the possibility of progress both for the past and the future. unfortunately, trying to strike a balance is not suitable to the polarized politics we have today. i think that's a terrible thing because you should be able to criticize the racial history and also believe that there are certain advantages to our system. the next call for francis fukuyama is from lucerne valley california. this is john.

hello, john. >> hello there. this is for dr. fukuyama. you spoke previously about organized religion. and virtues such as dignity, fidelity, and temperance within a civil context. i have been working to grounded these types of moral virtues within a more basic instinctual behavioral foundation as outlined on themotiva tionsolution.net, my website. have you worked on having certain scientific types of behavioral psychological synthesis in our political system.

>> thank you, john. >> well, i don't know you as how you define scientific. the least red book of the 10 i have published is when i put -- when i put out in 1998 ornate -- or 1999 called the great disruption. i took on the argument that religion is necessary for moral order and the decline of religion across the west expands -- explains all sorts of disruptions like crime and family breakdown. my basic argument i think is close to what you might be suggesting. that human beings are intrinsically social creatures. and religion is one method used to bind people to certain moral codes and standards. but you don't need religion to do that because the human instinct for conformity to rules is so strong that that spontaneous social order will

reassert itself. you do not need formal religion to necessarily do that. if you want empirical demonstration of that, europeans are much less religious than americans. when posters ask them, do you go to church or believe in god, they say no. but their crime rates, their family breakdown rates are lower than in the united states. even in the united states, look at the highest rates of, you know, social dysfunction. they actually occur in the bible belt. you know, in places where overt religiosity is the strongest. one more example is east asia. east asia does not have organized religion. they have various forms of shaman is a and so forth.

but they don't have a certain clear set of transcendental moral views. japan, korea, taiwan, yet, are all relatively functional -- extremely functional. you know, they are very well ordered societies. i would say i believe there are a lot of things in human nature that promote social order. among them is religion, but it's not seen a non--- sina qua non. 202 is the area code. 748-8201 for those of you in the mountain and pacific time zone. we have a text number 20274 88903 four text messages only. please include your city and first name. this is a text from greg. dr. fukuyama. the british empire likely had

the most experience creating states where a modern state did not exist. what is your assessment of that history good and bad? >> well, i think it was a good legacy where the british actually succeeded in creating a state. the primary example of that would be india. i mean, india had a stage before it was conquered by britain, the subcontinent did. but the british created modern institutions that survive to this day. the indian administrative service was originally the british indian civil service. there army came out of the army that was created by the british under the rise --raj. that was a case were having ruled india a couple hundred

years they actually had the time and energy to create state institutions. unfortunately in many other places, they did not leave behind anything particularly remarkable. nigeria was a british colony that never had anything comparable to the state institutions that india did. and, one of the dysfunctions of contemporary nigeria is that has an extremely weak government. that really cannot force rules and provide basic order. there are many other cases of data. in some instances, the british participated in kind of divided rule strategy. they knew they could not create a centralized order and in order to protect their petitions they basically tried to play one ethnic group off of another. that, you know, lead to a different set of dysfunctions once these countries, you know, received independence. you know, 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 for -- by britain as a means to, you know, again, kind of a divided rule strategy. that has been one of the big effects of kenyan politics. competition between five or six major ethnic groups for political power. i would say the british legacy has been very mixed. i think it is important when colonial powers actually create state institutions. but britain's record on that is not great. another text message from ernest in hopewell junction, new york. is it time to modernize the constitution and how would we do this? >> yes, i think basically there are many features of the constitution that really do need

modification. probably the one that is most prominent is the electoral college. that means a very small minority of american voters actually determine who gets to be elected. and there are other aspects of the constitution that over your represent smaller states. that was done deliberately by the founding fathers that wanted the assent of the smaller states to the constitutional order in the first place and therefore gave them a kind of veto power over things that would diminish them. it has led to the fact that california, with 40 million people, gets two senators. and wyoming, with less than 10 million people, gets two senators. that just leads to a big distortion in fair representation of voters. so i would think that one of the

things you would want to do is modify that system so it's actually more democratic with distributed power to, you know, people in proportion to their numbers in the population. the prospect for doing that now is almost zero because, among other things, founding fathers made it extremely difficult to modify the constitution. you need big majorities, not just in congress, but in states. or among the states in order to bring about an amendment. that is one of the reasons why there have been so few amendments. particularly in this polarized time that if you get enough consistent on a modification you can actually get a majority on something that is vanishingly small. there are other institutional participants we have that are not -- practices we have that

are not rooted in the constitution that we could implement more easily. changing our electoral system from a winner take all plurality system to something like rank-choice voting could make, for example, third-party bids much more feasible than they are under our current system. that is something under the control of individual states and municipalities. it does not have a constitutional basis. i think focusing on things that can be changed rather than pie in the sky changes to the constitution are what we really ought to be focusing on now. >> michael, broward county, florida, go ahead with your question or comment for dog through -- for dr. francis fukuyama. >> dr. fukuyama it is great to hear you speak because you are one of the last true optimist i believe. you talk about a natural evolution into a liberal democracy. i have two quick questions here.

might that liberal democracy be a liberal logical democracy? i think a lot of libertarian populism is based on the fact they see the lack of a need for government when we can communicate. hierarchy is about communication. that is why we have primate hierarchy. without that maybe we could just have a law of efficiencies may be run by nai. will -- run by an ai. will we get is that from destroying centralized government? that would be chaos. or will we have a strong centralized government that will develop programs that will evolve into literal software programs to drive that logical future democracy. i want to add too, and this will blow your mind. if you look at all of the poems ever written, all the billboards, all the movies, all of the dramas and plays, not one

single one is 100 percent fully optimistic and positive about the future. that's where culture meets biology. because, that is an internal projection of what is going on inside our heads in the outside world of culture. culture is literally biology. >> michael, we will leave it there and get a response from our guest. >> if you want an optimistic movie, you can watch mary poppins. but watching that over and over will get boring. i think that is why every movie involves drama or conflict. i think that, being a liberal, a classical liberal, as i consider myself, is not the same as being a libertarian. libertarians basically think government is bad and they will try to minimize the role of government in every aspect of life. i think that is a big mistake. that gets back to the point i

made earlier, that you cannot have in modern society -- a modern society if you don't have a modern state able to enforce rules, able to deliver services that people want to protect the community and so forth. especially at the scale of, you know a country nearing 350 million people, you cannot do that. that one come about spontaneously. you will not get people to simply banded together on a horizontal basis to protect their communities. or if they do, what you will have is a dissent into militias and warlords. that is less good than having a monopoly of force by a legitimately democratically elected government. i think every society has to be some mixture of centralized hierarchy plus bottom-up

spontaneous cooperation. if you have too much of the former you get a dictatorship. if you have too much of the latter you get in an article -- an anarchical situation. i think modern technology, particularly the internet has raised the possibility of the grassroots cooperation a great deal. for all the complaining about social media and the internet, it is still the case that social media provides opportunities for grassroots organization and mobilization that simply did not exist before. that is the reason countries like china and russia wants to squash the ability of people to communicate with one another on a horizontal basis. that is something that technology is providing for us. but it cannot just be that, right?

you have to have a more hierarchal system to impose a certain set of roles. defining the extent of those rules is the big question in all of politics. >> francis fukuyama's most recent book came out last year " liberalism and its discontents." the next call is from pat from keyport, new jersey. you are on the air. >> i am really 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 to believe. the world health organization wants control over u.s. policy, vis-à-vis the plates and whatnot. as government goes away from the people, government works best at a local level. as more comes out of washington and davo's, the world economic forum, can american freedom

survive globalism? >> well, i think you are vastly exaggerating the power of what you call globalist institutions. the world health organization is just an advisory body. they put out concurrences about what the current state of the scientific evidence is on something like pandemic control. they have no power to enforce that. i do not think it is right that they aspire to that. no country has delegated responsibility for its health policies to the who. it is simply an advisory body. that still at a national level. i think overall, when you look at basically all of the existing international institutions, they are like that. countries have simply not been willing to give up significant degrees of sovereignty to international bodies in ways

that give those bodies authority, certainly not any of the u.n. organizations now. the one part of the world i'm in -- world in which this has happened is your. the european union in economic policy does delegate substantial authority to european institutions. they did that voluntarily. they think they are better off as a result of that. it has created a bit of a backlash when the eu does things people do not like or understand. but fundamentally, i think europeans are happy with that. we don't live in europe. the who will not do anything other than issue toothless, you know, degrees about what it thinks are good public health policies. but certainly, american health authorities are free to accept or reject those. and that is exactly what happened during the covid pandemic. i think we should be careful about exaggerating how powerful

these international bodies really are. >> i want to go back to your book "political order and decay" from 4014. you write "decay is not the same thing as civilizational decline. it does not have to be terminal or irreversible. decay has to do specifically with institutional rigidity and capture of the state by elites." that is the line i wanted to ask you about. "capture of the state by elites." >> well, that is 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 in politics, which other democracies do, it is basically

a free-for-all which includes rich corporations and rich individuals that can simply by political support to protect themselves. i am just one example, they carried interest provision that allows hedge funds and other financial institutions to get taxed at a much lower level than individuals would be taxed at. the only way you can explain that is, there capture of, you know, surge of members of congress soothe your -- congress through their lobbying and so forth and thus up in that kind of situation. i think it is going to really extraordinary levels. but it's not a complete control by oligarchs. otherwise, you could not explain either bernie sanders or donald trump in self and why they did so well. because that was not the choice of a majority of corporate america, let's say.

but it does mean you have excessive elite control of the mechanisms of american democracy. i think you could vastly reduce that control if you actually had serious campaign legislation. but again, given our polarization, that is something we are not able to get to. like i said, other democracies do this quite effectively and i think we could in theory do it as well. >> david, hope sound, florida, good afternoon. >> as always, thank you for c-span. francis fukuyama, good to speak to you again as i did in 20 on this program. my observation is, you talked about health care being one of the functions of the state. yet, every time this date has tried to expand its role in

health care it seems like the people revolted against it. in 1965, we passed medicare. in 1968, richard nixon was elected president. in 2009, with obamacare, or the affordable care act as you call it, was passed. in 2010, son of a gun, the republicans made big gains -- >> what is your point, david? >> my point is, may be the people do not want all this big, government grab of our systems, particular health care. >> thank you, sir. we 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 citizens. there is a good, economic logic for doing that because, if you do not actually have to worry about losing your health insurance, you do not have to worry about moving to a better job and with a different company, moving to a different state and so forth. which is what we've got with this patchwork of state led plans, some of which are more generous than others, so one and so forth. there is a good, economic logic hind having this. what i would say is, yes. you are right. there has been a lot of american resistance to this. this is one of the unfortunate manifestations of american exceptionalism. american exceptionalism can be interpreted as being exceptionally good, but also exceptionally bad or dysfunctional. i think this is one of these cases where there is a deep,

political culture of distrust of the state that i think americans carry two pathological extremes. in cases where there is really a good function for the government to provide a certain service, we resist it because we think all of government is bad. this has manifested in this conservative -- concerted labeling of obamacare, the aca as affordable medicine. if we are going to adopt socialism in the united states -- if that is the case, the united states is the only rich democracy that is not socialist. every other 1 -- japan, korea, germany, switzerland, norway, italy, every one of these countries has a universal health system mandated by the government. i think this is a function of modern governments.

it is the peculiarity of this american, antistateism that leads us to constantly try to reject it. >> professor fukuyama, are you still in the classroom, and if so, what is your take on the evolution of students the last 30 years? >> [laughter] i am definitely still in the classroom. one of the things i am not looking forward to is 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 chatgpt. i always thought all along that most of the essays i had to read were written by computer, but now, they are literally going to be written by a computer. i am not sure how to deal with that. i teach in a diverse and

international program. i run a masters program, on international policy. about 40%, almost 50% of our students come from other countries. it is hard to characterize them as a whole. i think there has probably been something of an increase in a certain kind of intolerance and a certain kind of entitlement on the part of students. i would say, my students are less subject to this and other parts of the university. but, that has been a change that i think is a change for the worst. on the other hand, they come incredibly well prepared. i think our higher education institutions do a great job in teaching people a lot of basic skills and information.

there are areas where they could do better. for example, american university has basically given up on teaching civics and basic knowledge about how their own political system works. that is something i think we need to remedy. on the whole, i like my students. >> donald, pilot mountain, north carolina. you are on with francis fukuyama . >> 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 postmodernism by stephen rc hicks. he does an excellent job of debriefing the intellectual history of marxist and anti-intellectual -- i should say, anti-enlightenment.. my question to you, if you could

do free verse on this -- extend -- do you see postmodernism driving the left and right and their criticisms of modern experiment with united states, and overall with localization? thank you for taking my call. >> i am glad you posed that question. chapter six of my last book, "liberalism and its contents" is about that issue. i think at the core of a lot of post modernist critiques is a critique of human cognition. the liberal enlightenment began with this belief there is an external objective world, and that we human beings can understand and manipulate that world through something we call modern, natural science and the scientific method. that has come under attack by postmodernists. i think the attack begins on the left.

i know a lot about this, because i spent a couple years of my life -- i went to paris and studied with jacques denny. i knew a lot of the french postmodernist thinkers, who migrated to the united states and took hold in a lot of american universities. one of the central critiques made particularly by michelle was a critique of modern science. in a series of books, he basically said that in the old days, the ruler -- if he did not like one of his subjects, would have them killed. today, we cannot do this. what we do is manipulate what we think the truth is and in the case of incarceration, homosexuality, a number of other areas, he argued persuasively that what appears to be a

scientific consensus actually represents the hidden interests of an elite that is trying to buy compliance and loyalty among their subjects. he then generalized that you say, basically, the whole of science is not about any search for objective truth. it is simply about power, and that the powerful want to use this technique as a means of enhancing their power. i think that this is true in many respects. you have this period in american history of scientific racism, where a lot of supposedly scientific observers talked about racial hierarchies, and this was all rooted in biology. there is no question there have been examples of this, but to broaden this critique to the whole of modern natural science and say everything is

subjective, everything represents the power of elites that are manipulating things behind the scenes is 200 on the entire lightning -- entire enlightenment project that makes science possible. it happened during the covid epidemic is this idea that had taken root in postmodernist circles on the left and informed a lot of progressive thought, then migrated over to the right, where then, as a general teak of science and scientists that begins with -- the public health authorities in retrospect made a lot of mistakes. that is just the way science works, because he did not actually know what the cause of covid is, what how it is transmitted, all of this stuff. a lot of the times, they got wrong. this fit into this general narrative that this was --

vaccines and masking and these measures that public health authorities recommended represented age identity -- represented a gigantic conspiracy on the parts of elites to manipulate people and render themselves more powerful. this is exactly the postmodernist argument. this is transmuted from issues that progressives care about to issues that people on the right care about. i think both of these are destructive, because 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 use experimental techniques to get closer and closer to that truth. if we did not have that, we would not have much of the modern economic world. >> mike, detroit.

please go ahead with your question or comment. >> when it comes to some of these strategies of the democratic party, this is all about divide and conquer. obama was talking about he was going to fundamentally change the nation and going into what, you know? he did not fundamentally change the american people, who are welcoming people, but he did fundamentally change the democratic party. there is overwhelming evidence -- you are talking about a criminal corruption, a political corruption, please do not mutilate our children. treason and incompetence to identity politics. they want a one party system. this is an existential threat within our country. forget about statism. globalism and socialism has a lot to do with the ideologies with the people in this democratic party.

>> i think we get the point. let's get the response from dr. fukuyama. >> i completely disagree. a lot of the identity politics that i myself object to is believed to be a progressive wing of the democratic party. that party rejected the most left-leaning candidate in 2020, bernie sanders, and picked a candidate they thought was more centrist. obama did not believe any of the stuff you are a trip into. he is a classical liberal, meaning classical and my sins, believing in the universality of -- classical in my sense, believing in the universality and objective of something like civil rights movement ought to be integration into an american mainstream.

he was not this mad identity arian that wanted to divide the country. it is just our politics had shifted and a lot of people take crazy statements made by individual professors or by one extreme wing of the democratic party and say all democrats believe that, it is nonsense. there is much more diversity of opinion within that party then i think you are giving them credit for. >> professor fukuyama, what do you look for in that personal essay from students who are applying to be in your class? what appeals to you? >> it is interesting, because the part that i think can get written by the computer is -- i founded an ngo at age 15 and learned concert mathematics at age 17 and i did this.

they are taking all of the boxes -- ticking all the boxes the admissions committees are looking at. i think more useful kinds of things are descriptions -- i think chatgpt is going to be able to come up with this kind of a narrative in the future. sometimes, you can verify things that people have said. if they come from a underprivileged background or have had to struggle with bad family conditions or personal experiences that are dramatic or whatnot and -- traumatic or whatnot and they managed to get through all of that, i think that is something i take seriously. that is why i think all of this ai stuff is dangerous, because once you identify what the

reader of the application is looking for, you can get the computer to live her up exactly that sort of thing, whether it is true or not -- to deliver that sort of thing, whether it is true or not. that is what i focus on. >> let's go to the other side of the coin, which is, if you have a bias or two. mike, detroit. you completely disagreed with what he had to say. if he were in your class, would that affect your grade? >> no. look. as a professor, you cannot let these kinds of partisan disagreements affect the way that you evaluate a student. first of all, in my teaching, although i am talking about political institutions and in a way, that does have implications for your partisan choices, you are never going to grade

somebody based on those partisan outcomes. you are going to grade people on the basis of, did they actually use evidence? did they make coherent arguments? did they actually cite credible sources when they are putting forward the case they are making? is there logical consistency?/ those are the things you look for. whether that benefits one partisan side or the other i think is not what you make judgments based on. >> elizabeth, oklahoma city. you are on with francis fukuyama . go ahead. >> a great honor to hear you and speak with you. my concern is the historical ignorance is so much of the american population and the growing lack of interest in history among college students, the decline in the number of students studying it.

i use it as an example for a dangerous precedent. for example, in mortimer's book, time travelers guide to english history, restoration gives away the way the english treated their servants. the english moved to america and carried those same traits with them. that lack of inability, that lack of ability to understand the evolution of practices is worrisome. i wondered if you could comment. thank you. >> i am worried about that, as well. i think that learning history is part of the task in civics education, because if you do not understand where you're institutions came from, historically, you are not owing to understand how they operate in the present. i am afraid that a lot of schools, and in particular, a lot of elite schools like stanford have gotten rid of that

basic education in american institutions. there used to be a required culture course of all stanford students until the late 1980's that basically starts with the hebrew bible and goes through the great western thinkers. it was a western culture course, culminating in the federalist papers and the american constitution and going on to marx and freud and recent thinkers. the university got rid of that in the 1980's as a result of pressure from critics on the left that said, why this emphasis on western institutions? we should be studying china, india, the muslim world. that is reasonable. i think you need this basic understanding of other

civilizations, but it should not come at the expense of understanding those western institutions that are the basis for our commonly held beliefs in our own american democracy. that is simply not taught in many schools today. i think that is one of the reasons you can get away with making so many bad historical arguments in the political debate, because people civilly do not understand their own history. >> in fact, you write in "origins of political order" i am paraphrasing you, but a lot of historical writing has been characterized as odtaa. what does that mean? >> yes, those letters stand for one damn thing after another. a lot of history is just

recitation of this king came to power, then he was deposed by that upstart, then there was a war and so forth. you do not actually have an effort to draw a larger narrative. what common patterns do you see in history, what kinds of institutions develop over time, what was their impact that would be useful in thinking about the present? the thing is, you say we should study history but there is so much history. you could spend four years studying the history of the late roman republic in the sixth century and still not exhaust most of that literature. you have to be much more focused on the kind of history. i 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 need to know to be conversant in those areas. a lot of universities have given up on that. i find them on my students, it is quite remarkable. the ones that actually know a lot of facts about the way their own society developed, they learned them in their high school ap history courses, but not anything they took in the 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 answers that we got from francis fukuyama. favorite books include neal stephenson's terminal shock and snow crash. eve fairbanks, the inheritors. michael lewis, the fifth risk. octavia butler, parable of the solar. professor fukuyama is currently reading tara isabel burdens self-made. what is that book about?

>> tara birkin is a very acute, social observer. her book is about modern identity. in modern times, we have this idea we have this unique self inside each and every one of us. and we need to cultivate that self. she gives this history of self identification that, in the end, amounts to self-promotion. she goes all the way back to the renaissance, but carries it up through the kardashians in the president -- in the present. although she chose not to be terribly judgmental, in the end, she thinks this is not a healthy trend that we should be constantly looking within ourselves or our bearings because we are social creatures and we need to connect to other human beings. sometimes, the most important

thing is not what is the deepest, buried thing in our soul but the way we relate to other people. it is a very interesting book. it reveals this common thread of self creation that extends over many centuries, at least western history. >> it never fails. i get any mail after this segment and saying i ran through these books too quickly. we are going to show the favorites again. are there any on there that you want to speak to? >> i like neal stephenson. i like science fiction in general. i read a lot of science fiction. i have always loved his books, because they speak to some of the big political issues. snow crash was written in the early 1990's. it is about an america where the federal government had been reduced, like many libertarians

hope, to just the territory on which federal buildings stood. everything else was controlled in these workplace where they need passports and visas to go from one suburban subdivision to the next. it was a fantasy about this libertarian world. his latest book is about global warming. it is about the fact a single, rich individual in texas is rich enough to pump sulfur dioxide in the upper atmosphere he can change the weather patterns in the indian monsoon and china and so forth. and, how the world deals with climate change when that kind of technological possibility exists. they are bookends to this long period between the 1990's 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's science fiction, eve fairbanks, the inheritors is on francis fukuyama's list. >> octavia butler, parable of the store. last call, jan edwards, grand blank, michigan. we have about two minutes. >> thank you for taking my call. professor, you mentioned you studied denmark. denmark's history. i am going to suggest the 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. after they left england, they went to the dutch republic but discovered that their children

were being exposed to other religions so they left for america. >> we are going to leave it there. thank you so much. professor fukuyama. >> i had a visiting professorship at a danish university, so i felt i knew denmark better. i have been to the netherlands a lot. i could have picked getting to the netherlands, but denmark it was because i knew that country personally. >> i want to finish with this quote from your book, "identity, the demand for dignity and the politics of resentment." the global surge toward democracy that began in the 1970's, what samuel huntington labeled as the third wave of democratization, has gone into a global recession. our present world has -- is simultaneously moving toward opposing dystopias of hyper centralization and endless

fragmentation. different parts of the world are seeing the breakdown of centralized institutions, the emergence of failed states, polarization and a 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 a shared identity. francis fukuyama of stanford has been our guest for the past two hours. we appreciate you coming back on in-depth 17 years

good evening. i'm tony clark from the carter library. i'm really glad you all are here because i think this is going to be a fascinating eve b