Why I Can't Stop Thinking About 'The End of History'

Francis Fukuyama's “The End of History and the Last Man” is one of the most insightful books for understanding the strangeness and instability of this political moment. Fukuyama wrote his landmark book more than 30 years ago, and it’s typically remembered as a triumphalist argument, heralding the permanent victory of liberal democracy at the end of the Cold War. But that’s not quite right. Fukuyama also talked about the serious weaknesses he saw in liberal democracy — how it may not fully satisfy the human soul — and his warnings feel very prescient now. So I wanted to have Fukuyama on the show to talk through the ideas in his book and how he sees them today, at a time when liberal democracy seems increasingly imperiled around the world. Fukuyama is a political scientist at Stanford University and the author of a number of other great books of political theory, as well as a new memoir, “In the Realm of the Last Man.”

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

• 0:32Ezra Klein?

  Francis Fukuyama's 1989 essay, "The End of History," is remembered as this triumphalist argument heralding the permanent victory of liberal democracy. After it, anything major that happened in the world, you would get these people saying, "Well, I guess history didn't really end, did it?" I remember this practically after 9/11. This week, of course, is the 25th anniversary of 9/11. But this was such a terrible misreading of Fukuyama's argument, because if you actually read his essay, and particularly if you read the book that came out of that essay, he is saying something very different. The book was called "The End of History and the Last Man." It was anything but triumphalist. Liberal democracy

• 1:17Ezra Klein?

  might win, Fukuyama thought. It might become the way most states organize themselves, but it might win atop a cramped and partial vision of the human soul, one that believed in our ability to consume but had little room for our desire for recognition, for greatness, for daring. And no political system without room for those parts of our souls would be stable for very long. You cannot build a good society atop a flawed vision of human nature. My view is that very few books in politics are as insightful or as important for understanding where liberal democracy went wrong, why figures like Donald Trump keep rising, and why the opposition to them seems so wan and uninspiring so often.

• 2:00Ezra Klein?

  So this is a book that I think needs to be cleared of a sin that didn't really commit, because it has something to say to us now. Fukuyama is a political scientist at Stanford University. He's written many books into that one, including a two-volume series on the nature of political orders, a critique of the neoconservative world that he was once part of, and a defense of liberalism from its attackers. But his new book is a memoir, "In the Realm of the Last Man." And so I wanted to begin with that idea of the end of history and the last man. I wanted to begin by rediscovering the book that made Fukuyama famous, so we can hear what it has to say about the world we now live in.

• 2:44Ezra Klein?

  Francis Fukuyama, welcome to the show.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  Thanks very much for having me.

• 2:47Ezra Klein?

  So I want to begin the conversation in your most famous book, a book I'm a huge fan of, which is "The End of History and the Last Man." So this is built on an essay that comes out in 1989. It's a few months before the Berlin Wall falls. The book comes out after the fall of the wall. You have this moment where liberal democracy really seems to be triumphing. The end of history has become this highly memed, in many ways simplified, concept. So what was it?

• 3:16Speaker 01

  Well, this was not my phrase. It was a phrase of the German philosopher Hegel, and he meant history with a capital H. So we would use the word "development" or "modernization" today. But it's directional. It's progressive. Things are getting better. Human reason is prevailing in structuring societies. And the question of the end of history was not the end of events. It was to what objective does this historical process seem to be leading? The Marxists took that same concept of history. They believed in history also, but they believed that the end was not a liberal society. It was a communist utopia. And that was their

• 4:00Speaker 01

  guiding star in their political movement. And my observation back in the late 1980s, when Gorbachev was in the Soviet Union, was that we weren't going to get there. We were going to stop at the penultimate stage, which was some version of liberal democracy and a capitalist economy. And for me, that was the practical end of history that had really emerged.

• 4:22Ezra Klein?

  So this is more, the way to think about the term "the end of history" is the end of the process of figuring out how to politically organize society?

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Or the goal, or the objective of that process.

• 4:33Ezra Klein?

  Why did you think we were going to stop there?

• 4:35Speaker 01

  Well, I didn't know that we were going to stop, but all of these big systematic competitors had all either self-destructed or had been rejected by the people that once followed them. And I think the challenge that I was trying to make was to ask people, "Yeah, can you locate something that's better than this outcome?" Not necessarily that our society is perfect, it obviously is not, but is there an alternative form of political and social organization that you think will make people in the end happier and lead more fulfilled lives? And to this day, I've not seen anyone really posit that.

• 5:15Ezra Klein?

  Well, what the Marxists thought, and you talk about this in the book, is that a capitalist system has within it a contradiction that will inevitably lead to its undoing, which is you have this class conflict. And you have a small number of people at the top who are exploiting the great mass of workers beneath them. And liberal democracy is lying when it says that it equally, or even reasonably, apportions freedom. That the, as a famous line goes, that the fact that the rich and the poor men are free to sleep under the bridge is not an equality of freedom. So why are you not convinced class is such a dangerous contradiction?

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Well, it could be, especially with the rise of technology. But for much of the period after 1945, you didn't have pure capitalism. You had, basically, in most advanced countries, a form of social democracy. And I think the democracy part of it was absolutely necessary, because unless you provide certain social protections, unless you do a certain amount of redistribution, the inequality in the society is going to become intolerable. And for most of that period, you actually had rising real incomes for working people. And so even though there was inequality, you had political stability, because everybody could buy into it. Now, I never argued that this would be true for all time, and I think

• 6:41Speaker 01

  that the nature of technology is changing, such that the degree of inequality has grown. I think globalization has also contributed to this. And unless you moderate those inequalities through political means, you're just not going to have stable democracy.

• 6:59Ezra Klein?

  So one of the things that I think is fascinating about the way you frame this in the book is you try to move the foundation for liberalism off of some of the philosophers we normally give it to, Hobbes and Locke, and onto Hegel. And one of the ways you do that is to say that Hobbes and Locke had this much more narrow vision of what a liberal society, or even just a justice society, is trying to achieve, which is self-preservation. It is simply almost existing at a reasonable level of material well-being. And you say Hegel understands the human soul better than that, and that the human soul wants more

• 7:41Ezra Klein?

  than that. It wants recognition. And the fundamental question for liberal societies, the one that will decide whether or not they are the end of history, is whether they are actually able to spread recognition around society equally enough, not just freedom, recognition, being seen, being valued enough to survive. So tell me a bit about that move, that it's actually recognition that is at the center of political life.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Well, this is an idea that goes all the way back to Plato. Socrates in the Republic asks, "Well, we have reason, we have desire, but isn't there a third part of the soul that he calls "thumos," which can be translated as spiritedness or pride?" And it's a non-material drive that people have, that they want other people to acknowledge their humanity. So I have these, I invented these two Greek words, isothumia and megalothumia. Isothumia is basically, it's the foundation of a liberal society, that everybody, by virtue of being born as a human being, has a certain base level of dignity that has to be recognized

• 8:52Speaker 01

  by the rest of society. We recognize it in a liberal society by giving people rights. And that means that you are seen as a human being that has some share of the power of the community. And that generates a huge amount of

• 9:10Speaker 01

  Resentment if you feel that other people are being recognized in a way that you are not. And that really, I think, drives a lot of democratic politics. Just to give you one example, in the gay marriage movement, you could have solved the economic problem of gay couples by giving them inheritance rights and that sort of thing, the ability to pass on property to the children they raise.

• 9:35Ezra Klein?

  Civil unions.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Civil unions. But that wasn't enough because gay people wanted to have acknowledgement that their unions had just as much dignity and just as much value as that between a man and a woman. And I think that was the fundamental drive that led to the legalization of gay marriage. So that's just an example. But I think civil rights, Ralph Ellison wrote a novel back in the 1950s about the experience of African Americans that had moved from the South to the North. You didn't have official legally sanctioned segregation. What you had was the invisibility. That's where the invisible man in the title comes from, that white people in the North

• 10:18Speaker 01

  simply didn't see a black person as a fellow human being. And that was really what, I think, generated the deep resentment and distrust that existed in northern cities and in racial politics.

• 10:31Ezra Klein?

  One of the really interesting sections of the book to me is where you talk about the ways in which material politics and a politics of recognition can blur into each other. That there are many places where people would, they have a level of material wealth that say in another country would be amazing, but in the country they're in, because it puts them further down the scale of recognition, it for them is a terrible injury. You have Adam Smith talking about this, that much of what people want from wealth is to be seen, it isn't simply to consume. So tell me a bit about that side of it, because I think that also makes sense of some parts

• 11:14Ezra Klein?

  of our economic politics too, where you'll sometimes have somewhat self-satisfied liberals say, well, actually, if you look on a chart, people have been getting richer and it's better than it was in the past and we have antibiotics now. But actually, if you understand that part of what people want from even the money they make is to be seen and recognized a certain way in society, that that actually contains within it a never enoughness, a constant instability, because there is always a certain amount of inequality of recognition in society.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  Right. Well, to expand a little bit on that Adam Smith section that you referred to, he says, "The rich man glories in his wealth and the poor man is unseen, is invisible to his fellow human beings." That's really the pain of poverty is this invisibility to other people. And I think that still operates. And I think if you think about our politics, a lot of it is about recognition rather than simply the distribution of material resources. A lot of populism today is driven by people who feel they're invisible, that the world is run by educated elites and they don't listen to the concerns of people like them

• 12:24Speaker 01

  and they don't recognize them as being fully equal because they don't have the educations or the sophistication. And I think that that unequally distributed recognition is actually at the base of a lot of our problems.

• 12:37Ezra Klein?

  I think something you see, you see it in some cases on the left, I think wokeness had a lot of this in it, but you see it in some cases on the populist right, which is, I don't have a word to make up for it, but a desire to invert status in a society. So a belief that your white privilege or your wealth and your riches make you suspect and should be, you should be treated as suspect until you say prove yourself otherwise. On the right, this can take forms of attacks on their chosen elites, journalists and cosmopolitans. And populism has a lot of this in it, the people who have been judged excellent or who

• 13:19Ezra Klein?

  have attained power, there's an effort to sort of alter the moral valence of that power and the way society sees them. And I actually see the last couple of years, as in some ways a fight between these, some of the radicalization of the tech right comes from their feeling of, well, we did what you wanted, we made our money under capitalism, we built these great companies and now you hate us. And that pushed them into a very, very different and eventually quite scary politics.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  No, that's absolutely right. I think that your judgment of the moral character of the people you don't like then blends with resentment at the fact that they are unjustly recognized. And that's really the source of many of the forms of backlash that we see in our society, both on the left and the right. You don't want to be seen as lesser than other people and you get very resentful when you're treated that way. And the inversion, I think, is simply a demand that that stop, that you be recognized at least as the equal. So just because you've made a lot of money doesn't mean that you're a bad person.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  The real anger comes from people that feel that they're victimized, that they are marginalized as a result of their identities. And that is now something that's occurred to a lot of people that occupy previously privileged positions in the society.

• 14:43Ezra Klein?

  So you define there the version in which recognition is equal. But you said you invented another word.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:51Ezra Klein?

  Megalothumia is that?

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Yes, megalothumia. So that is the desire to be recognized as greater than other people. And I think that this is obviously a threat in a democracy because a liberal democracy is based on the premise that all people, all citizens are essentially equal. But that's not enough for a certain group, a certain subset of human beings. They want to dominate, they want to be more than others. It takes oftentimes a very negative form of political domination. So you want to be a dictator or an autocrat. But it's also necessary because you can't have any kind of human excellence if you didn't have the desire to be better than other people.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  If you want to be a great pianist or a football star or a great artist, I think that's also driven by a certain kind of desire to be recognized as better than other people. So I think that you can't have a society of perfectly equal recognition. That has to be the basis for social cohesion. But you also can't have a dynamic society without people that want something more than that. Now, I actually wrote about Donald Trump in the original book, The End of History and the Last Man.

• 16:04Ezra Klein?

  He comes up a few times.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. And back then, I thought, well, one of the virtues of living in a capitalist democracy is that this desire for unequal recognition can be satisfied just by becoming rich. And it's a way of bleeding off that energy. Little did I know that 30 years later, that wouldn't be enough for Donald Trump and that he'd want political power as well as fortune.

• 16:29Ezra Klein?

  So that brings us to the other side of the book, which gets talked about somewhat less. And maybe the way to get into this is simply to say, who is the last man?

• 16:38Speaker 01

  So the last man is the creature that Friedrich Nietzsche, the other great German philosopher of the 19th century, identified as the product of the end of history. A person that was satisfied with the things that liberalism provides, basically peace and prosperity, but had no further aspirations, no desires for a better vision of the world, nothing that they would risk their lives on behalf of. And for Nietzsche, it was really that extraordinary ambition that was really what made a human being a human being. And instead, in a liberal society, you got this very flat world where everybody has

• 17:21Speaker 01

  to tolerate everybody else and nobody wants to think of themselves as better.

• 17:26Ezra Klein?

  So there's something interesting here. One of the constant critiques of at least a portion of the right towards liberalism, for that matter, towards socialism, is that It's fundamentally built on a lie and that that lie is equality. And the form of equality that is a lie can take different versions, right? You can have people who see racial equality as a lie and they get obsessed with race and IQ and things of that nature. You can have people who see just individual equality as a lie. Obviously, some people are either more morally good than others. Other people are more talented, more capable, they work harder.

• 18:06Ezra Klein?

  But that many on the right see it as a dangerous lie, that a society could or should be equal. And that the particular danger of that lie is that it blunts ambition. It pulls down those who would strive for excellence. And I certainly see in much of the sort of tech right reaction in the last couple of years, in some parts of the new right and how they look at society, a sort of sense that this happened. This is why so many on the right are rediscovering Nietzsche. Like, who is there in your title? You know, the sort of originator of the last man idea?

• 18:42Speaker 01

  No, that's right. Well, first of all, let me just defend the idea of universal equality because I do think, you know, and ultimately, if you look historically, it derives from a certain Christian interpretation that human beings are fundamentally equal. There's a passage in Galatians that says, "There's neither Jew nor Gentile, master nor slave, male nor female, but all are equal in Jesus Christ." And, you know, that fundamental insight, I think, has a real meaning because there's a core, something in one of my books I labeled factor X, that makes every single human being recognizably human. So I think that there is something really genuinely to be protected in this idea that

• 19:27Speaker 01

  every one of us has a certain moral core that is of great value and needs to be protected by the system. But it's also true that it leads to a flattening of our societies because liberalism is necessarily pluralistic. It's a recognition of the fact that different people pursue different ends, that they have different visions of the good life. The reason you created liberalism in the first place, in the 17th century, was the wars of religion in which people kill themselves over, you know, minor theological differences. And there was a lowering, deliberate lowering of the human horizon to mean survival. You know, the right to life is superior to the right to the good life.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  But this does take away something. People want to live the good life. They want to have higher aspirations. If you look at modern America, we don't ask that much of citizens. You know, you obey the law, you pay your taxes, and that's fine. You don't have to sacrifice. You don't have to take any grave risks on behalf of the society as a whole. And I think that there is a part of the human psyche that actually wants that kind of life, you know, that feels flattened if they don't have the ability to, you know, to, you know, as the Declaration says, risk their, you know, their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor for a cause.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  And that's why I think you get these jokers on January 6th, dressed up in camo, pretending that they are these patriots that are defending, nobly defending this way of life. I think that, you know, you have that striving for that degree of sacrifice and it doesn't exist in our society, and so you invent a cause.

• 21:15Ezra Klein?

  So why in the original essay do you end on saying that the end of history will be a sad time?

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Well, I think it would be sad precisely because of that lack of risk and of a vision of a noble future that, you know, you are willing to struggle on behalf of. I have another line in the original book that said that if you're living in a society that is peaceful and democratic because of struggles of an earlier generation that were successful, then you're going to struggle against peace and democracy because what you want to do is struggle for struggle's sake. And I think it's that impulse that, you know, really drives a lot of extremist politics and disturbs the, you know, the potential stability of a liberal society. It's also a generational thing.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  You know, it's clear that the people that want most desperately to live in a liberal society are people that live in dictatorships. You know, there's genuine joy when communism fell in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. You can see this in all the people that get on boats, you know, desperate to get to, out of a poor, corrupt, you know, destitute country and to get to America or to Europe. And so, you know, there is a real enthusiasm for liberalism on the part of people that don't have it. And I think that we do go in these generational cycles where, you know, once you have it, you take it for granted and increasingly you look for something further.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  And so you're not living in a dictatorship any longer, so you think Brussels is the dictatorship that you have to struggle against. So there may be kind of a rise and fall in the support for liberalism, but in the end, it's, you know, going to be the most stable outcome that, you know, that a human society can achieve.

• 23:12Ezra Klein?

  If you're not a subscriber to The New York Times, we have some news for you. You can now explore The Times for free without any paywalls at all during your first month in the New York Times app. You have a quote I often think about where you say, "We inhabitants of liberal democratic countries are by now so used to accounts of current events, the reduced motivation economic causes, so thoroughly bourgeois in our own perceptions, that we are frequently surprised to discover how totally non-economic most political life is." And I think that's a bridge to something worth talking about this week. This is the 25th anniversary of 9/11. I think the first time I remember a lot of people all of a sudden saying, "Well, I guess the end of history wasn't the end," was actually 9/11.

• 23:56Ezra Klein?

  And an attack on America from people coming out of an ideology that was fundamentally non-economic, that was religious, it was very much concerned with recognition and humiliation, people willing to launch attacks in which they knew they themselves would die. And, you know, one of the things that I think has come since then is that politics has been driven externally and internally by, I think, people whose motivations are much more about recognition. And liberalism, as you say, in the way this quote continues, "does not even have a common vocabulary for talking about the prideful and assertive side of human nature that is

• 24:38Ezra Klein?

  responsible for driving most wars and political conflicts." So how do you think about that, that blind spot? And the way maybe 9/11 forced the resumption of recognizing that side of politics?

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Well, it certainly forced the recognition that there were other people around the world that were driven by very non-economic factors. You know, if you're willing to be a suicide bomber, you obviously feel that there is a completely non-material cause that you're, you know, that you're serving. I don't think that it directly challenged liberalism in the way that people thought at the time. I think that radical Islamism is not a, it's not an ideology that's going to ever conquer the world, certainly not at this point. It only takes root in relatively poor, disorganized societies that are Muslim to begin with. So in that sense, it was different from Marxism, Leninism, that genuinely had a kind of universal

• 25:37Speaker 01

  appeal in many different societies. And so I think that the direct threat that here was an alternative to liberalism that was very powerful was simply not true. And in fact, in the years since 9/11, it's kind of faded. What I think 9/11 triggered was actually the Western reaction, or overreaction to both Afghanistan and to Iraq, that then set in motion a lot of other, you know, I think, very dangerous trends. Militarization of foreign policy. I think the beginnings of a surveillance state, you know, in the United States because of the fear of terrorism.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  And also because the wars never resulted in a, in a good outcome in either Afghanistan or Iraq. Great cynicism about American power and the use of American power that led directly to the emergence of people like Donald Trump.

• 26:35Ezra Klein?

  So you were a neoconservative at that time. You signed some of the early letters arguing for the removal of Saddam Hussein. And then the Iraq war itself led you to break with neoconservatism broadly. Why?

• 26:49Speaker 01

  Well, I don't have a problem with the use of force to get rid of a dictator. I mean, we did that in World War II with Germany and Japan, and that was a very positive outcome. What I had been spending much of the 1990s studying was actually the use of power in developing countries that were culturally quite different in Central America, you know, in Southeast Asia, in other places. And I was very skeptical whether the United States itself had the staying power to really transform a very different society. In my view, we tried to do this in the Philippines, in Nicaragua, in Vietnam, in many other places.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  And, you know, the American public gets tired after about four or five years, and then they give up and the society is left worse off. And I was very worried that the Bush administration would succeed in getting rid of Saddam Hussein, but then would be at a loss on how to actually create a stable country in its wake. And it was worse than I anticipated. They were even less prepared, you know, for that long-term effort when they did the invasion. And that was the real problem that I had with it.

• 28:01Ezra Klein?

  One thing you talk about in the memoir that you've released is you describe that as kind of a reckoning with how much of your own thinking can be generated by who you're around, what social circles you're moving in. Just tell me about that sort of meta-realization.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you know, coming out of the Enlightenment, we have a certain view of human cognition that says, well, human beings take in empirical information, they process it, they draw inferences, and that's how they end up believing that certain things are true. Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist, wrote a very interesting book about what he called motivated reasoning. He said, that's actually not the way that human reason works, that we start with the conclusions that we want to believe in, and we use our enormous cognitive abilities to marshal the evidence to support those views. And I have to say that that Enlightenment view looks less and less true, you know, when you watch the politics of the present day.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  And it was true for me as well. You know, I moved in this neoconservative social circle. You know, I wrote a lot for Commentary magazine and, you know, other publications in that genre. And my own sense of, you know, who I was was very much shaped by the approbation of, you know, people that were also in that movement. And that's what made it hard to break with them, because it means, you know, not just changing policies, but it means changing friendships. And that, you know, that's what happened.

• 29:36Ezra Klein?

  One thing you saw right after 9/11 and in that period of run-up to war in Iraq particularly, was a huge number of neoconservatives and other cultural commentators celebrating the return of a thumotic, passionate politics, this view that America had become decadent and soft, full of metrosexuals and management consultants. And here, finally, we had a struggle again, a clash of civilizations, you know, a reason we needed this manly Texas rancher as our president. Looking back, some of the rhetoric on this has a real quality of the absurd.

• 30:19Ezra Klein?

  But one thing I think you also see is that the Iraq war, the highly aggressive reaction America had for a long time afterwards, it's done very lasting damage to our politics. I see Trump is a direct descendant of it.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:35Ezra Klein?

  And there is this constant belief, I think, on the part of some intellectuals that violent struggle is an ennobling thing for societies. And yet I look at, you know, certainly in more modern times, Vietnam and Iraq, and I see Israel right now. And I think the dangers of having your politics become profoundly oriented around violence, around reprisal, around struggle, around these kinds of more warlike virtues is also very, very present and visible. So I'm curious what lessons you take, not just about the question of, in what cases

• 31:18Ezra Klein?

  can America export democracy at the point of a gun? But what does it do to a polity when it sometimes gets the wish of people who think that we've grown soft and calculating, and all of a sudden we have this return to the virtues or the vices of war?

• 31:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I actually talked about that in the last few chapters of The End of History and the Last Man, that, you know, there were certain thinkers, including Hegel, that kind of felt that every now and then you had to have a war to recharge our batteries, so to speak, and to get us serious about things. The trouble is that technology has moved on, and that's just impossible. I mean, it's not just nuclear weapons, you know, you can't have a little war with nuclear weapons. But conventional weapons have become so destructive that the negative impact of any kind of conflict right now is so potentially devastating that that's simply not an alternative.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  And so I think for a successful society that wants to bleed off that megalothumia, you need to find, you know, peaceful outlets for that kind of ambition.

• 32:40Ezra Klein?

  I want to talk about the politicians who followed this, Obama and Trump. And maybe the place to start, because I think this is almost the more interesting question for liberalism, is Barack Obama. I'll begin broad, which is, how in the broad story of America do you now see the Obama presidency?

• 32:59Speaker 01

  Well, I think it was well-intentioned, but in a certain way, it wasn't ambitious enough. And I think that's probably what a lot of his progressive critics think, you know, that he said very soothing things about, you know, kind of post-racial America, just his very presence as president was an affirmation of that. But it didn't really change any of the underlying social and economic inequalities that were driving the racial divide in the United States. And one of, you know, I think another perfectly just criticism was he was too bought into what we now call neoliberalism with the kinds of economic advisors that he surrounded

• 33:42Speaker 01

  himself with, who kind of accepted the, this new form or the new evolution of capitalism that was producing oligarchs and very large wealth inequalities, which you could have addressed through antitrust, through, you know, different tax policy. But under Obama, you saw this problem that I describe in a couple of my books as vitocracy, that we have a constitutional, a very complex constitutional system built around checks and balances. The essence of liberalism is the rule of law, that there should be rules that govern and limit executive power. But I think that the American government at that point had become so complex that

• 34:23Speaker 01

  it became really hard for anybody to do anything, either in a conservative direction, which frustrated Reagan, but also in a progressive direction. You know, issues of climate change really require fairly strong, controversial decisions because you have clashing interests and, you know, somebody's got to resolve those. And so I think that the underlying institutional problems were really never addressed. You know, take the filibuster. It's completely non-constitutional limitation on the power of Congress. And, you know, you could have gotten rid of the filibuster, but even that relatively low hurdle, you know, was not even attempted in that, in that period.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  The other thing I think that I would criticize Obama for more was that in the absence of the ability of the government to take on frontally many of these challenges, because it didn't have the power to do it, you had the flourishing of a certain kind of identity politics in civil society. And that, you know, was not, I don't think that was the core of his presidency, but it certainly, you know, took hold in that period.

• 35:30Ezra Klein?

  I do think it took hold in that period, but I think it took hold for a reason not unrelated to what you're describing, which is one of the ways I think about what has gone wrong in liberalism, because I think quite a bit has. And I think liberalism right now, even though I'm a liberal, has real exhausted feeling to it, is my one line on this is that first liberalism captured the institutions, and then the institutions captured liberalism. And what I mean by that is that liberals, in many cases, built America's political institutions. They certainly, as liberalism became like the reigning ideology of the universities, liberals became the people who staffed these institutions. And so then liberals became the people who owned their failures, who governed with the

• 36:13Ezra Klein?

  horizons of what these institutions could achieve.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:17Ezra Klein?

  And if you are the defenders of the system that doesn't work, if you are, if your moral ambition is boundaried by what failing institutions can achieve...

• 36:32Ezra Klein?

  You're not going to have a very exciting political philosophy.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  No, you're absolutely, yeah, you're absolutely right about that. I think that at this point, you know, for me, it would be absolutely wrong to think that we need to go back to the pre 2016 world, because that world was one in which the government was basically hobbled from doing anything ambitious. I think, you know, what propelled Trump to power was the belief that it was too constraining, and so he simply wanted to become a dictator, violate, you know, all sorts of rules in order to get things done. But you need a little bit of that in order to do progressive things. You know, it takes 10 years to get the permitting done to do a transmission line, to get power from the middle of the country where alternative energy is produced to the west coast where it's consumed.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  And that's the product of, you know, this kind of proceduralism that was ushered in by people basically on the left. So you're right that they created this institutional straitjacket. And I think one of the big challenges is how to go back to a stronger government that can actually do good things.

• 37:42Ezra Klein?

  Well, this proceduralism is, I think, a very biting tension right now, because on the one hand, much of the critique that liberals, even the left, has of Donald Trump is the evisceration of procedure.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:56Ezra Klein?

  He wants to build a ballroom, he just bulldozes his swing. And on the other hand, and that's true, I mean, he is eviscerating procedure, he is firing inspectors general, he is doing all kinds of things that properly you are not supposed to be able to do under our system of government. It is very, very hard, I think, to become very spun up about violations of procedure and not then accidentally wrap yourself as a defender of procedure. And so if procedure is both the problem, in the sense that it is being ignored, but also a little bit when you're in power, the problem in the sense that it is being overly followed.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:38Ezra Klein?

  That doesn't leave you a very comfortable place to stand.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  I think if a Democrat is elected in 2028, they're going to have a big conundrum, because they're going to want to do things, especially if it's a more progressive, left-leaning Democrat. And they're going to find themselves up against these same procedures that have hobbled, you know, Obama and Biden. You know, Biden wanted to have high-speed internet in rural areas, and he was completely unable to produce that in the three years that, you know, after the passage of that act. So they're going to want more authority, and they're going to have to, in a way, look a little bit more like Trump. I think that the trick is going to be to fundamentally stay within the law, but to

• 39:25Speaker 01

  modify the law in ways that grant, you know, essentially more power to the government to do things. And I think that's going to be a hard thing to sell, because the immediate charge is, oh, you're just acting like Donald Trump. But in fact, you know, he was responding to a real problem, this real institutional problem in the way that American government was operating.

• 39:48Ezra Klein?

  You wrote a book in 2021 that I think introduces an interesting tension into this, which is called Liberalism and Its Discontents. And that book ends on a call, I wouldn't really call it a stirring call, I think it's hard to have a stirring call for this, for moderation as the answer for what is ailing liberalism, a sense of temperance. Here, I ask you, you know, what you think of the Obama presidency, and what you fundamentally say to me is it wasn't radical enough. I ask you about American institutions and procedures, and you say liberals are going to have to be more like Donald Trump, they got to get rid of the filibuster. I've been arguing for ending the filibuster for a long time. I can tell you with certainty, people do not experience that as moderate.

• 40:31Ezra Klein?

  So I'm curious how you think about resolving these.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  I guess, as in the end, you're right that there is a contradiction there. You know, the same vices that characterize bad dictatorial governments will also come to characterize good progressive ones. You know, people have been complaining about the Supreme Court overturning Humphries' executor. This is this rule that allowed Congress to set terms under which a president could or could not fire an executive branch official in a multi-member, you know, commission. Roosevelt wanted to fire this guy, William Humphries, that had been a commissioner for the FTC, because he felt that guy was getting in the way of his New Deal agenda, progressive

• 41:19Speaker 01

  agenda. So the very same constraint on executive power that we're now criticizing, you know, a conservative Supreme Court for overturning was something that progressives wanted. I just think that that's kind of built into, built into our politics, that the same set of institutions can either be good or bad, depending on the goal that you set. So you have to, you know, have a good set of ends that you're trying to achieve, but you also need power.

• 41:49Ezra Klein?

  Let's talk about the man who stepped into some of the failures here, or some of the resentments here, which is Donald Trump. As you mentioned, Trump appears a couple of times in End of History and The Lost Man. But when he emerges into politics, he emerges as something other than simply an icon of capitalist success. He emerges as somebody bringing a renewed nationalism, a renewed belief in borders, belief in maybe more traditional hierarchies in America. And over time, he emerges, in your telling, as somebody who is either proposing or modeling

• 42:30Ezra Klein?

  a different form of government, a different regime, not just a different leader. You've described him as repatri monumentalizing the government.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 42:38Ezra Klein?

  What does that mean?

• 42:39Speaker 01

  So let's begin with another bit of psychology. It's not natural to favor a well-qualified stranger over your relatives or your friends. It's a very natural human desire to want to reward friends and family. So most states in human history were patrimonial, meaning that they basically were run for the benefit of the rulers. It was the ruler's household, the friends and family of the ruler, that were given privileges and were able to enrich themselves. And the reason you went into politics was to enrich yourselves. And I think that every society that has managed to create modern state institutions that

• 43:19Speaker 01

  are impersonal has had this constant backsliding temptation, because the rulers themselves would like their friends and family to, you know, to be favored. Just one simple historical example, the Ottomans had the, one of the weirdest ways of getting to a modern state, they literally captured young boys in the Balkans, brought them to Istanbul, and trained them to be administrators and generals. But they couldn't have families, because they didn't want nepotism, right? And they couldn't resist the demand of the Janissaries to have children, to have families. So eventually, a Sultan gave in, and you're back in the whole nepotistic, patrimonial

• 44:01Speaker 01

  world that the Ottomans had briefly managed to get beyond. We're doing that right now. You know, instead of professional diplomats handling our Middle East policy, you get Jared Kushner and Steve Whitkoff, you know, two friends and family of Donald Trump, and you're paying the price for it, because a modern state really does need kind of meritocratic, you know, impersonal people running the state apparatus.

• 44:26Ezra Klein?

  Are you surprised how easy it was for Trump to begin to build or rebuild that structure in a system that seemed just choked with rules and procedures to keep that from happening?

• 44:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm totally astounded that the American people don't seem to really care that much. I mean, maybe in the fullness of time, there'll be some accountability, but yeah, I would not have expected that the degree of corruption that exists in the current administration would have been tolerable to, you know, mainstream Republicans, for example.

• 44:57Ezra Klein?

  When Trump sort of re-rolled back in the 2024 election, much more so than in 2016, he ran and assembled a coalition as a candidate of courage and thumos and passions. You know, this really took hold after the nearly successful assassination attempt with his bloodied fist in the air. You saw a sort of rallying around him as a almost mythic man of history figure. I think a lot of that has drained out of the system now, as he seems a little bit more.

• 45:37Ezra Klein?

  Ridiculous, dangerous, can't be, you know, spending his time on the ballroom.

• 45:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:43Ezra Klein?

  But is there something to be learned or be seen about what at least some people wanted to see in him? What they thought he might represent that felt to them like it was missing?

• 45:58Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's all about power. You know, I think that many of Trump's defenders currently would say that we still, you know, that the Democrats only produced weak leaders and we want a strong leader. They'll excuse the corruption by saying, well, okay, maybe you're getting corruption, but that's the price you have to pay to have somebody that really wanted to close the border and was able to, to do that. And they'll look past, you know, all of the other institutional depredations that have happened under him because they want that, that strength. It's something that I wouldn't have expected in American politics because really our system is really designed to guard against, you know, that kind of leader.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  There's a famous letter of Alexander Hamilton that anticipates Trump perfectly. He said, there will be a point in American politics where some person with great oratorical skills will come and rally people again, you know, in favor of his own personal power. And that, you know, was part of the reason they designed this complex constitutional system. By the way, I'm not completely pessimistic. I think our institutions actually are going to hold at the end of this story, but, you know, we're being taken for a very dangerous ride and, you know, in the meantime.

• 47:14Ezra Klein?

  You wrote, I forget when they actually came out, but these two books about the origins of modern political states. And the central question in those books was about how do you get to Denmark? How do you get from, you know, more rudimentary forms of human organization to the advanced, efficient, fair, neutral state, sort of both metaphorically and literally represented by Denmark? And I remember, you know, reading those books at the time and thinking that that statement made sense. And as, as I was thinking about them again for this conversation, some part of me, when I framed the question, how do you get to Denmark?

• 47:58Ezra Klein?

  It no longer felt like the right question, that Denmark does not feel like the future. I mean, one, Europe itself does not seem all that stable. You just saw the AFD posting a huge result in a regional German election. You have far-right populism rising all across the continent. But also the, the generalized sense that Europe is falling behind, that it is itself being somewhat choked by rules and procedures, that, you know, China is roaring forward. If you were writing those books today, if you were thinking about the formations of states and the, the pathway they're traveling, do you still see Denmark as a goal?

• 48:34Speaker 01

  No, absolutely. I mean, the reason I like Denmark was not for the same reason as Bernie Sanders. It's not because it's got this huge welfare state. It's because it's run competently. And I just don't see any period in human history in which competence in state administration is not a virtue. And it's a, going to be a virtue if your goal is to restrict immigration. It's interesting, Danish politics has been, you know, more stable than ours, but they have really closed off immigration, despite the fact that there's still, you know, coalition with, you know, with social democrats in it.

• 49:12Ezra Klein?

  And some people, my colleague David Leonhardt, among others, has argued that that's why their politics have been more stable.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:16Ezra Klein?

  They basically merged liberalism with a more closed border nationalism.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. But the thing is that they could actually do it competently and they could actually achieve those goals. So again, I just don't see any, any circumstance in which having a competent, modern, public administration isn't going to be an advantage. That's how countries get rich in the first place. And that's how they manage the different crises that hit them, you know, at later points, like pandemics and financial crises. If we didn't have a really competent set of financial managers in 2008, I think we would have been in big trouble.

• 49:52Ezra Klein?

  I'm not saying that, that we don't want competent administration. We do. And I'm not saying that that isn't very hard to achieve. It is. But, but I want to try to push you towards the question I'm asking here, which is whether or not, again, with your more thematic hat on.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:07Ezra Klein?

  I think the conversation around Europe has changed a lot in the past decade or two decades. You know, we've gone from, I remember this spade of books in the early 2000s about whether or not the European Union was a future. And now Europe seems very left behind and a lot less stable politically. And you have this sort of strange competition between an America that is operating in a reckless, chaotic, high-risk way, and a China that is showing incredible capacity to build a, you know, 21st century manufacturing and innovation juggernaut that is operating under a much more authoritarian form of politics.

• 50:49Ezra Klein?

  It is, takes risks, but in a very calculated way. And somehow the idea that, you know, what you're trying to do is, is get to where Europe is. I mean, Europe feels a little bit like it's getting left behind.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  No, no, look, I am not trying to get to where Europe is. Europe is, you know, if you're talking about over procedural, excessive proceduralism, that's Europe. Basically there bureaucrats make so many rules. You have member state level rules, and then you've got the whole Brussels bureaucracy. And, you know, anybody operating in Europe will tell you that, you know, complying with this mountain of rules that they established is why they don't have a big tech industry. You know, for example, one of the things that Mario Draghi and countless other reformers have recommended is actually get a single market. That was the whole point of the European community. You can't have large-scale companies in Europe because every, one of the 27 member states has all these niggling little rules. So they're not there.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  They're not a model.

• 51:49Ezra Klein?

  It's very hard to sell across the countries.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  You can't sell across the countries.

• 51:52Ezra Klein?

  In the way it's very easy to sell in America.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and for that reason, they have put limits on their own economic productivity by, you know, by the fact that they don't have competent administration that could actually make a uniform playing field for European companies.

• 52:08Ezra Klein?

  Okay, but I want to stop here because I want you to try to resolve this tension more for me. I think, I think what I say that, I remember Tyler Cowen, The Economist, saying something of this nature, where he said, look, you meet people who like work in the government in Europe. And almost to a person, they are on average, they are competent, they are cultured, they can say more to you about literature and books and art than the person in the same position in America can. And yet the outcomes are not that good, that Europe is struggling. Why? What is it about these competent governments that is not leading to more competent governance?

• 52:49Speaker 01

  Well, that indicates they're actually not so competent. I don't think competence is measured by the number of rules that you pile up. At some point, I think competent governments have to cut back on those rules and rely on the, you know, the common sense and the discretionary judgment of, you know, the people running those systems. So I don't think that it's the case that they are actually competent. There's a point at which, you know, you're trapped in an institutional system that sees legitimacy lying in further rulemaking. And it, you know, I think legitimacy really comes from outcomes. And they're at a point where they're not getting outcomes because they're choked by,

• 53:31Speaker 01

  you know, by this compliance, this rule compliance mentality that they've developed.

• 53:47Ezra Klein?

  One thing that I think is shifting the politics of America and Europe simultaneously, China is a little bit of a different case here, is that the platforms on which we politically communicate and the platforms in which we shape what we see politically have changed. We've moved from, you know, people maybe read the newspaper in the morning or they watch some nightly news show to this.

• 54:13Ezra Klein?

  Much more anarchic, algorithmic, social and beyond social media environment. I never think it's an accident that the populist right began to surge across the world at the time that political communication went algorithmic. I'm curious how you see this in terms of some of these theories and probably the way that social media is a constant measuring of recognition. Are you seeing me? Are you liking me? Are you, you know, and the politicians get this constant feedback. It shifts how they act, how they think, how they generate a sense of how they're doing. Where does this fit in some of your theories of political orders and the human soul?

• 54:53Speaker 01

  Well, you know, ever since 2016, we've been having this prolonged debate about where all this populism is coming from. And everybody gives this list of seven or eight things, economic inequality, globalization, incompetent leadership. And then they say at the end, and also social media. I actually think that technology exemplified by social media is really much more important than most of the other explanations, that you can't explain the timing for the rise of populism. And in particularly, you can't explain the particular nature that it has taken without social media. For example, a lot of the, what it means to be a conservative these days, a populist conservative, is to believe in conspiracy theories.

• 55:37Speaker 01

  And it is much easier to promulgate, in fact, there are incentives for promulgating conspiracy theories on a completely unregulated internet, you know, that the way you get followers, if you're an internet influencer, is to say more and more outrageous things. Your credibility is not measured by whether you actually have done the fact checking and have these institutional safeguards for the reliability of your information. It's how many likes you get. And I think it's absolutely been at the core of a lot of the radicalization of the politics of, you know, countries that have gone online in that period.

• 56:16Ezra Klein?

  So something that has been kind of lurking in our conversation is China. And you'd said at the beginning that the end of history was about this question of would we come up with ways of organizing a complex society that were more successful, more desirable than than America? I've seen you in more recent comments and interviews begin to grapple with the possibility that China represents a model that actually is working and could appeal on wider scale. I think you said something like, we're a third of the way to that actually being the more successful model. So, so tell me what you think China both represents as a form of political organization,

• 56:58Ezra Klein?

  you know, where it differs from liberal democracy? And what you then think that means for it as a possible model of, you know, what other countries and societies are going to try to?

• 57:11Speaker 01

  Sure. Well, I think a liberal democracy is based on having a competent state that is limited both by a rule of law and by elections. And China has the competent state, very competent, but it doesn't have either a rule of law or elections. And therefore, the quality of governance there depends entirely on the quality of rulers. One of the things about Chinese civilization is that, you know, Confucianism embodies bureaucracy as one of its foundational cultural characteristics. Educated people should be the ones that rule. And to this present day, that's where Chinese party cadres are recruited from, you know, the best and brightest in society.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  So they've got this tremendously competent state. The problem, I think, in the, so I've, it's not just recently. I've thought all along that this is the only alternative political and social system that has a chance of being competitive with liberal democracy, precisely because they can deal with modern technology. They can be at the forefront of technology and as a result of of economic growth. The question is, is this a sustainable model? And I think that there are reasons to still regard that as an open question because, you know, their economy is based on doubling down on this export-driven, you know, model that made them rich in the first place.

• 58:37Speaker 01

  That's not a sustainable model. They've got big problems in their property market. They're going to have huge problems with unemployment, youth unemployment there is already at extraordinarily high levels. And so I don't think you can take the sustainability of either their economic or political systems for granted. The reason, the reason I started saying these things about China versus the United States is because the American model has deteriorated.

• 59:05Ezra Klein?

  Right. Yeah, I'm not sure you can take the sustainability of our model for granted.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. No, absolutely right. It seems to me we've got an administration that is doing everything it can think of to weaken the United States vis a vis China, attacking the scientific establishment, attacking allies, being, you know, completely capricious and arbitrary in economic policy. I mean, this is not something that a competent state does.

• 59:27Ezra Klein?

  But maybe to unite two things we were just talking about in the last couple of minutes, when people talk about our model, they tend to mean in their head, whether it's America or Europe, a particular form of governance. But something that you gestured at a few times there is that that form of governance took hold and flourished in a particular historical context, the post-war context, and a particular technological context, a particular way we communicated. It was a, you know, a period of newspapers and radio and TV. And, and I think one of the open questions about us is whether or not these contingencies

• 1:00:10Ezra Klein?

  were fundamental, whether or not there was something in the way a particular form of government connected to a particular moment in communications technology, you know, a certain level of globalization. And the question that's coming, or maybe is already here, is how all of these models operate in a different, particularly technological era, right? How they adapt or don't adapt to social and algorithmic media, how they adapt or don't adapt to AI, how they adapt or don't adapt to globalization. But I'm curious how you bring those things into your framework.

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  Oh, no, look, I've never said that liberal democracy was the best system under all possible technological conditions. I think, in fact, the nature of the technological horizon determines the kind of politics you can have. And I think for that reason, you know, AI is going to be very threatening to our democratic system. I wrote a book in the early 2000s, actually, about biotechnology, where I was arguing that if you could actually, you know, through something like Chris Burkhasnine, if you could modify the human gene line to modify human nature, you would attack some of the basic premises of modern liberalism, because you could create different classes of human

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  beings, you know, in a way that didn't exist before. And now you can combine the biotech with the AI and produce these really very science fictiony, but, you know, entirely conceivable outcomes that are going to be completely toxic to the maintenance of the kind of egalitarian society that we've seen. We've already seen this concentration, this extraordinary concentration of wealth, you know, in the technology sector. And that by itself is also something that is very difficult for a democracy to deal with. So, yeah, I think that it's all contingent on, you know, the nature of technology at any given point in time.

• 1:02:07Ezra Klein?

  One way to look at a political system is that it is a collective technology for absorbing and responding to information. And it works better or worse, depending on how well it's able to do that. And I think increasingly, we're seeing the way our system is absorbing and responding to information is degrading. AI is very much a system for absorbing, collecting, aggregating, and then responding or reacting to information. And I've not seen any particularly convincing descriptions of how you might integrate that capacity more fundamentally into a political system.

• 1:02:49Ezra Klein?

  But it's a little bit hard for me to imagine there won't be more profound experimentations around that, that, that maybe the set of systems we can imagine operating, which were more bounded by the way human intelligence worked and the speed of human beings working with each other, is not the boundary. And the, you know, the world is going to be opening to stranger things in the next 10 or 20 years than were imagined in our 20th century political science, if not always in our 20th century science fiction.

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think that modern government is going to have to rely on AI simply to process information, because there's too much of it out there and it's too hard for human beings to, you know, absorb all of the inputs that that they need to. I think the real danger is in agentic AI, where human beings delegate certain powers to machines that can then operate autonomously. You know, it's very interesting, at the frontier of computer science these days, they're more like zoologists that have just discovered a new species and they're trying to observe how it behaves under different conditions, but they don't really know what's happening on the inside of the machine, even though they're the ones that, you know, built it.

• 1:04:05Ezra Klein?

  And they're trying to make that new creature more powerful, as fast as they possibly can, and they don't know what that will do.

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's kind of a crazy race that's going on right now. I think that's really the danger, is this likelihood that we will overdelegate and then, you know, the machine will develop values that may not really align with, you know, the ones that the creators hoped it would. I mean, we already had this hugging face incident, you know, a couple of weeks ago, where the machine did something that was completely supposed to be off limits. And that's just the beginning, I think, of, you know, more stuff like that to come.

• 1:04:40Ezra Klein?

  This is a point others have made, but the fear was always that the AIs would take agency from us. What's obviously happening is we are handing that agency over as fast as we possibly can. And I talked to the people at these labs working on self-improvement. They don't even necessarily think self-improvement is a good idea. They just, even if it's not a good idea, if the other labs or the other countries are going to do it, they want to get there first. And, and I guess this would be, this is a place where I wonder about your perspective. It's so much of what we can or can't do in terms of regulating AI is dependent on these, at least perceived, race dynamics between the US and China, between firms and other firms. This doesn't feel to me like a problem without

• 1:05:22Ezra Klein?

  human precedent, but it is a problem coming at a time when the government of the US is pretty erratic and our confidence in our governing capacities is pretty low, where China is trying to catch up with us, where there's a lot of M&V between the two countries. I'm curious how you look at this more international relations based aspect of it.

• 1:05:42Speaker 01

  Well, just on a domestic level, the state capacity problem comes back because you can't regulate this technology if you don't have people in the government that understand it, at least at a level that they can really get a hold of what's going on and, you know, make, put some controls in place. On the international question, obviously, there's a geopolitics of AI that's driving everybody forward, you know, that they're too worried about what China is going to do. I think some of that worry is a little bit misplaced because as far as I see it, the Communist Chinese Party is not a bunch of libertarians that say, oh, great technology, let's just let it rip,

• 1:06:24Speaker 01

  you know, we're not going to try to control, they're going to try to control it. If you create a model that is really good at breaking into the most classified computers your government runs, they're not going to want to see that get out, you know, they're not going to want to have Chinese citizens have that capability. So I'm not sure that there's no basis on which you couldn't get some ground rules laid down despite the competition between the United States and China that put some limits on this. And I think it's going to be absolutely necessary because even a big, powerful country like the United States can't do this simply on its own.

• 1:06:59Ezra Klein?

  One thing I've heard people worry about is whether or not, even if you could imagine a deal, whether or not that kind of deal would be verifiable, trustworthy.

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:09Ezra Klein?

  People will say, I agree that China's not going to want a self-improving model able to break into classified computers running wild. But at the same time, they'll say, but China's probably more likely than we are, given the way they can wall things off from their media, et cetera, to say, that seems like a quite powerful weapon to have. Let's actually bring the very best scientists into the government. Let's give them the resources they really need.

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:36Ezra Klein?

  And let's have them create something on our behalf that we can use the way we want to use it. So to the extent this is a powerful weapon, a state that is good at creating things is going to try to create that weapon internally. And so you can't trust the deal. You have to simply act as if the other partner's untrustworthy. Do you buy that?

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  I'm afraid that a lot of that logic is inevitable. Yeah, I do not know whether it's possible to control this technology. Even a powerful state like China is going to have trouble doing that. And when you have a globally competitive world, you know, there may be certain things that you can't really get the capacity to deal with. So yeah, maybe, maybe it's going to be the end of a song.

• 1:08:21Ezra Klein?

  I want to avoid ending there on whether or not the AI will kill us all. So I'm curious, given, you know, what you've seen in the politics of this era, it does not look like Trumpism is a dominant competitor ideology. I don't think that repatriationalizing the government is proving to be popular, even if it is not maybe as unpopular as one might have imagined. So what do you see as a, as a kind of answer to some of these trends?

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  Well, I think that's pretty simple. In countries where you can still have free and fair elections, you win elections because that's the route to political power. The model for this was really the Hungarian election last April, where Orban had been in power for 16 years, had really turned Hungary into an authoritarian country in the midst of the European Union. But Peter Magyar had the political skill to organize a very broad coalition and not just squeak out a narrow victory, a massive victory that was a very great repudiation of Orbanism. I think America has a chance of doing something similar, probably not as decisive, but certainly it could send

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  a very powerful message in the midterm elections that are coming up in November. And if the polls are to be believed, you know, it, it, it could really take place.

• 1:09:40Ezra Klein?

  What is the goal of liberalism? And here, I don't mean classical liberalism in its long history. I mean, American liberals, you know, the left of center, not quite socialist part of the Democratic Party. What is its moral goal at this point? And what way does it actually want to change society? I think people look at Trump and they know what he wants to do. I think they look at Bernie Sanders or Zohar Mamdani or AOC, and they get a sense of, of where they feel the problem really is.

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:10:10Ezra Klein?

  I'm not sure they exactly could answer that so well for, you know, your generic mainstream liberal Democrat.

• 1:10:18Speaker 01

  Well, I don't pretend to speak on behalf of that category of people. I can tell you what my vision of it would be, which really has to do with this whole question that I've been quite preoccupied with, which is state capacity. I would like to see a government that can actually set, you know, generally accepted, not radical goals, universal healthcare, building high speed rail, doing all of these things, but actually being able to accomplish it in a reasonable amount of time. I got preoccupied with NASA recently because between John F. Kennedy's announcement that they were going to go to the moon in 1961 and actually landing on the moon in 1969, it's

• 1:11:01Speaker 01

  only eight years. In the 2000s, George W. Bush announced that they were going to go back to the moon. That's when the whole Artemis program got started. They finally, he said they were going to do it by 2015. Here it is, 2026. They finally got a rocket to go around the moon, but it didn't actually land on the moon and will be lucky to land another human being by 2030. And so something has gone wrong in the ability of the American state to execute the very good, you know, intentions that it announces. And I guess maybe this isn't a moral vision, but it's certainly a vision for a different kind of politics I would like to see in America that can actually announce a goal and actually

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  get it done in a reasonable amount of time at a reasonable cost.

• 1:11:47Ezra Klein?

  Well, this is a very core argument of abundance. So I'm thrilled to hear you say some of this. I think one thing that struck me about the reaction to abundance and its argument for a much stronger state was that many people came back to me and said, well, what is the vision of the good life here? Is it just more stuff? And I would say, no, no, we want more homes, we want more clean energy, we want more public infrastructure, we want more medical breakthroughs so we can have cures, right? These are all things that have already been identified as goals. This is what liberalism is already trying to achieve. And I'm saying it should be able to achieve it. But after hearing again and again, like the need for a vision of the good, The Point,

• 1:12:31Ezra Klein?

  which is a philosophical magazine, you know, devoted whole, issued liberalism and its, you know, vision of the good, I began to take more seriously that people felt something was absent and lacking. You know, the, the way I take some of the thematic arguments you're making in End of History and the Last Man and apply them to modernity is not just that people want to fight in wars. I don't think most people do want to fight in wars. I don't think most right wingers want to fight in wars. I think this is cosplay. We do have wars and they're horrible. And they are not things that society is excited about having a new draft in order to send its young men and women to fight in, for instance. What I do think, though, is that people want to believe they are engaged in some morally

• 1:13:15Ezra Klein?

  ambitious project to change the world in which they live. That is not all people want from politics. Many people just want low prices. But there is a level of politics that has a intense energy within it. And that any movement that cannot operate on both, right? You can have a politics that is all energy, but can't lower prices or achieve anything. Maybe you'd say that's Donald Trump right now. And that doesn't work when you try it. But, you know, politics is driven by the people in it with a kind of energy to change things fundamentally. And so if you don't have some answer for them, some answer of the moral crusade that they are involved in, and that like kind of beats in your own heart too, I think your politics is not going to be successful, particularly in like the modern attentional environment where energy and enthusiasm and

• 1:14:00Ezra Klein?

  outrage and inspiration are the coin of the realm.

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  I'm not so sure that you can't do that in a liberal society. And if you think about John F. Kennedy himself.

• 1:14:10Ezra Klein?

  Oh, I think you can. I just think you need a liberalism that wants it.

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, it seems to me there's a lot of challenges out there that are achievable within the context of a real liberalism. I mean, for example, current distribution of wealth and power in the United States is something that could be changed. You know, you don't have to have these tech oligarchs running around, you know, donating hundreds of millions of dollars to election campaigns so that they can get outcomes favorable to themselves. Having a state that can actually operate in this very difficult and very threatening technological environment is a plenty ambitious goal. I think it's just a matter of articulating to people why it's

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  necessary and how it's achievable, just in the government being able to master and control AI rather than the technology controlling and mastering the government. I mean, that's a huge challenge that.

• 1:15:12Ezra Klein?

  And for that matter, human beings.

• 1:15:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. All right. Right.

• 1:15:14Ezra Klein?

  So then always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:15:18Speaker 01

  The first two are ones you're doubtless familiar with. One is Jennifer Polka's Recoding America. I think she is the most insightful, in a way, critic of what's wrong with the American bureaucracy, but she does it from a sympathetic standpoint. She understands why bureaucracy and government are necessary and how, you know, it could actually be reformed to do things better. The second one is Mark Dunkelman's Why Nothing Works, where he puts everything in a bigger historical context, a swing between Jeffersonianism, where power is pushed down as far as possible to the people, and a Hamiltonian vision where the government itself is the, is the engine of change. And he argues

• 1:16:02Speaker 01

  that we've been in a Jeffersonian period ever since the 1960s and we need to switch to a more Hamiltonian perspective. The final one was written by an old friend of mine, Bob Wright, The God Test. I think it actually, you know, he's been covering artificial intelligence really since the 1980s. He interviewed Jeffrey Hinton way back then. He's got the best explanation of how LLMs work for a layperson that I know of. It's encased in a ultimately extremely optimistic, sort of almost metaphysical theory about the progress, not just that humans have made, but all the way from single cell to multi-cell to, you know, different

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  forms of animal life. But it's an argument, you know, for seeing a broader pattern in the human story that artificial intelligence actually plays a positive role in.

• 1:16:59Ezra Klein?

  Francis Fukuyama, thank you very much.

• 1:17:02Speaker 01

  Thank you, Ezra.