i. on the side of the demos<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/harpers.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/Cut-8_Final-1.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
christopher beha:We\u2019re here to talk about the crisis of liberalism. I\u2019d like to begin with the general question of what the term means to each of you. Does it suggest a particular sort of economic relationship, a political regime, a bundle of rights or guarantees, a view of human nature or human flourishing? What is\u00a0it?<\/p>\n
francis fukuyama: I would start by saying what I don\u2019t mean by liberalism. If you call someone liberal in the United States, you mean that person is left of center, prioritizes equality, and wants government to do more to promote it. If you call someone liberal in Europe, you mean that person is right of center, prioritizes liberty, wants free markets and less government intervention. I don\u2019t think these economic definitions are the essence of the thing. To me, liberalism revolves around a presumption of basic equality of dignity that applies to all of us as members of our species, and the idea that this dignity is ultimately based on our moral autonomy, our ability to make moral choices. You institutionalize liberalism through a rule of law that puts constraints on the use of political power such that the government does not interfere with this basic autonomy.<\/p>\n
Since its beginnings in the seventeenth century, liberalism has also been closely associated with a certain cognitive mode\u2014that of modern natural science, with its belief that there is an objective reality beyond our subjective consciousnesses, a reality that we can come to know through the scientific method. We can then use the resulting knowledge to manipulate that reality, moving from science to technology, and finally to the engineering of economic and social\u00a0life.<\/p>\n
If you use the term this way, Sweden, Denmark, and other big social democratic states qualify as liberal, but so do the United States, Japan, and other countries that have smaller welfare states. Liberalism has much more to do with this fundamental recognition of individual\u00a0rights.<\/p>\n
patrick deneen: I agree with Frank that these different instantiations don\u2019t define the essence of liberalism. As a political philosophy, liberalism is essentially a repudiation of a central tenet in the premodern tradition, which is that human beings have a telos, or an end, that we have a nature, and that the first is given to us by the second. You see this in Aristotle, in Aquinas, in many of the classical and Christian thinkers. It seems to me that the two definitions of liberalism that Frank rejected\u2014European-style economic liberalism and American-style social liberalism\u2014are two manifestations of this separation of telos from nature. In the classical liberal tradition that begins with thinkers like John Locke, the view is held in advance that human beings have no telos, but that we do have a fixed nature. We can discover our nature by imagining our pre-political condition. Human freedom is the essence of that state of nature, outside and beyond politics. So the political order comes into being to maximize this individual freedom, and to ensure conditions of relative peace and stability. But it\u2019s a freedom stripped of any sense of\u00a0duty.<\/p>\n
This is a fundamental departure from the pre-liberal tradition. The classical tradition had a sense of rights, but they were always linked to a strong sense of duty. Classical liberalism decouples rights from duties. The emphasis in this tradition is on economic liberty. And as Frank said, there is also a strong emphasis on science and technology. We take human nature as a given, but we treat the natural world as endlessly manipulatable.<\/p>\n
Progressive liberalism, on the other hand, rests on the idea that there\u2019s a telos, but not a human nature. Human beings have a kind of developmental quality; we develop in and through historical time. To realize this potential, human beings need to be freed, not as economic animals, but as social animals. We need to be freed from constraints in the social sphere, the kind of informal constraints that limit our ability to become the creatures that we can become through this development. The scientific and technological project turns inward, to the development of human nature. Since our nature is not fixed, it can become subject to technological development. But humans need the assistance of the liberal state to achieve the conditions that allow for this development.<\/p>\n
In contemporary politics, economic and progressive liberals see themselves as deeply antagonistic. But in practice, the economic project and the social project have unfolded together. And these forms of liberalism reserve their deepest antagonism for the discarded tradition that linked telos and nature. This is what ultimately defines liberalism: its antagonism toward the classical tradition that saw telos and nature as fundamentally bound together.<\/p>\n
cornel west: Any time you use a term like \u201cliberalism,\u201d you want to historicize it and contextualize it and pluralize it. We have varieties of liberalisms. Some of these liberalisms are among the grand products of the age of Europe, from roughly 1492 to 1945. In the face of oppressive kings and queens, these traditions defended individual rights and liberties. They began by establishing property rights and freedom from arbitrary political power. As we moved into various republican and democratic experiments, we began to talk about basic rights that went far beyond these\u00a0ones.<\/p>\n
The sunny side of liberalism is its defense of these indispensable rights and liberties. The dark side of liberalism is its blindness to the threats of oppressive economic power, its blindness to militarism and imperialism abroad. But it\u2019s very important that we never view liberalism in monolithic, homogenous terms. I hope we\u2019re able to have a kind of dialectical understanding, so we can tease out what we see as valuable in these various liberalisms, and at the same time keep track of faults and\u00a0foibles.<\/p>\n
deirdre mccloskey: I see liberalism as the social and political and economic theory of an equality of permissions\u2014not equality of opportunity, which I think is an incoherent concept, and certainly not the great socialist ideal of equality of outcome. It\u2019s an equality of permission to all humans. We\u2019re all conscious of the incomplete realization of liberalism. But the idea is very powerful.<\/p>\n
Liberalism\u2019s first great accomplishment was the abolition of slavery. This was followed by the abolition of further slaveries. I regard slavery as being about the physical coercion of people, and liberalism is, ideally speaking, the end of hierarchy, the end of subordination of one human to another. There are people who say\u2014implausibly, I think\u2014that Roman Christianity was the source of liberalism. But I think it originates in the eighteenth century. Adam Smith [McCloskey makes the sign of the cross<\/em>]\u2014I always cross myself when I mention Smith [laughter<\/em>]\u2014is my main man. Yes, there are precursors, but certainly not Christian precursors. In this way, I would agree with Patrick that liberalism is a rebellion against\u2014well, against the\u00a0church.<\/p>\nSt. Paul was very clear about this. He lived in a slave-holding society, and he said that we are all slaves in Christ Jesus. For more than a thousand years we lived with this idea that we\u2019re all slaves, so hey, slavery is no big deal. You\u2019re going to get eternal salvation. What does it matter if you spend your life by the Eastern Gate, blind and begging? That view ends with secularization. So, I believe that the great shift of liberalism is against Christianity, although I\u2019m a Christian\u00a0myself.<\/p>\n
This change is not confined to the economy. I think liberty is liberty is liberty. And to be sharp about it with Patrick, the unity of nature and telos is, in my view, extremely dangerous. My identity as a trans woman\u2014or, for that matter, my identity as a professor or an economist or whatever\u2014is threatened by someone else imposing their idea of my nature and my telos. That\u2019s what liberalism\u00a0denies.<\/p>\n
west: I would not give liberalism credit for playing the vanguard role in the abolitionist movement. That was Christians. William Lloyd Garrison, Lydia Maria Child, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman. There you\u2019ve got much more community-oriented people, with a conception of a self that is thoroughly relational, tied to traditions. It\u2019s not atomistic. These were not liberals.<\/p>\n
mccloskey: Hold on. Take 1848 and the beginning of the American women\u2019s movement. They\u2019d all been active in antislavery agitations.<\/p>\n
west: Absolutely, Seneca\u00a0Falls.<\/p>\n
mccloskey: And they said, Well, if them, why not us? And that\u2019s been the trope all along\u2014if them, why not us?<\/em> It\u2019s an equality of permission, extending, extending, extending, which does not accept our equal enslavement to Christ Jesus as the justification for the enslavement of one human over another. I think you\u2019ll agree that the arguments for slavery in America were religious.<\/p>\nbeha: The context of this conversation is that there\u2019s now a widespread feeling that liberalism\u2014more or less as we\u2019ve just defined it\u2014is under threat, coming after a period of unchallenged ascendency. The largest of these threats seems to be the rise of so-called illiberal democracy. What is the relationship of democracy to liberalism? Do the two require each other in some\u00a0way?<\/p>\n
mccloskey: Well, if you believe in equality of permission, then you believe in equality of what Benjamin Constant called \u201cancient liberty\u201d\u2014that is, the right to participate in the formation of society. So that\u2019s democracy.<\/p>\n
fukuyama: The two are mutually supportive in most cases, but they\u2019re not necessarily joined together. You can certainly have illiberal democracies. That\u2019s what Viktor Orb\u00e1n is trying to construct in Hungary. That\u2019s basically where Narendra Modi is moving in India. And you can also have liberal autocracies. The classic case was late nineteenth-century Germany, which had a very strong rule of law, a lot of individual freedom, but no democratic accountability. Singapore is a contemporary\u00a0example.<\/p>\n
But they do tend to go together. Liberalism starts with this premise of universal human equality that says that no particular group is going to have privileges over any other group within a society, which is a fundamentally democratic premise. I don\u2019t think liberalism has any relationship to disagreements about human nature or human ends. It\u2019s a pragmatic way of limiting centralized power. One of the things you see, when democratically elected leaders start to erode the liberal constraints, is that they can keep themselves in power forever by gerrymandering or by manipulating electoral processes. This is exactly what is happening in our country. So you need the two working together. You need the rule of law to put constraints on power, but you also need democracy to support a belief in law and the need for constraints.<\/p>\n
deneen: Liberalism has very little to do with preventing centralized power. We have an extremely centralized government today. Kings of old would be jealous of the military, economic, and executive power that\u2019s wielded by what we call liberal regimes. So I don\u2019t think it has much to do with whether or not power is centralized or authoritarian. Liberals use those terms when they happen to disapprove of how power is being\u00a0wielded.<\/p>\n
In my view, democracy is largely a legitimation mechanism for liberalism. If democracy\u2014or, let\u2019s say, the will and view of the demos\u2014can be sufficiently constrained within liberal forms, if it can be backstopped and qualified whenever necessary to achieve liberal ends, then liberalism and democracy can be seen to go together. But largely, the democratic component functions as an ongoing performance of consent. It\u2019s a performance that reenacts the fictional moment of consent when our forebears signed the social contract agreeing to a liberal regime. When that form of consent takes an illiberal turn, then it\u2019s no longer called democracy; it\u2019s called populism. But it\u2019s the same thing. It\u2019s the will of the people being expressed. Within a liberal order, one of those expressions is seen as legitimate, and one is seen as illegitimate.<\/p>\n
west: Liberal defenses of rights and liberties are preconditions for any democratic experiment in heterogeneous populations. The problem, historically, was that early forms of liberalism were compatible with some very ugly forms of hierarchy\u2014imperial, racist, sexist, and so on. You have to have counter-majoritarian institutions, and a rule of law in place to defend rights and liberties, so those rights and liberties themselves do not become an object of democratic deliberation. Because the demos can be xenophobic, narrow, parochial, and so forth. But the elites can be all of those things as well. So I resonate in some ways with my dear brother Patrick here, though we have our differences.<\/p>\n
fukuyama: If you look at the Lincoln\u2013Douglas debates, Douglas said, \u201cIt is none of my business which way the slavery cause is decided. I care not whether it is voted down or voted up.\u201d He thought that democratic will was supreme. And Lincoln thought there was a higher principle than democratic choice. It\u2019s in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. We don\u2019t think of Lincoln as a leading liberal, but he\u2019s making basically a liberal argument, saying that democracy can be trumped by a higher principle\u2014which is this principle of equality.<\/p>\n
west: But there\u2019s a civic republican tradition that\u2019s important for Lincoln here. We can\u2019t allow liberalism to get credit for everything. And I do want to be clear, as we consider what we learn from these various forms of liberalism, that they come from social movements. The European movements in the name of rights and liberties in the face of kings and queens were major social movements, taking place under certain historical circumstances. And America builds on that, but America has its own distinctive\u00a0forms.<\/p>\n
deneen: From liberalism\u2019s very beginning, there were twin fears about the demos. The first fear was an economic fear, fear of a demos that tended left. This was the fear of a left populism that would threaten property rights. Much of what we\u2019ve experienced of populism in the modern world has been this left populism that attempts to use democratic mechanisms to enforce forms of redistribution or constraint upon powerful economic\u00a0actors.<\/p>\n
The other form of populism that liberalism fears is a kind of right populism, which we\u2019re seeing more of today. This is the demos that\u2019s conservative, that\u2019s traditional, that wants to continue its way of life. It seems to me that we have a constant fluctuation of the threat that the demos poses to liberalism. But from the outset of liberalism, the demos had to be sufficiently constrained. Sometimes by forms of government, such as judicial mechanisms in the United States. John Stuart Mill argued that people with more education should be given more votes. In the United States, only people with property were given the vote. There always had to be a mechanism to constrain the threat that the demos posed to liberalism. And to be clear, I\u2019m on the side of the demos, in both its left and right\u00a0forms.<\/p>\n
ii. just people buying and selling stuff<\/strong><\/p>\nbeha: Deirdre, in one of your recent books, you wrote, liberalism \u201cdepends on and nourishes ethics.\u201d I suspect that you\u2019d all more or less agree with the first of those claims. What about the second? Patrick has argued at some length that liberalism winds up being inimical to precisely the kinds of values that a liberal society needs to flourish.<\/p>\n
mccloskey: There\u2019s a lot of evidence that a society of equal permissions and increasing equality makes for better people. Neither the left nor the right seems to understand this. The Marxists and the Chicago school are in complete agreement that markets are amoral, that the only virtue capitalism rewards is prudence\u2014understood as ruthless self-interest. I come from the Chicago school, but I broke with this foolishness. Prudence is not the only virtue in the marketplace. Hope and faith and justice and courage: these are all fostered by bourgeois capitalism.<\/p>\n
west: The danger here is that if we talk too much about values we\u2019re going to end up again with an atomistic conception of individuals who are choosing goods out of context, not in relation to traditions. I\u2019m glad to hear you talking about virtues. You\u2019re talking about something that\u2019s embedded in dynamic traditions that shape and mold people. Civic virtue has to go hand in hand with any kind of democratic\u00a0project.<\/p>\n
mccloskey: I agree. And I think we all agree that virtues don\u2019t just spontaneously emerge from markets. You can\u2019t just say, \u201cAll we need is markets and everything\u2019s\u00a0cool.\u201d<\/p>\n
deneen: No one within the liberal fold would deny the importance of values, and maybe even of virtues, depending on how one defines them. But there\u2019s a structural issue. It turns out the liberal part of each side ends up undermining the corresponding virtues that they claim to rest their hopes\u00a0on.<\/p>\n
I come more from the world of the right. And the right, to be a bit reductive, is nostalgic for a kind of, let\u2019s say, Fifties or Eighties vision of a fairly wide-open capitalist market in which you have strong, traditional, communal, familial, and religious structures. Well, there\u2019s a problem we\u2019ve seen unfolding, which is that a dynamic, open, transformative economic system tends to undermine the very institutions that this right-liberal order relies\u00a0on.<\/p>\n
The left has a similar blind spot. In response to the ravages of economic individualism, it calls for forms of solidarity, and it looks, for example, to the trade unions or to somewhere like Sweden as an exemplar of the kind of social solidarity that\u2019s necessary to restrain the utilitarian tendencies of\u00a0markets.<\/p>\n
But the social libertarianism of the progressive left undermines the very basis for this kind of solidarity. The effort to liberate yourself from family, from religion, from community, to make yourself into a free actor in the social realm, actually hollows out the kinds of spaces that develop a strong sense of solidarity.<\/p>\n
mccloskey: I disagree. I don\u2019t think that markets, which after all are just people buying and selling stuff, going to work and finding a job, have this corrosive effect. We\u2019ve exchanged commodities since the beginning of humanity, and markets have co-existed with ethical development.<\/p>\n
west: You can\u2019t just say, my dear sister Deirdre, that markets are just about buying and selling. No. They manipulate, they dominate. You\u2019ve got advertising industries in place to convince people to consume. The markets that Adam Smith was talking about are qualitatively different from twenty-first-century\u00a0markets.<\/p>\n
mccloskey: Well, they aren\u2019t the same in every respect. But large-scale capitalist markets have long existed\u2014in Rome, for fish sauce, of all things, or in China, for silk. These were highly modern, sophisticated exchanges.<\/p>\n
west: That\u2019s true, those were sophisticated organizations\u2014but not in terms of penetrating every nook and cranny of the culture, not in terms of penetrating every nook and cranny of the psyche. Not in terms of penetrating every nook and cranny of the soul. We\u2019re dealing with commodification on steroids.<\/p>\n
mccloskey: Amsterdam in the seventeenth century was a liberal paradise compared with other European cities\u2014because it was an entrepot, because it was a market. I don\u2019t think the original sin of greed is causing all of the evil in\u00a0society.<\/p>\n
fukuyama: But I also don\u2019t think this social breakdown that Patrick\u2019s talking about is inevitable. Culture is much stickier than he gives it credit for. There\u2019s a lot of progressive culture that I don\u2019t like, but I think overall, if you look around the world, cultures are quite stable, because human beings have an innate social side that wants to conform to norms. And the idea that once liberalism gets out into the world, it\u2019s going to eat away every existing social norm is just empirically\u00a0false.<\/p>\n
It does seem to me, though, that the particular form of globalization that we\u2019ve experienced does pose challenges to the hegemony of certain traditional cultures, because you\u2019ve got this very easy transfer of people and ideas and cultural means across\u00a0borders.<\/p>\n
west: Personally, I believe that greed and hatred and envy are hounds of hell. They are ideologically and politically promiscuous. They will lay down with any system\u2014feudalism, capitalism, socialism, whatever. So the question is: What does that look like in our\u00a0time?<\/p>\n
beha: Cornel, in Race Matters<\/em>, you write, \u201cMost of our children\u2014neglected by overburdened parents and bombarded by the market values of profit-hungry corporations\u2014are ill-equipped to live lives of spiritual and cultural quality.\u201d We can argue over the extent to which, in fact, market forces are causing something like that. But I would like us to think about what it means to live lives of spiritual and cultural quality, and whether it is a failing of liberalism that it cannot articulate a particular vision of human flourishing, or whether it is one of the great values of liberalism, as many liberals think, that it does not articulate a singular vision of flourishing, that it rather allows individuals to have their own conceptions of human flourishing.<\/p>\nmccloskey: I really believe that if we\u2019re going to get along we can\u2019t have other people imposing ultimate ends on\u00a0us.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/harpers.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/Cut-9_Final-1-300x300.jpg\")
west: One of the challenges is that, on the one hand, we need a larger framework that allows for a variety of different perspectives. Nobody\u2019s imposing one view on anybody. But on the other hand, you have to have enough glue in place: not just tolerance, but respect, not just respect, but humility. It\u2019s like a jazz artist, right, who learns and listens from others and knows that no one of us happens to own the\u00a0truth.<\/p>\n
deneen: There\u2019s a book by a Jesuit priest named Jean Dani\u00e9lou called Prayer as a Political Problem<\/em>. Father Dani\u00e9lou suggests that prayer is important in all of our lives. In a secular context we might talk about the functional equivalent of prayer\u2014the possibility of having time to contemplate. In our civilization, it\u2019s always been important to have at least a day when the market wasn\u2019t in charge, when the hurriedness of the marketplace and all of its various distractions wasn\u2019t in the driver\u2019s seat. The Bible calls that the day of rest; the\u00a0Sabbath.<\/p>\nNow, in an effort to avoid designating exactly which day that would be\u2014because that would favor one tradition over another; it wouldn\u2019t accord with liberalism\u2014we\u2019ve done away with it altogether. We don\u2019t even want to talk about whether there should be a day of rest, because we can\u2019t designate the day, because that would be a form of authority and oppression. But notice what we have instead: a society in which the professional managerial class is much more likely to be able to find the time for the functional equivalent of prayer\u2014to be able to go to Vail and hang out in the mountains, or whatever. Whereas more and more aspects of working-class lives are dominated by the market. They lack the social forms that might point them to something higher, outside of the base distractions provided by the\u00a0market.<\/p>\n
In many ways, I think this represents a deep betrayal by elites. It was always the responsibility of elites to assure a kind of spiritual equality. As Christ said, the poor will always be with us. But there is the possibility of spiritual equality that allows for people, no matter their economic status, to have moments of nobility, to experience something transcendent.<\/p>\n
mccloskey: There are a whole bunch of problems with that statement. One is that it\u2019s not true that the working class has less time for the transcendent than it once did. It has more time, vastly more\u00a0time.<\/p>\n
deneen: I\u2019m not simply talking about free time. I was having a conversation just the other day with my mail carrier, and I said, \u201cWhy are you delivering mail on a Sunday?\u201d And she said, \u201cBecause if we don\u2019t do it, Amazon will start using UPS and stop using the post office.\u201d So in order to continue working with Amazon, my postal carrier has to deliver mail every day of the week. We should really think about what it would mean to have at least one day of rest for every person in our society. I\u2019m talking about the decline of communal norms that allowed for more elevated forms of\u00a0leisure.<\/p>\n
mccloskey: And you don\u2019t regard watching professional football as an expression of the transcendent, I\u2019m guessing?<\/p>\n
deneen:\u00a0No.<\/p>\n
mccloskey: Why not? As you said, the transcendent is necessary\u2014we all agree. But the transcendent comes in forms other than Catholicism. There are people who depend on the transcendence of their family or their friends. To say that modern people don\u2019t have enough access to transcendence, so we need someone to say, you\u2019re not allowed to go to the shopping mall on Sunday, I just don\u2019t think that\u2019s empirically\u00a0correct.<\/p>\n
deneen: If you want to make it an empirical question, I would begin with this: Is our society succeeding or failing in terms of empirical measurements of relationality? For example, how is our society doing when it comes to the formation and flourishing of families? We can define families in many ways, but on any measure, we\u2019re not doing very well. How is our society doing when it comes to the development and flourishing of friendships, of communities, of a sense of duty? In other words, how much and how well is our society flourishing?<\/p>\n
I come from the social science world, so I can tell you that in nearly every one of these areas, we are doing rather poorly. We\u2019re flourishing in terms of autonomy, disconnection, the sense of being liberated from one another. But it turns out that the more free, autonomous, and disconnected we are, the more miserable we become. We\u2019ve overshot the\u00a0mark.<\/p>\n
mccloskey: I don\u2019t want to be interpreted as saying that all that matters is national income. We all agree there are other things that matter to ordinary people. But it matters more to them that their income is about twenty-five times higher in real terms compared to 1800. And their free time for the transcendent has vastly increased. People are working forty-hour weeks instead of eighty-hour weeks, as some farmers did then. They have an extended childhood, and a long retirement.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s an enormous change. It\u2019s the second most important secular event in human history. The invention of agriculture is the first, and the great enrichment since 1800 is the second. And there\u2019s no reason why it can\u2019t become everyone\u2019s gift in the next fifty or one hundred years. But if we go down Patrick\u2019s path, we\u2019ll stop economic growth, and it won\u2019t be the case. If we throw away this chance for a full human fulfillment, that would be\u00a0tragic.<\/p>\n
beha: I take you to be saying that the economic returns that liberalism has delivered over the past few hundred years can continue indefinitely at more or less the same\u00a0rate?<\/p>\n
mccloskey: I\u2019ll make you a bet. By the year 2100, income per head worldwide will be two or three times higher than what it is now in the United\u00a0States.<\/p>\n
west: But the one thing that our dear sister is presupposing is that there\u2019s still a\u00a0planet.<\/p>\n
mccloskey: That\u2019s true. We\u2019re still able to shoot ourselves in the\u00a0foot.<\/p>\n
deneen: It may not be up to us. The natural world is giving us feedback. This explosion of prosperity coincided with the age of fossil fuels. And the consequence of our binge is that now we have to confront the limits of the world and we need to begin to think about how we can live in a world in which we\u2019re respectful of the natural order. And that may entail a kind of dialing back on travel and forms of transportation that might seem cheap but turn out to be extremely expensive.<\/p>\n
mccloskey: Global warming is already on the way to being solved by technological innovation, by the very capitalism that you think is so\u00a0bad.<\/p>\n
deneen: There is always a feeling that the solution to liberalism\u2019s ills is more liberalism. I think instead we\u2019re likely to see a reduction of what we might call hyper-liberalism in the marketplace, the end of globalization at some level, the reincorporation of industrial policy, a recognition that this country needs industries that guarantee security, and as we\u2019ve seen with COVID, that we need access to pharmaceuticals, we need access to military goods, we need access to basic goods and services that can\u2019t be guaranteed in a world in which conflict between nations hasn\u2019t gone away and isn\u2019t likely to go\u00a0away.<\/p>\n
mccloskey: That sounds like going back to\u00a01950.<\/p>\n
deneen: I\u2019m not talking about going back. I\u2019m talking about going forward, having learned things from where we are\u00a0now.<\/p>\n
beha: Patrick, do you see yourself as proposing a kind of tradeoff where we aren\u2019t going to maximize economic efficiency? Are we going to have to suffer some losses in economic output to achieve this\u00a0vision?<\/p>\n
deneen: We have to start by recognizing that the conversation we\u2019re having wouldn\u2019t have happened twenty-five or thirty years ago. We\u2019re having this conversation because we\u2019re responding to blowback. The working class is saying, \u201cWe no longer want to have this hyper-liberal economic order. We don\u2019t want to have this hyper-liberal social order. We are responding from both the position of left populism and the position of right populism.\u201d And liberals are now running to the barricades and saying, \u201cThis threat from illiberalism is a form of populism that imperils the good thing.\u201d But the good thing has, in fact, put us in the situation that has caused this blowback.<\/p>\n
Untrammeled liberty in economic and social spheres results in deep social and political cleavages that give rise to all of these conditions and pathologies. Much of liberalism\u2019s success arose from a pre-liberal inheritance\u2014the kinds of traditions, institutions, and practices that, in some senses, limited liberals\u2019 worst tendencies. It\u2019s an inheritance that liberalism was not able to replenish. Liberalism has not proven itself capable of limiting itself. Instead, it has proven very good at extending itself and making itself more\u00a0extreme.<\/p>\n
Can liberalism recognize that it needs to limit itself in order to preserve what good it generates? If it cannot, then it is surely\u00a0doomed.<\/p>\n
mccloskey: My fear is precisely that we\u2019ll put limits on ourselves. We\u2019ll kill the golden goose in a sort of celebration of envy and\u00a0hatred.<\/p>\n
iii. you end up with a disaster<\/strong><\/p>\nbeha: In your most recent book, Frank, you attempt to distinguish\u2014as many people do, though some people disagree with this distinction\u2014between liberalism and neoliberalism. You say that what many people on the left and the right claim not to like about liberalism as such is really the aberrant form liberalism has taken roughly since the Seventies. They disagree with present-day liberalism, not because of some fundamental weakness of the doctrine, but because they are unhappy with the way liberalism has\u00a0evolved.<\/p>\n
But then the question becomes: How does a liberal system regulate itself? What is it about neoliberalism that is inconsistent with liberalism? What is it that allows you to draw that distinction and say liberalism is good, and neoliberalism is\u00a0not?<\/p>\n
fukuyama: It just seems to me that states are necessary to regulate markets. They\u2019re much more crucial in some sectors than in others. For example, with an unregulated market in the financial sector, whose foundations were laid in the Eighties and Nineties, you end up with a disaster. We didn\u2019t have big financial crises prior to the sterling crisis in the early Nineties\u2014not since the Great Depression. What changed was the view that markets could ultimately be self-regulating. In the financial sector, this was total nonsense. Because of the systemic nature of finance and the damage it can do to the real economy, you\u2019ve got to regulate it very strongly. So deregulation laid the groundwork for a series of financial crises culminating in 2008, which I think was directly tied to the rise of populism, both Bernie Sanders\u2019s version and Donald Trump\u2019s\u00a0version.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s that famous Milton Friedman article about how the duty of any corporation is basically to its shareholders, maximizing profits\u2014there\u2019s a purely economic argument that you can make in favor of that. But I don\u2019t think we appreciate the degree to which that view took hold in business schools and then started to erode precisely the kind of virtues that players in capitalist markets previously held, that they actually do have social responsibilities\u2014to workers, to customers, to suppliers. Basically, they were told, \u201cJust maximize your profits. Do what Wall Street wants you to do, and that\u2019s all you need to do. You don\u2019t have to worry about society as a\u00a0whole.\u201d<\/p>\n
But I think we\u2019re already seeing a correction in terms of the state\u2019s role in regulating global finance. It probably needs to be strengthened even further, but it has begun to\u00a0happen.<\/p>\n
mccloskey: Can I make a small comment about Milton\u2019s article? The famous line from that essay is half of the sentence\u2014the social responsibility of a corporate executive is to make as much money as possible. But the second half of the sentence goes: while conforming to the ethical and legal rules of society. That part always gets left\u00a0out.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, I think you\u2019re right. It metastasized in business schools. Business schools went from trying to make managers into professionals\u2014like lawyers, professors, and doctors, who acknowledge a deep ethical commitment to their clients, their students, their patients\u2014into making people with a kind of \u201cscrew you\u201d attitude.<\/p>\n
fukuyama: Actually, I might take this in a slightly different direction. In 1999, I published The Great Disruption<\/em>, a book about the kinds of apparent social breakdown that Patrick has been discussing: the massive increase in divorce and in single-parent families, the rise in crime rates across the United States beginning in the Sixties. The causes of all this, in my view, were technological changes brought about by the development of capitalism, but not by neoliberalism or any particular ideological doctrine.<\/p>\nWe moved from an industrial society to a postindustrial society in which sitting in front of a computer screen became a more valuable skill than lifting a pickaxe. For obvious reasons, this development coincided with a massive increase in female participation in the labor force. Developing countries still relied on physical labor. But every country that was transitioning into a knowledge economy gave women a bigger role. At the same time, the pill allowed for a division between sex and reproduction.<\/p>\n
The traditional family, where the man is the breadwinner, begins to be replaced in a society in which women have much more economic clout. It even becomes financially possible for a woman to raise a child on her own. China is going through something similar right now, and it\u2019s not just down to market forces. It\u2019s really technology changing the nature of labor, and therefore the nature of gender roles, which then changes the nature of social structures and so forth. This produces a lot of things that people interpret as moral\u00a0decline.<\/p>\n
But the point I tried to make in that book is that we\u2019re never going to be in a permanent social decline. We\u2019re going to come up with new\u00a0norms.<\/p>\n
beha: But liberalism is itself a set of norms, right? If there is necessarily going to be a change of norms in order to address these technologically driven social changes, are those norms going to be consistent with liberalism? Or are the liberal norms among the very things that are up for grabs as we figure out what is going to make a stable society under these new conditions?<\/p>\n
fukuyama: I mean, globalization, what\u2019s that driven by? Well, partly liberal ideology. But also the reduction of transportation costs. It\u2019s just a lot easier to build an iPhone in Shenzhen and ship it to the United States than it would have been fifty years\u00a0ago.<\/p>\n
What system is going to put a stop to that or reduce the social impact of that kind of mobility? I don\u2019t know. But I\u2019m pretty confident that, given that human beings are inherently social, they will come up with new norms to deal with this kind of fluidity. But I don\u2019t think you can simply dictate from the top, \u201cYeah, okay, this is how we\u2019re going to deal with this changing set of technological conditions.\u201d<\/p>\n
west: Even in personal terms, Frank, your own shift from being one of the grand intellects of neoconservatism to embracing a certain kind of highly progressive liberalism in the last few years\u2014you\u2019re seeing something that\u2019s about more than just technology. It\u2019s really a class war. It\u2019s the mobilization of resources against vulnerable populations. Profits are going way up and wages are stagnant. Technology can\u2019t account for that. The attacks on the trade union movement, that\u2019s not technological, that\u2019s political. The attempt to keep wages low, that\u2019s not just technological.<\/p>\n
fukuyama: That\u2019s true. Part of what I\u2019m saying is that we\u2019re now kind of out of that neoliberal period, and a lot of those policies will be reversed.<\/p>\n
west: Well, we hope. It could bounce\u00a0back.<\/p>\n
fukuyama: Yeah, it could. But I think there are deeper sources of social change that you can\u2019t really address with\u00a0policy.<\/p>\n
mccloskey: Social and economic change is so unpredictable\u2014it\u2019s like trying to steer a car through fog. Maybe you\u2019d better stop driving. But I don\u2019t agree with your economic history. It\u2019s not true that real incomes have not continued to grow for ordinary\u00a0people.<\/p>\n
west: At the same rate as\u00a0CEOs?<\/p>\n
mccloskey: No. But I don\u2019t think envy is a good basis for a\u00a0society.<\/p>\n
deneen: Part of what we\u2019re acknowledging is that whether you want to call it neoliberalism, or liberalism on steroids, or just liberalism, as it becomes more realized, it becomes unbearable to a lot of people. And it particularly becomes unbearable to those who, whether or not they\u2019re twenty-five times wealthier than in the past, know they\u2019re a hundred times less wealthy or a thousand times less wealthy than the wealthiest people in their\u00a0society.<\/p>\n
mccloskey: Why should they\u00a0care?<\/p>\n
deneen: Of course they care. It\u2019s an offense to their sense of dignity and equality, knowing that their fellow citizens have access to many more opportunities, in terms of educating their children, influencing political outcomes, charting the course of the nation and so\u00a0forth.<\/p>\n
west: And then we come back to our Christian perspective, which is: How do we generate contexts in which we can relate to one another as human beings regardless of what our circumstances are, and then tilt toward sharing the wealth? Jesus runs the money changers out of the temple and he\u2019s crucified. Why? Not because he hates rich people. He hates greed.<\/em> He loves the\u00a0poor.<\/p>\nmccloskey: Yes, he certainly loves the poor and hates greed. But the problem with that vision of sharing resources is that it results in shared poverty. Business is not robbery. Business is inventing stuff that makes customers want to buy\u00a0it.<\/p>\n
iv. there\u2019s always going to be authority<\/strong><\/p>\ndeneen: We have to think about how we construct a market embedded within a political and communal order which allows for the flourishing of human beings, one which doesn\u2019t assume that generating wealth for the sake of wealth is its sole purpose, which recognizes that an economy exists to serve human goods and human ends. How do we generate a sense of solidarity that, short of turning us into fortresses, recognizes that the ability of people to recognize who we are probably requires a certain boundedness and respect for cultures and traditions that tend to be eviscerated or undermined or attacked in a liberal\u00a0order?<\/p>\n
fukuyama: There\u2019s a living example of a country that does exactly what you are talking about. In Germany, you have an education system in which by the fifth grade you either go into a vocational track or a university-bound track. And it\u2019s supplemented by an apprenticeship system that does exactly what you\u2019re talking\u00a0about.<\/p>\n
I admire that system a great deal, because it gives dignity to working-class skills. If you want to become a retail clerk in the United States, you go to Walmart, you get two days of training, and then they put you out on the floor. In Germany, you have to take two or three years of classes, and then you get a certificate recognizing that you have completed this apprenticeship. It doesn\u2019t necessarily make you a better clerk, but it gives you a certain sense of dignity, right? I think that what you\u2019re criticizing is not liberalism; it\u2019s a particular American version of liberalism that\u2019s always been much more cutthroat and much less respectful.<\/p>\n
Take labor-management relations. In northern Europe, you have these broad, cooperative negotiations over wages that apply throughout the economy. It\u2019s a relationship built on trust between workers and managers, as opposed to the American system, which is completely adversarial. It\u2019s like a zero-sum struggle between capital and labor. You have a zero-sum struggle in southern Europe too. In Italy and France, labor wins, and in our country, management wins. But I think that there are varieties of capitalism and varieties of approaches to these different policy problems that could mitigate some of the problems you\u2019re talking\u00a0about.<\/p>\n
deneen: But, Frank, you know the tradition from which those arrangements arose. It was Christian democracy, not liberalism.<\/p>\n
fukuyama: Of course. Democracy itself has Christian roots, I think. But you don\u2019t need actually observant Christians to keep that tradition alive. It\u2019s a matter of public policy. Any society is free to dignify labor by implementing policies like\u00a0that.<\/p>\n
At the same time, we\u2019re not going to go back to an earlier world in which everybody was a manual\u00a0worker.<\/p>\n
west: The danger, though, is how intense the backlash is at the moment, especially against the elites and the technocrats. The backlash is deeply white supremacist, deeply male supremacist, deeply xenophobic, with a deep hatred of us sitting around this table\u2014the professional-managerial class, the elites who will betray them. We might not have that much time. American neofascism may kick in so quickly that we don\u2019t have time to deal with these subtle\u00a0issues.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s why we have to ask: How do we attenuate the neofascist backlash? Look at Charlottesville. \u201cJews will not replace us, blacks will not replace us, women will not replace us.\u201d This is the lunatic fringe, but it\u2019s moving to the center. That was 2017. Five years later, it\u2019s been normalized.<\/p>\n
deneen: This is not just a problem with American capitalism, and the political blowback that we\u2019re talking about is not limited to the United States. Conditions here are maybe particularly fertile for it, but it\u2019s happening all over the developed Western world. We\u2019re seeing the advance of right-wing populism in Italy, and elsewhere in Europe. We\u2019ve certainly seen it in parts of Eastern Europe. It\u2019s not a uniquely American phenomenon.<\/p>\n
And I think it does arise from what Christopher Lasch called the betrayal of democracy by the elites. As Lasch described it, we have a managerial class that sees itself as detached from and no longer bearing responsibilities to those who have not been successful\u2014because it\u2019s their fault, they didn\u2019t work hard\u00a0enough.<\/p>\n
west: Part of our problem, especially in this country, is that we\u2019ve got some very precious fellow citizens who are thoroughly convinced that the professional-managerial class is dominated by greed and arrogance and condescension and haughtiness and has given up on respecting them as human\u00a0beings.<\/p>\n
All the talk about plurality<\/em> and diversity<\/em> and equity<\/em> and all these bureaucratic categories trying to deal with difference\u2014when it really comes down to it, this class doesn\u2019t respect ordinary people. So this multiculturalism within the professional-managerial class, what does it do? It just makes the empire more colorful. It just makes class hierarchy more colorful. And yet the damage is still done\u2014people still feel as if they\u2019re pushed to the margins, as if their dignity is being\u00a0crushed.<\/p>\ndeneen: This is a sentiment that\u2019s expressed on both the left and the right. In National Review<\/em>, Kevin Williamson condemns the people who didn\u2019t get out of these backward, broken-down, nowhere places\u2014Steubenville, South Bend, Gary\u2014because they just didn\u2019t have the gumption to get up and rent a U-Haul. We\u2019re talking about people whose families may have lived there for generations. But he says it was their fault for not renting a\u00a0U-Haul.<\/p>\nThere\u2019s a sense that it\u2019s your fault if you\u2019re a loser in this system, and it\u2019s no comfort to say, \u201cWell, you\u2019re twenty-five times richer than people two hundred years ago.\u201d It\u2019s no comfort to these people if they\u2019re being condescended to and regarded as objects of contempt by their betters. If you don\u2019t want the ugliest form of rebellion that I think we are increasingly likely to see, there had better be a genuine sense of duty and responsibility to these people that doesn\u2019t presume that you have to go to Harvard or Yale or Princeton to\u00a0succeed.<\/p>\n
And to be frank, I think this is just liberalism, once again, identifying those who haven\u2019t accepted or embraced the ideal of the autonomous individual that has always allowed liberals to define a certain part of the population as existing outside of the liberal circle. It has been Native Americans. It has been African Americans. It has been unborn children. And now it\u2019s increasingly those members, especially of the white working class\u2014though it\u2019s not just the white working class\u2014who haven\u2019t pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and gotten out of Steubenville.<\/p>\n
mccloskey: Well, I\u2019ve got tons of suggestions about what to do about that problem. For one thing, help people get out of the areas that are economically unprofitable. And I\u2019m willing to be taxed to do that. What do you think we should\u00a0do?<\/p>\n
deneen: We don\u2019t abandon these places. We build them back up again. We support people who want to live in their places. We don\u2019t say, \u201cLet\u2019s raise our taxes so everyone can move.\u201d People have a sense of home and belonging, and that\u2019s what liberalism can\u2019t recognize. That\u2019s part of the managerial\u00a0mindset.<\/p>\n
Frank already mentioned some examples from Germany. My father-in-law is a German butcher. His father was a butcher, his grandfather was a butcher. They lived in the same town for generations.<\/p>\n
I think often about the state of many German cities right after World War II. They were completely destroyed. Compare those cities in 1945 to some of the American cities I mentioned. These were thriving communities, beautiful places. And look at them now: They look like they lost the\u00a0war.<\/p>\n
Now look at the German cities that were destroyed in the war. Berlin is beautiful. Dresden is beautiful, at least the parts not built by the Soviets. The little towns whose names we don\u2019t even know, they\u2019ve all been beautifully restored. And why is that? Well, it was the Marshall Plan, it was investment in those places. But it was also simply that the Germans cared about those places. They didn\u2019t give up on\u00a0them.<\/p>\n
mccloskey: But we shouldn\u2019t give subsidies to places. Here\u2019s an example: high streets in Britain have the power to prevent the strip malls that are so characteristic of our country. Now you say, \u201cOh, isn\u2019t that wonderful?\u201d Central Salisbury, it\u2019s a beautiful place with a marvelous cathedral. And in the days when they were all Sabbatarians, as you\u2019d like them to be, you didn\u2019t shop on Sunday, so what was the\u00a0result?<\/p>\n
Working women, taking care of their families, had to shop on Saturday morning. The owners of high street real estate profited because they could prevent competition. It sounds very nice: \u201cOh, we have this wonderful home, and this is our home, and we\u2019ve always lived there.\u201d But if you do that, you don\u2019t necessarily help the people you\u2019re talking about. You don\u2019t help the women. You don\u2019t help the poor people who would prefer to shop at\u00a0Walmart.<\/p>\n
All your proposals about what to do about this alleged virus called liberalism, all of them without exception are from the Fifties\u2014high tariffs, high transport costs. Putting women back in the\u00a0kitchen\u2014<\/p>\n
deneen: Did I say\u00a0that?<\/p>\n
mccloskey: But Patrick, what\u2019s your alternative? There\u2019s a wind blowing that gives people hope and gives people a richly spiritual future. As you know, I\u2019ve written a rather harsh review of one of your books. But I deeply respect your scholarship. I seriously want to know, what\u2019s your alternative?<\/p>\n
deneen: I\u2019ll invoke John Dewey here. In a wonderful essay called \u201cLiberty and Social Control,\u201d Dewey argues that whenever someone is claiming liberty, power is being exercised on behalf of that liberty. In other words, there is no political system, including liberalism, that does not exercise authority. So then the question isn\u2019t, \u201cIs there authority in your system?\u201d It\u2019s \u201cWhat is the purpose for which authority is exercised?\u201d How would we prioritize, say, families, as a matter of public policy, as a matter of national emergency?<\/p>\n
mccloskey: So let\u2019s not allow abortion, let\u2019s not allow queers, let\u2019s not\u00a0allow\u2014<\/p>\n
deneen: I didn\u2019t say any of that. I said, what would we do to prioritize the formation and strengthening of families in the United States? And the first response from a liberal is always, \u201cOh, you want to ban queers and abortion.\u201d This is the sort of liberal move which claims that if you seek to promote and foster strong families, then you must be an authoritarian. I just began by saying that there\u2019s always going to be some exercise of authority.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/harpers.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/Cut-10_Final-1-300x300.jpg\")
mccloskey: Well, I\u2019m appealing to you all. As Lenin said, \u201cWhat is to be\u00a0done?\u201d<\/p>\n
west: You don\u2019t begin by laying out policy. You\u2019ve got to have a broader vision. We\u2019ve got to look to tradition, and we\u2019ve got to do so with an attitude of serious critique. Because tradition can suffocate, and tradition can emancipate. Tradition is something you\u2019ve got to hold at arm\u2019s length, but there\u2019s no alternative to it. You\u2019ve got to come out of some set of traditions no matter\u00a0what.<\/p>\n
deneen: I keep being challenged about what I want to see. Am I simply appealing to the past? I am appealing to something in<\/em> the past, but it\u2019s more philosophical than any particular period of time. And I think you do the same, Deirdre. You invoke Adam Smith; I invoke Aristotle. Not because I think we should live in the fourth century bc, any more than you think we should live in the eighteenth century ad. We find in those resources lessons that we need to relearn today. In the Bible, when St.\u00a0Paul uses the word \u201cfreedom,\u201d this doesn\u2019t mean freedom from external constraint, the liberty to do as I wish. It means the capacity for self-control and discipline. And I think that\u2019s a tradition that we need to reconnect with. This isn\u2019t going back; it\u2019s going forward. We need to consciously think about living in a world of limits in which we learn to be self-limiting.<\/p>\nmccloskey: Imagine a world in the last two centuries without liberalism. What kind of a world would we have? We would have frozen hierarchies.<\/p>\n
west: But liberalism is not the only opposition to hierarchy.<\/p>\n
mccloskey: Come on. As you said before, it was the force that overthrew kings and queens. And that hereditary power was the main sustaining force of hierarchy. Without liberalism there would not have been economic growth, I would argue, of any sort. There would still have been overseas empires\u2014consider Spain and Portugal, which were not great, successful, capitalist empires but ancient ones. We would have a terrible world without liberalism.<\/p>\n
v. why did they keep at it<\/strong>?<\/strong><\/p>\nbeha: This might be the time to talk about the relationship of liberalism to imperialism. We know that the earliest flourishing liberal societies, the Dutch Republic and the United Kingdom, had vast colonial holdings in which the rules of liberalism did not apply. And to some extent, the economic promise that is at the heart of liberalism, as you\u2019ve described it, that promise was made good for those people, in part, by way of illiberalism outside of their\u00a0borders.<\/p>\n
mccloskey: What do you mean? That the exploitation of non-European people made liberal societies\u00a0rich?<\/p>\n
beha: Yes, or that it certainly\u00a0helped.<\/p>\n
mccloskey: Absolutely not. As Mark Twain said, \u201cIt ain\u2019t what you don\u2019t know that gets you in trouble; it\u2019s what you know for sure that just ain\u2019t so.\u201d Everyone knows that imperialism was a big economic advantage for Europe. But it just ain\u2019t\u00a0so.<\/p>\n
And the idea that you see in the new histories of slavery, that slavery was what made the United States rich, which is expressed in a glorious and wonderful form in Lincoln\u2019s second inaugural, is baloney. It\u2019s just not true. If it were true, then the Canadians, who never had slavery, would be poor, and we\u2019d be rich. It doesn\u2019t make any\u00a0sense.<\/p>\n
fukuyama: But there is a separate issue from this empirical one about whether imperialism was beneficial or not. It has to do with dignity. Two things have been going on. You have a liberal idea that says that all people have rights and should be treated equally under the law. But then you also have a very restricted understanding of who is a rights-bearing human being. So the big social change has been an expansion of who that\u00a0is.<\/p>\n
Men without property were added in the 1820s. The Fourteenth Amendment theoretically extends this to African Americans, but then it\u2019s taken away for another century. Women don\u2019t get it until the Nineteenth Amendment. And so forth. That has a counterpart in foreign policy, where this big change comes about because, thanks to Hitler and the defeat of fascism, it becomes impossible for any liberal in Europe or the United States to say, \u201cYes, we have a right to rule over these non-white people due to their race.\u201d If all men are equal, how can you possibly justify, for example, keeping the Philippines as a colonial possession? You can\u2019t. So, it is true that liberal societies engaged in essentially racist colonialism. Non-liberal societies did that also. But if you didn\u2019t have the liberal idea of human equality, you couldn\u2019t have dismantled colonialism.<\/p>\n
Liberalism at least planted the seed by stating the aspiration that all people should have equal\u00a0rights.<\/p>\n
west: Well, two things. One, we have deep empirical disagreements with our dear sister here in terms of the economics of imperialism. But imperialism is not just about economic exploitation; it\u2019s about the expropriation of other people\u2019s land. It\u2019s about killing them and their children. That\u2019s an issue of dignity, and I think we all agree on\u00a0that.<\/p>\n
You\u2019re talking about how colonialism gave no benefit. Why did these elites stay in it for so long? If it wasn\u2019t in some way in their interest\u2014economic, psychic, spiritual, political, cultural, civilizational interest\u2014why did they keep at it? I think we would all agree that there was an interest there, and then we could debate about the economic dimension of\u00a0it.<\/p>\n
But we can\u2019t look at this solely through a European gaze or a white gaze. Black people didn\u2019t need white abolitionists to tell them that they wanted to be free. The Japanese didn\u2019t need Europeans to tell them that they did not want to be subordinated. People in Africa, indigenous people in other parts of the world, they didn\u2019t need Europeans to tell them, \u201cYou are worthy rights-bearers; you are human beings.\u201d They already knew it. It\u2019s the folks with the guns that didn\u2019t get the\u00a0memo.<\/p>\n
The same is true for women. Women didn\u2019t need the example of other social movements. They didn\u2019t have to wait for men to tell them, \u201cYou\u2019re really human beings. You can get out of these patriarchal households.\u201d You had voices saying the same thing forever, but these voices had been crushed. The same is true with gay brothers, lesbian sisters, non-binary and trans people. They\u2019ve been trying to raise their voices for a long\u00a0time.<\/p>\n
beha: One thing we have not yet heard in this conversation, which I expected to hear at some point, is an articulation of the idea of liberal values as universal values. It seems like everyone here is committed to some sense of tradition and cultural embeddedness. But this is the other question that gets back to some things that Frank has dealt with\u2014the view that sees part of liberal progress as exporting this system to other places, with the desire for every society in the world to be structured along liberal\u00a0lines.<\/p>\n
mccloskey: I want them to be. I think the whole world would be much better off. I think it is the end of history, even if Frank wouldn\u2019t use that term\u00a0anymore.<\/p>\n
fukuyama: My view of this these days is completely pragmatic. The United States has gotten into a lot of trouble trying to export these values. We had this period between 1989 or 1991 and 2008 where the United States was just totally hegemonic\u2014military power, economic power, cultural power. And we didn\u2019t use that power very responsibly or prudently. The reason I moved to the left is that the two big things that happened in that period, as far as I was concerned, were the invasion of Iraq and the financial crisis, both of which came out of excessive American self-confidence\u2014first, that we could reshape the world along liberal lines using military power, and second, that global financial markets would be self-regulating and make everybody better off. Both of these projects turned out to be big failures.<\/p>\n
So I am in favor of being cautious about this export of ideas, because I don\u2019t think it worked. There are places where it did work. You bomb Germany and Japan to rubble, you give them a lot of money to rebuild, and you present them with a big enemy in the Soviet Union, and what do you know? Germany and Japan want to adopt your values, and they\u2019re very successful in doing that. But you go into Iraq and Afghanistan, different cultures with different levels of development, and it doesn\u2019t work so\u00a0well.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t approach this from an ideological point of view. I agree with Dierdre that if everybody respected human rights and thought like liberals, we\u2019d probably have a better world. But that\u2019s not the world we live in, and we don\u2019t have the power to create it. So we need to be\u00a0careful.<\/p>\n
deneen: I don\u2019t think the imperial question is off the table. America is a kind of bellwether of the liberal order. We have the most extreme form of market liberalism and the most extreme form of social liberalism, and we\u2019re exporting both of those. It\u2019s a different form of imperialism. It\u2019s a more efficient form of imperialism: a soft, cultural imperialism as well as a financial imperialism, market imperialism. And now we\u2019re seeing the political consequences of these extremes\u2014the populist response\u2014becoming increasingly global as\u00a0well.<\/p>\n
west: In Democracy Matters<\/em>, I wrote a chapter on the deep democratic tradition. The backdrop of this tradition is the dignity of ordinary people. Each one of them has an equal status in the eyes of something more powerful. They have to undergo education, they have to undergo spiritual formation, they have to develop a sense of civic virtue, but it\u2019s their voice. That\u2019s a democratic voice, with a liberal dimension. We started this dialogue saying what? Without liberalism as a prerequisite in terms of rights and liberties, fascism is the alternative; that\u2019s it. Let\u2019s just be honest about it. But then the question becomes: Are we sensitive enough, and do we have the patience to tease out the resources in our own tradition that can serve as a launching pad for alternatives?<\/p>\nmccloskey: We Americans can be a light unto the nations\u2014but boy are we far from\u00a0it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Is Liberalism Worth Saving?, Harper’s, February 2023 The cover story in the current edition of Harper’s Magazine is more than worth reading. It’s a dialogue among well-known commentators about the state–past, present and future–of liberalism writ-large, the concept underpinning the combination of democracy, human rights and human needs in human civilization, versus various versions […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14381"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14381"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14419,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14381\/revisions\/14419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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