we will start again at 45. [background noises] [background noises] [inaudible conversations]

>> good afternoon everyone. welcome back to the 2024 at mccain conference at the u.s. naval academy in annapolis, maryland and the deputy director of the center for ethical leadership. it is a great privilege to welcome another distinguished scholar to it here to annapolis. the senior fellow at stanford university freeman's institute for international studies. and a faculty member of the center on democracy development rule of law. courtesy of a political science. he has written widely on issues of development and international politics. 1992 book the end of history and last man has appeared in over 20 foreign translations. his latest book is entitled a liberalism at his discontent. i received his ba from cornell

university and classics and a phd from harvard in political science is a great honor to welcome her to annapolis professor francis. [applause] >> i guess it is appropriate i am rising in defense of liberalism is patrick still here? there he is okay. it will be an interesting counterpoint. so i consider myself excuse me. i had a little motorcycle accident on tuesday. i'm still feeling a little of the effexor map. if i stop and grimace a little bit you will understand why. in any event, i consider myself

a classical liberal. it's an important adjective put in classical in front of liberal because i think there has been an evolution of a liberalism in certain directions are not necessarily implied classical liberalism. i think most of the complaints actually have youth extensions let me begin with the definition of what i regard as liberalism. liberals believe universal that universalequality of human. that is to say it liberals do not believe a certain group of human beings a certain class that has superior dignity to other groups. that dignity is something that needs to be protected by a rule of law that limits the ability of states to intend on the rights of individuals and it depends on things like

constitutions, checks and balances plan to get our efforts to limit the power of the state. that distinguishes liberalism like something like theocracy that's based on a single religious doctrine it's also different from nationalism it takes one ethnic group or race places at at a higher dignity to other people. liberalism is compatible with nationstates have a limited territorial jurisdiction we can talk about that later. the world needs to be divided up into nationstates but the confines of a nationstate liberalism asserts citizens should be treated equally. i think they are basically three arguments you can make in favor of liberalism part one is a pragmatic one the second is a

moral argument and the third is economic. let me go over those in turn. the pragmatic argument stems from the historical origin of liberalism. liberalism appeared in the middle of the 17th century as a result of the european wars of religion. after the protestant reformation european spent roughly next one or 50 years fighting each other something like one third of the population of central europe died in the course of the 30 year war is a very bloodied conflict. a very cruel one. at the end of that. a lot of european thinkers decided they need to lower the temperature of politics such that politics central definition of the good life. they were competing definitions of the good life.

liberal thinkers argued the state ought to be neutral in regard to them the central liberal virtue is toleration. you're going to layer the horizons of politics in order to preserve life itself so people would not kill each other of the kinds of sectarian differences that animated european politics in the previous generations. it's a means of governing overt diversity. the reason you want a liberal society is that societies are diverse religiously, racially and very many ways. liberalism is a way to allow the different groups to live next to each other peacefully. the moral justification for liberalism really has to have the protection of human autonomy the ability of human beings to exercise choice. this ultimately has religious

roots if you go back to the book of genesis, adam and eve are instructed by god not to eat from that fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. they disobey god and are kicked out of the garden of eden. thereafter human beings have a kind of intermediate moral status they are not god. they do not have god's dignity. there also different from the rest of nature in the sense they can sin. the fact adam and eve made the wrong choice is really in a way which characterizes the moral core of a human being. they can understand the difference between right and wrong. they can choose to do right. they often times make the wrong choice but that makes them different from the rest of nature ever since then i think liberal societies have said human beings and basically want to have the fundamental freedoms

who to marry, where to live, what occupation to pursue? what beliefs you hold dear that is a moral character that's fundamental to the dignity of human beings. people use human dignity all the time. if you ask what constitutes dignity and what is fundamentally this ability to make moral sources fundamental rights liberal regimes protect his right to own a private prive property. the right to transact all protected by rule of law that respects the property rights and respects the ability to transact

across different kinds of society at the richest societies have always been essentially liberal ones. that a protected property rights. that have a fundamental rule of law that heard the institutional framework in which a modern market economy can arise. now this is true even in a place like china. china opened up to the world in 1978. i gave up central planning. it began to allow ordinary citizens to in effect own private property but quadrupled its output in the next four years after the household responsibility act was passed that allowed peasants to keep the surplus from their labor. in other words they introduce incentives into what had been a

completely centrally planned system. and that is the basis for trying chinagetting richer. now, china is in no way a liberal society politically. and has become blessed with the rise of his jinping in 2013 but the prosperity of modern china depends on their adoption of liberal understanding out property rights. latest in a whole series of economic success stories. beginning with the netherlands, britain, other liberal societies. first the commercials in the industrial revolution's because it protected the ability to innovate and learn money. to provide incentives to citizens to enrich themselves. it has produced a wealthy

society. those are the arguments that i think are still very important. unnecessary to keep in mind too. so the question is, why has a liberalism come under attack as it has are both the right and the left? i would not say most but a surprising number of my students would not describe themselves as liberals. they feel liberal societies have permitted too many economic injustices, inequalities and the like. liberal societies are too slow the critique of it comes from the right. unhappy with the fact that liberalism does not set a common goal for the whole society. it tolerates different views of the good. that is religiously diverse and

the like. i would say the sharpest criticisms are not of what i regard the court classical liberalism. that assertion of the universal dignity of human beings. head has to do with what i regard as extensions of liberal ideas into realms where they ceased to make sense. they have counterproductive consequences. there is a kind of symmetry because these extensions are both on the right and on the left. we begin with the ones on the right height has to do with what is now generally referred to as neil liberalism but that is to say this is not capitalism per se. for some people neil liberalism is a center for capitalism. the extension market principles with economists these are people

that argued that state intervention was counterproductive. head hurt economic efficiency. they argued for an across-the-board removal of the state from economic life. we associate this. with politicians like ronald reagan, margaret thatcher, ronald reagan famously said the scariest words he has ever heard was i am from the government and i'm here to help. this began a whole. in at least american culture. the state was the enemy of economic growth that overregulated, and this incentivized creators and entrepreneurs. the impact of discussion up we

have to be fair about this. it was precisely this kind of neil liberalism taken to a global level quadrupling of global output that global trade system which work the way the courses say it should. if you have comparative advantage expand markets very dramatically and everybody gets rich. this is what happened and that. the trade fear tended to under emphasize was that not everybody in your society got rich as a result of this process. in particular low skilled people living in rich societies were likely to lose jobs and opportunities to similarly skilled people in poor

countries. the top and after the entry of china in 2001. the other thing was the whole mantra of taking the state of the economy was applied particularly in the financial sector. the financial sector cannot regulate itself. markets do not culminate they do not end in a self regulation that protects the interests of society as a whole. i think we saw this from the subprime crisis in 2008 when banks were allowed to take excessive risks. this was the culmination of crisis with the asian financial crisis. argentina, russia, a whole series of economies blew up because of the excessive movement and liquidity of one part of the world to the other. people who had formulated this

theory of neoliberal economists in the united states or hoist when it came home to roost in that financial crisis. this is been well documented. that occurred precisely and news has exasperated feelings of class conflict and working-class working classpeople being left e way as at the root of the rise of populism for the second decade of the 21st century. that is neil liberalism on the right. there is another distortion of a liberalism on the left who might label woke liberalism.

i think when a lot of people criticize it liberalism they're not criticizing classical liberalism as i have defined it. they are criticizing a woke liberalism. there are several aspects of this transformation of the way the left of thought about inequality. so what defines a progressive settlement on the left social economic inequality want to redress that. in the 20th century that inequality was understood and broadcast from marxist was fundamentally divided and you need to equalize the outcomes by centralizing the memes of production and so forth are in r to solve that problem. we got to the end of the 20th century the sources of inequality were redefined in much narrower terms.

it was no longer the inequality of big social groups the proletariat but i came to focus on narrower groups defined by race, ethnicity, gender and eventually things like sexual orientation. inequality was seen not so much as economic inequality but inequality of dignity certain marginalized groups were not respected by the rest of society. there's also a particular partin element of this. because of america's racial history. african americans have been treated unjustly throughout the history of the country beginning with slavery. even after the 13th, 14th, 15th amendment you had the continuation of the racial hierarchy that lasted up until the civil rights movement.

this created a focus on the mechanism for subsequent group seeking social justice to fall in the same category of civil rights that needed to be corrected and use the same techniques instead of relying on legislatures relying on courts in order to achieve the equal outcomes. inequality morphed in away from marxist class struggle what we now call identity politics. i went to make really clear since i've been involved in arguments over this for the last several years. ever since i wrote a book called identity what is wrong with identity politics. i want to be very clear about something for this illiberal form of identity politics and there is an illiberal form of identity politics. i have no problem with the liberal form.

liberal form i would say go something like this. people are treated as members of groups they are marginalized as members of groups. this was classically most true with african americans simply on the basis of their skin color did not have equal rights. any liberal society if you are part of a group that has been missed treated you have every right in the world to mobilize on the basis of your common identity that is the source of your mistreatment you mobilize, you enter the political system and make demands on the political system to treat you equally. that is the essence of martin luther king's civil rights movement. you got up on the steps of the lincoln memorial and set i look forward to the day went a little of black children will be treated the same as little white children. that's the plea for a marginalized group that

organizes on the basis of an identity category to basically demand equal liberal rights to enter into that same liberal society. within illiberal form of identity politics becomes meaning it's the most important thing that anyone can know about you. your skin color, your skin color, your sexual orientation and that membership in a group will trump anything you have accomplished as an individual. that is an illiberal form of identity politics. that's the part of identity politics that becomes very problematic in that liberal society. you give out jobs, places, universities, promotions and the like simply on the basis of those identity categories that violates the fundamental liberal principle that we regard people

in the society as individuals. the abilities in their natural abilities. if you treat people simply as members of groups here basically of violating that underlying premise that is illiberal. there's a lot of forms this can take in terms of the way people are treated. there is a big controversy right now over things like cancel culture or a woke culture. but i would say in general and i have argued this in many different fora is that i guess the big argument that i keep having as how broad and fundamental is this?

a lot of conservatives would argue were living under a woke tyranny in every institution and the society is dominated by identity categories. and if you violate the politically correct attitudes towards those categories you are going to be canceled. from my point of view this is not the america i experience first of all these identity categories really do apply to a surgeon or relative narrow set of issues related to civil rights and related to race, sex, ethnicity, and the like. we continue to enjoy liberal freedoms of just about every other regard. you can say whatever you want to say about president biden or candidate donald trump and gnome is going to put you in jail. people who think we are living under a liberal tyranny hot to go live and russia or china

that's a general tyranny where you cannot make little statements that contradict the accepted ones by the political authorities. so in that respect there is a hierarchy in a certain priority of a liberal rights and things like freedom of speech, freedom of association, this ability to speak out on political issues is important. that is something we can argue about. the other thing that has been going on really does have to do that i said is a good thing. i've human economy and gave the

human beings dignity in the eyes of god really had to do with the ability to make certain moral choices. there once determined not by human beings but by god. in a moral framework they did not invent. moral judgments would be made concerning the way they lift up to these external imposed rules as time went on over the last couple of centuries relentlessly with thinker like frederick at the end of the 19th century he creates this character currently

obey the law or not. he can make up the law himself. the expressive individualism that would extend all the way to the ability to establish the moral rules under which you are living. society are shared rules. everyone gets to make up their own rules as expansion of the realm of autonomy some of it is abetted by changes in technology. so, for example if you think about something like gender

inequality labor between men and women made his sense and hundred gathered society in agrarian society. and in many respects and that industrial society. the ability to do useful work and an industrial society dependent on upper body strength. to lift really heavy objects. dig ditches. this sort of thing. he go through the socioeconomic transitions that we have seen. in particularly the transition into a postindustrial society in which the majority of people doing useful work are not out there digging ditches are big barrels of cotton but sitting in front of a computer for eight hours a day typing things into the computer screen. that is a world in which women

naturally have a much larger place in the workforce. i would say one of the biggest social changes that took place beginning in about the mid- 1960s was the entry of hundreds of millions of women into the workforce across the world. beginning and advanced industrial countries that had already made the transition into postindustrial societies. but now it is really happening universally. and in this case it is technology that is really allowed women to occupy a superior place in the societies and many respects because quite frankly women are better at most jobs and men are at a certain age. if you are in hr manager you basically have a service job. if you give it to a man or woman they've got identical iq scores

you're going to give it to the woman. she's going to be much more reliable, not take stupid risks and so forth. and so we have growing shifts on nature of gender relations across every society that is undergone this shift. i think it is wrong to say simply this is an ideological i mean ideology was part of it. the growth of feminism with women's equality was obviously something that complemented the shift in workplaces. it's also something that is fundamentally created by the technological nature of this new emergent society that we have been living in. that is respect autonomy has been abetted by technology. the latest front tier with human biology think of the solution

undergoes the transgender activist agenda it would not be possible again without the medical technologies that supposedly make this possible. and so this is another set of developments that has changed the perceived nature of what liberalism represents. and i think that one of the unfortunate things is now there are many people in the world. many people who are illiberal antidemocratic, authoritarian who are willing to basically take a woke liberalism as a substitute for it liberalism itself. classical liberalism is all about political rights. the right of people to enter the political marketplace to speak

out to associate, to mobilize. but if you listen to someone like victor or von or vladimir putin it's about lgbtq rights. that is a mistake. there is that element in liberalism. but in my view it's unjustified extension of the understanding fundamental understanding of classical liberalism. it is used by the enemies of liberalism to undermine the legitimacy of the liberal project as a whole. that is something to keep in mind the next time you hear one of these profoundly illiberal authoritarian leaders criticizing liberalism and liberalist societies. i will write you back in 2017 victor or bonn and hungary said he is a building and illiberal democracy. that is in fact what he has done.

liberal democracy is that liberal institution on the one hand that has to do with the rule of law. constitutional checks and balances. democracy meaning free and fair elections on the other. a lot of populists have done is use the democratic part of the competition liberal democracy to attack the liberal part once you attack that liberal part you can undermine the democrat you can change the rules under which elections occur which happened in hungary. you will make sure you never lose another election by gerrymandering and so forth. missy it is not based on that serious critique of liberalism it's a critique of a certain kind of a woke liberalism. but neoliberalism by contrast is the easiest to reverse.

because it is simply based on policies. i think in the united states today is seen a very substantial walking back from neoliberalism. in the 19 '90s you have the washington consensus the belief by every economist you needed to deregulate, privatize, reduce tariff barriers so forth and so on. people believe it in the 1950s or 60s industrial policy has made a huge comeback. under the biden administration the state is being used to promote semi conductors, batteries, a whole lot of strategic technologies those can be walked back simply by changes in policy. it is harder to walk back a woke

liberalism in the sense that because it's embedded in a certain understanding of rights and autonomy people are less willing to give it up. you see signs that if you mandate policies that are fundamentally unnatural, they are not going to stick. i will give you one little anecdote in support of this. there is an italian journalist named alexander who wrote this very nice book last year. the sullivan institute was a cult that existed in the upper west side of new york city. that well-to-do artists a lot of creative people that were sucked into a cold that believe they

were on the left. not the private ownership of property although karl marx but the nuclear family. unless you have the nuclear family cannot achieve a society. and so the upper west side hideouts actually tried to do this. they take children away from their mothers and have them raised by somebody else because they thought the most evil person in the child's life was going to be the mother who would become a dictator and set a model for dictatorship politically later on in life it's a hard book to read because the personal cost this doctrine imposed on the cult members that lived in this cold was pretty horrendous in terms of wrecked t

childhoods and very unhappy children. very old warped individuals that then came out of this movement. if you state what happened to it? wasn't this the cutting edge of individual liberation? at that time a lot of people believed it was. today it does not exist because this idea that somehow parents of eight nuclear family are deeply unjust and un- natural is simply not true. you get in the way a kind of a natural evolution to a form of social relationship that makes sense both for individuals but also in terms of the darwinian underpinnings of sexual selection and so forth. i think you are also seeing something of a reaction of certain forms of identity politics. gei was not controversy of five

years ago. it's hugely controversial on many campuses and immediate boardrooms in the united states. i do not know what's going to happen in these areas. these are the areas that drive conservative really crazy. in the liberal society because she can make free choices. because you can discuss things and deliberate over appropriate policies nothing is ever permanent. if something relate does not make sense like ripping children out of their mother's arms and having strangers raise them it's not going to continue. there is going to be an adjustment. it may take several years for the adjustment to occur. i do think there is a self corrective mechanism that applies to these kinds of social changes. now some of them because they're rooted very deeply and changes in technology are not going to

be reversed. something is dictated by the nature of economic production today. they're not going to become stay-at-home wives and mothers as in previous generations. some of these social changes are inevitable but others of them are much more voluntary. i'm going to end on the following observations. i see bill sitting there this is something he has argued in the past. i would like to defend a liberalism in positive terms. white level societies that kind of freedom and dignity it accords its members is the most powerful argument. but there's also a very powerful argument which has to do with what is the alternative? and i think part of the reason

we are seeing the rise of populist nationalist movements all over the world is a liberalism has been so successful. with exceptions it is pretty seven years of peaceful prosperity that have adopted this liberal democracy. i just think of the human characteristics he began taking these good times for granted. i actually had a line of my original book the history of the last man or i said if you cannot struggle against injustice you're going to struggle against justice. because of people want to do is struggle. they want to have higher horizon to struggle against. it has become all too easy for young people to forget they are living in one of the most prosperous, freest society with the greatest degree. they say okay, what else is new?

very nice. i want something more. and that is one of the sources of taking for granted the benefits of that liberalism i just outlined to you. it is taking them for granted that has led a lot of people, especially young people on both the left and the right to say it's not enough. i want more. i went social justice or i want community and want a stronger sense of bonds with my fellow citizens. in a realistically if you look at the societies that are based on one of the stronger principles, it does not end well. you think about india right now. it was one of the premier liberal societies emerged after its independence in the 1940s. right now the hindu nationalist party and prime minister trying to shift its national identity to one based in a hindu

religious they are basically left out of the national identity. deeply problematic in a society that has that kind of history of communal violence based on sectarian differences appear i do not see how you can run a country like india except on liberal principles. that is the world we are facing today. so, i think with that let me close and see if you have any comments or questions. [applause] [applause] >> cooksey written someplace recently at. [inaudible]

the loss of trust. [inaudible] you look at the measurement and trust in public. >> yes, terrible. >> all of these years in military precipitous decline. relook at struggles were hard with recruiting maybe that is another indicator system longer and institution people are anxious to join. >> think there are several causes to the decline of trust. it is interesting because it's pretty much across the board of domestic institutions in the united states is due to several

factors. but most important one i actually think is technology. and the fact that so much of our lives have moved online over the past to strike really since 2010 and 2011. i think that permits and what one of my colleagues labeled the spoke we at realities. you can believe things and you can believe they are supported that are completely false. you are living in a universe thousands, millions of people who agree on these false premises. extreme denial is an half the republican party believes more than half of believe the 2020 election was stolen.

a similar percentage believes vaccines are more harmful than helpful. i don't think this could have existed in a pre-internet world in which certain elite institutions had credibility and the ability to filter that kind of information. those of us have been looking at this phenomenon since 2016 have always said social media, the internet is one of the sources of this. i always thought it was one of six different things. you have economic inequality, cultural conflicts. demagogic politicians and so forth. i now think this is actually of those explanations probably the dominant one that in my mind is really causing this lack of trust. when the internet was privatized in the 1990s everybody including myself said great. this is going to democratize information anyone can have

access to any information they want too. information is power therefore this will be profoundly good for democratic societies. it turned out part of that was right. it did democratize good information is not necessarily democratic. is not anyone thanks of or wishes for looking at the computer screen. to add credibility for empirical information those have been undermined by the ability of anyone to say anything they want on the internet. that is one issue. again the causality is very hard to distribute fairly. there are multiple causes. obviously economic inequality have led to this for the fact elites have managed to steal themselves off with a lot of the world around them for they hate

to create that causes resentment. there are cultural issues that are very divisive. in many ways i think are more important than the pure economic inequalities. i would say actually does the technology factor that in my mind is really central to the drop in trust existing institutions. >> will, sir. i had a question in regards to that. without enforcing or pulling the plug on the internet, how can we absolving taking for granted are democracies as well as trying to mitigate on the spreading of false information? >> out is a really tough questions. i'm the reason it is a tough question is right now you have two choices in front of you. either you can have big internet platform do content monitoring.

at stanford we been looking at this for a long time for that of a policy cyber standard created several years ago it looked at disinformation and content moderation. first of all you have to moderate content. there is so much garbage on the internet the platforms are not your basic filtering of that information you would have beheadings gory violence, pornography just stuff nobody would want to see. they have this basic function of acting as filters. the big problem comes in political speech. there's a big legitimacy problem with a for-profit private company making basic decisions what is and is not acceptable. i don't think that got the right to do that. on the other hand you don't with the government to do that either. you don't the government to set

up a bureau that says this is factually true in the sort of thing. we came up with a solution i chaired a group on platform scale three years ago where we came up with a concept increasingly think is the only solution to this problem we called middleware. so what is the problem with these big platforms like facebook, twitter, whatever it is called now. the problem is their ability to reach these enormous audiences and to either amplify or silence certain voices. that is the fundamental problem. it's not censorship. is a lot for the right say but is a very powerful political tool that can be used for good or ill. we don't the government making

those decisions. what big private companies to do that. will be to solve it is by competition. what you could specify what kind of content you wanted to hear or see. if you drink amazon search to say only what you buy american. you look at political news i want to hear about environment or the southern border. you would get here more or less more diversity, less diversity. the important virtue of this is that it would put the user in control of content moderation. the user could himself or herself make these basic decisions about what came across through facebook or x or what

ever. we may be moving in the direction of something like that because there is now been a proliferation platform all i think is necessary is to have competition. you are not reliant on three gigantic platforms for your news. you've got blue sky, macedon, the reds, there is a protocol if you post something on threads it also shows up on macedon. and if they join the same consortium all these platforms can reach much broader audiences. but again you would control of what you saw and what other people saw. i think that is what is critical. what's critical is to reduce the scale of the content moderation and increase its diversity and hand it back control to individual users. we got stuck because we did not

see an economic model to make it viable. maybe it is just appearing maybe the market is providing that itself. last went okay. quick something struck me. he said at one point if something does not make sense is not going to continue. quick something is deeply unnatural is probably not going to continue. an obscure essay to issue already referred and patrick referred earlier that you wrote long ago i think you made the claim or at least suggested if something makes sense is not going to end. that is liberalism. it seems your belief then as now is liberalism makes sense. my question is basically this, could you make the case just play devils advocate for yourself make the case that it doesn't do so may be in light of

the case you made against liberalism long ago which consisted in some part at least in the essay and the suggestion liberalism ends in boredom. the prospect of centuries of boredom might scent history going again. is that still your view that boredom is a point of view liberalism does not make sense and reduces us to a state of boredom or would you update that in light of subsequent event? as i try to explain liberalism does make sense it does not make sense to people at every moment what is their considered argument? quick susan adjustment mechanism that has to happen. that is the experiment we been going through in terms of

neoliberalism, woke liberalism and so forth. i think there is a way of adjusting if these things don't seem to be making sense for making people happier then you're going to try something else. that's one of the virtues of the liberalism. i do actually think the boredom at the end of history is something that's driving a lot of people towards this right wing populism. that combined with the fact you can look at this online fantasy were we completely disconnected with reality. like i said if you cannot struggle against real injustice you struggle against justice. i think a lot of people are falling for that. in europe you have right wingers to say we are living under the brussels attorney of the horrible european union. it's real. european union is a bunch of

bureaucrats that make up these annoying rules. you are still living and an incredibly free society. you want to have an enemy and something to struggle against it. you turn this into the monster you're dealing with. okay, go ahead. >> it seems to me based on what you just said it's not simply boredom that is the problem but the lack of seriousness of one's life the less self-respect one has given you got no overarching moral purpose. >> the original end of history i said this desire for recognition as it is important for their two types. isis is where you demand equal recognition to other people. but also you want should be seen as greater goes to our intention because obviously if i'm recognized as superior then you are going to be recognized as

inferior. the trick in the liberal society is to neuter and put it into a room that donald trump will be satisfied having these casinos that turned out to not be the case. the liberal society. maybe that's not enough for some people. [applause] >> thank you very much for sharing your thoughts on liberalism of the 202024 mccain

conference. a liberal democracy challenges and critics. the last panel of the day will take place in 10 minutes. we have to get up, stretch your legs and come on back. we will conclude with a look at liberalism and its application to military context. [inaudible conversations]