#471 — The End of History, Revisited

Sam Harris speaks with Francis Fukuyama about liberal democracy, American politics, and global order. They discuss the misunderstood thesis of "The End of History," how conservatism has mutated into ethno-nationalism, the self-defeating extremes of both identity politics and neoliberalism, the damage of Trump's second term, the war in Iran, the future of Israel, antisemitism on the left and right, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe http://samharris.org/subscribe.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

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• 0:25Sam Harris?

  I am here with Francis Fukuyama. Frank, thanks for joining me on the podcast.

• 0:29Speaker 02

  Well, thanks very much for having me.

• 0:30Sam Harris?

  I think you and I have only met in person once. I don't know if you recall this, but I think we met in Mexico ages ago at the Ciudad de los Ases conference.

• 0:41Speaker 02

  Okay, sure, in Puebla.

• 0:43Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah. That was a strangely well-produced event. It was impressive. It was like the Mexican version of Ted, but with some obvious narco traffickers sitting in the front row, you know, oxygenarians with 20-year-old girlfriends or something like that.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 1:01Speaker 02

  Funded by one of the richest men in Mexico.

• 1:04Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, it's good to see you. We've got a lot to talk about, so I'm just gonna take it from the top here. You've never been on the podcast, which seems like a glaring omission on my part, so apologies to both you and the audience that it took so long to get you here. But I just want to tap your political wisdom and get your view of the present. But let's start with the beginning, that most people will know you first from your article and then book, The End of History. As a writer of books, I'm exquisitely sensitive to a title serving to mislead most of one's audience and most of the world who will never read the book. And I think you're the ultimate example of this. And the end of history as a phrase seems to have convinced many people that you were

• 1:49Sam Harris?

  claiming something that you were not in fact claiming. So what was your thesis there and what is the common misunderstanding of it?

• 1:55Speaker 02

  Well, I think it revolves around two words. And does not mean the cessation of history. It meant, what is the objective or goal towards which history seems to be moving? And history, you know, in my sense, was that of the philosopher Hegel, which was a progressive evolution of human society. So the end of history meant, where is the whole modernization development process tending? And my argument was that it looked like it was tending towards a market economy linked to a liberal democratic political system. So that was the origin of the, I think, the misunderstanding. Because a lot of people just read the title and said, he thinks that stuff is going to stop happening.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  And that was never the idea. The other thing is that I turned the original article into a book with the title, The End of History and the Last Man. The end of history part comes from the philosopher Hegel. The last man part comes from the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who said that the last man is the ambitionless, passionless creature that emerges at the end of history, when all of his material comforts and security have been taken care of. And he no longer has any great aspirations or ambitions. And that this was one of the problems of the end of history, that people aren't going to want to be in that position and they're going to try to rebel against it.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  And I actually spent the last five chapters of the book version explaining how democracy could break down in ways that I think are actually being acted out as we speak.

• 3:31Sam Harris?

  So do you still feel that liberal democracy running on the rails of capitalism has more or less won the argument? And there's no real durable contender to it, even if in fact there are enemies of it and processes by which it can erode? Or do you think, I mean, so one data point recently, as recently as I think yesterday, in favor of that is, you know, we saw Viktor Orban lose the election. But I think many people view the kind of capitalist, quasi-capitalist authoritarianism that we're seeing in China now as a more durable contender. How do you view that, the sense that we know the punchline of history and it is liberal democracy if we can only hold on to it?

• 4:14Speaker 02

  Well, honestly, I don't know the answer to that. I think that the Chinese have created a pretty impressive system. It is authoritarian. It's quasi-market based and they are very successful at marshaling new technology. They're capable of innovating a lot of things we thought they weren't able to do. And conversely, a democracy, especially American democracy, looks like it's falling apart. If I were somebody trying to move from a poor, misgoverned country somewhere else, I would have chosen the United States without question for most of the last several decades. But, you know, these days, I'm not sure that it's such an attractive model for many people.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  And I would say if the Chinese keep their development machine going, you know, it may turn out that they have a real alternative. I think, however, that it's a little premature to come to that conclusion because there are a lot of problems in China which are related to the fact that there's no feedback, there's no responsiveness to public opinion, and that is going to get them into trouble, I think, in the long run.

• 5:23Sam Harris?

  Well, we'll talk about the problems of American democracy, I think, at some length here. But before we do, I think we'll invoke the concept of liberalism a fair amount. In your most recent book, I think it's your most recent book, The Liberalism and its Discontents, goes deep into the concept of liberalism and the way in which it can be self-defeating under certain conditions. I want to talk about that. But before we jump in, what is liberalism? And this word seems to shape-shift for people and it can mean many different things in different contexts. What should we mean by liberalism and what are its core commitments?

• 5:59Speaker 02

  Well, I can tell you what I mean. I think that a liberal political system is one in which government authority is limited by a rule of law and by constitutional checks and balances. It's a way of preventing the government, the executive, from violating the rights of ordinary citizens, from interfering too much in, you know, markets and ordinary activity of citizens. And it's really that. Obedience to law that is at the core of what I regard as a liberal political system. Now, it has other connotations in other parts of the world, so if you say liberal in Europe, it means that you're kind of very pro-free market, you're anti-regulation, and that sort of thing.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  But I don't think that the economic interpretation of liberalism is, for me, the key thing. The key thing is that the state should be limited by law, and there should be checks and balances to prevent violations of individual rights by the government.

• 6:57Sam Harris?

  So how do you relate the concept of liberalism to conservatism? And how do they relate to the traditional notion of left and right in our politics?

• 7:08Speaker 02

  Well, it's complicated, because, first of all, there are now several different definitions of conservatism. You know, conservatism could mean that you simply want to preserve as much of the past tradition as possible. And if you live in a liberal society, that's going to involve retaining liberal traditions. I think one of the problems we're facing now is conservatism has mutated into something scarcely recognizable. You know, it's returned to an old... Well, let me put it this way. I think in the days of Ronald Reagan, conservatism really was a form of liberalism. He believed in markets, he believed in limited government, in all of these constraints.

• 7:51Speaker 02

  And, you know, I basically agree with that. I think the government could be more active in terms of dealing with social justice, inequality kinds of questions than he did. But he was actually still in that liberal tradition that I think is foundational, that's really been at the core of American politics, really since the founding of the United States. What's changed is conservatism, because it's gone off in this ethno-nationalist direction that has become quite authoritarian in the way that it's implemented.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  And I think that that's very illiberal. You know, Viktor Orban, that you referred to as just having been defeated in Hungary, said that he was trying to run an illiberal democracy. That means, you know, you have elections, you have popular will, but the government isn't restricted. The government doesn't have to follow checks and balances. You know, the government can do whatever it wants. And if that's the new form of conservatism, I mean, J D Vance seems to think so, then that's not, that doesn't have much to do with the kind of conservatism that existed, you know, in Ronald Reagan's day.

• 9:00Sam Harris?

  So it seems that the kind of conservatism you're nostalgic for is often going by the name of classical liberalism now.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's one way of putting it. In the United States, it gets complicated because you have these libertarians who also think of themselves as classical liberals. I think that they're a more extreme version because I think that, you know, the true classical liberals, people like John Stuart Mill or Adam Smith, understood you had to have government. Government provided certain public goods. It provided the enforcement of rules and law, and you simply couldn't do away with government. Whereas in the U.S., you have this libertarian fringe that thinks that somehow all aspects of government activity are somehow illegitimate, that taxes are illegitimate. And I think that that's, you know, a big problem. And that really is not what classical liberalism was all about.

• 9:53Sam Harris?

  Well, I think most sane people, at least, you know, given enough time to consider the matter, and if we could push the argument far enough outside of any perverse incentives, most people, I think, will converge on something like classical liberalism at this moment, which is that there should be a respect for individual rights, whatever should be, whatever is best accomplished in the private sector should be accomplished there. But there are some things the market can't see, and the government can only accomplish well for us, and so we need some governance. We can't be anarchists or extreme libertarians. And, you know, individual rights are sacred because the primacy of the individual really is a bull

• 10:35Sam Harris?

  Work against authoritarianism and extreme forms of tribalism. And yet there's, there's this observation that liberalism in this form can kind of tip over into an individualism that's so radical that, that you sort of lose purchase on social cohesion. Right. That we all just become consumers. We come, become atomized. There's no way for the political system to really ensure that people get what they want communally. And then that invites potentially very illiberal forces to rise up and claim some of that vacated space. So we have populism in its various forms. We have identity politics. We have just nationalism.

• 11:17Sam Harris?

  I mean, you, you mentioned J D Vance, so you can have, you, you can seem to be sane until you talk long enough. And then you get a kind of blood and soil, you know, ethno nationalist commitment coming in as a way of ensuring that people feel bonded together and things get weirder and weirder. And we're living through that. Can you talk for a minute about just how liberalism itself is vulnerable? How, how a system built on openness and tolerance is vulnerable to being subverted? I mean, Carl Popper called this the paradox of tolerance in at least one facet.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I, I think it's basically good ideas being carried to extremes. And you had two cases of that, both on the right and the left. On the right, you had what's sometimes called neoliberalism. I think that this was an extreme sort of worship of market economics where, you know, markets could do no wrong. Or you wanted to, you know, deregulate as much as possible. And you didn't worry about things like growing economic inequality as a result of, you know, this free market system. So that was one of the things that drove liberalism in, I think, a bad direction that then spawned a left wing reaction. The left-wing problem, I think, is basically

• 12:30Speaker 02

  identity politics, that, you know, classical liberalism is based on a notion that all human beings have an equal dignity and that no particular group of people is superior or has a right to dominate others. And I think identity politics kind of reversed that and took, you know, formerly oppressed minorities or groups that had been marginalized and said, no, you know, they're special or they deserve special recognition and notices. And that's where I think they started to deviate from classical liberalism because they were willing to use state power to, you know, enforce some of these group identities

• 13:13Speaker 02

  and strengthen them rather than treating people as equal citizens. And I think, you know, the extreme right and the extreme left then fed on each other, that the identity politics created this reaction on the part of former majority communities that said that they were the ones that were being oppressed using the same language, this identitarian language. So now you hear, you know, that white people are the persecuted minority in the United States, and so they're in a way borrowing that same language of victimization from the, you know, from the left.

• 13:46Sam Harris?

  Yeah. I must confess, I haven't read your book on identity politics, but I think I've gleaned some of what you think about it from interviews I've seen. I feel like you're less allergic to identity politics than I am. I mean, my feeling is that just across the board, it's now dysfunctional. And I mean, the one way I would summarize this is that especially for, you know, left of center for Democrats at this moment in our politics, I would say that virtually any mention of race in any context for any reason is almost always counterproductive at this point, is almost always toxic politically. This is not to say we didn't need a civil rights movement, but where we are now, I

• 14:26Sam Harris?

  really feel like we need just a full commitment to a race-blind, you know, content of their character, political and ethical norm. Does that go too far in your view?

• 14:38Speaker 02

  No, no, no, I completely agree with that. I think that, you know, this old ideal from the civil rights era of a colorblind society should still be the objective that we want to. Move to, we can recognize, you know, de facto that our society isn't colorblind and that there are all these ways of hidden privilege and so forth. But I don't think that you can have a functioning liberal society based on, you know, making these identity categories essential to who you are. In a liberal society, you judge individuals based on their individual merits, achievements, character, morality, and you don't judge them based on the fact that they are, you

• 15:20Speaker 02

  know, female, or black, or Hispanic, or, you know, a member of any, you know, particular group. You want to tolerate and live in a pluralistic society where you're not oppressing any of those groups, but you're also not seeing the society just as a collection of groups. You're seeing a society as a collection of individuals that may choose to associate with certain groups for common purposes, but their primary identity is something that they themselves create and they themselves have control over.

• 15:52Sam Harris?

  Yeah, but many of us are concerned about the rise of antisemitism we see on both the left and the right now, and I want to talk about the status of Israel and our various adventures in the Middle East in a minute. But just taking the antisemitism piece in an American context, I'm worried that Jews will see, most Jews will see identity politics as their only bulwark against antisemitism. And I, my feeling here is that this is really no exception, that we have to fight for liberal values without indulging in identity politics. Does that seem too quixotic to you, or does that seem like the right algorithm to run?

• 16:35Speaker 02

  No, no, I think that, I think you're absolutely right about that. I think that if American Jews see themselves first as Jews and secondly as Americans, there's going to be a, you know, negative reaction to that. The other thing is within Israel itself, you know, it seemed to me that one of the impressive things about the state of Israel For me, as a classical liberal, was the fact that Arabs could be citizens of Israel. You know, that although Jewish identity was important to Israel's self-conception, it wasn't the exclusive way that you could be an Israeli citizen. And so you had Israeli Arabs. They were not always treated fairly or equally, but they could vote and they could

• 17:18Speaker 02

  take part in the political system. And I thought that that was always a very impressive thing about the state of Israel, something that wasn't replicated in many of the surrounding authoritarian Arab countries. And that's what I really fear is being lost under this particular right-wing coalition. That they're more intent on making the Jewish identity and a specific kind of Jewish identity core to what it means to be Israeli, which I think is almost automatically exclusionary for people that aren't Jews in that fashion.

• 17:53Sam Harris?

  Yeah, well, let's get back to that because that part of the world worries me as it worries almost everybody at this moment. But to stick with America for a second.

• 18:02Speaker 00

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• 18:11Speaker 02

  I don't think we've ever had an administration that has been this corrupt. Biden was supposed to fix all of this. You had a president that tried to overturn an election that was openly anti-democratic, was friendly to Putin and Xi and all the dictators in the world, and we managed to reelect this guy. I think that it's going to be really a tragedy if the Democrats don't manage to come up with something a little bit more attractive.