Is Liberalism Prone to Self-Undermining Excesses?

Part 2 of the closing keynote conversation between Francis Fukuyama and Pratap Bhanu Mehta at ISMA’s Liberalism for the 21st Century conference

Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Francis Fukuyama at the Liberalism for the 21st Century conference (Photo: Kris Tripplaar).

Yesterday, The UnPopulist published Part 1 of the closing keynote conversation between Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a leading Indian political theorist and public intellectual, and Francis Fukuyama, internationally known for his landmark 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, at the recent Liberalism for the 21st Century conference held July 11-12 in Washington, D.C. The gathering was hosted by the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, publisher of The UnPopulist, and today, we publish the second and final segment of that closing keynote conversation.

Their colloquy focuses on current challenges to liberalism in the U.S. and around the world, and both parts of the conversation were prefaced by a memorable and extended opening statement by Fukuyama on the nature and history of liberalism, as well as the nature of the backlash against it. Readers interested in video of the entire closing keynote session, including this opening statement, can soon access it at ISMA’s website and The UnPopulist’s YouTube channel (that you should all subscribe to) along with video recordings of the other sessions of the conference.

Below, Mehta and Fukuyama continue their conversation from Part 1, where they had just considered two criticisms of liberalism’s handling of the state: the political right’s claim that liberalism naturally produces overregulation of economic activities, thereby throttling growth, and the political left’s claim that liberalism underinvests in state institutions, weakening their capacity to undergird economic activity. Mehta begins with a question about state regulation, but then turns to “neoliberalism,” an economic variant of liberalism first recognized in the 1990s—seen as favoring unregulated markets, even in finance and international trade—and criticized earlier in the session by Fukuyama. Mehta and Fukuyama also discuss a form of “woke liberalism” that Fukuyama had faulted for treating such identity categories as gender, race, ethnicity and sexuality as “essential”—in other words, as fundamentally setting them apart from other groups in ways that violate the human universalism of true liberalism.

The following transcript has been lightly edited for flow and clarity.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Why do you think that this argument [between the left and the right] around the nature of the state [and regulation] has become so polarized in these extreme positions? Because you would have thought that this is an area that might be amenable not just to a kind of compromise, but to the discovery of the appropriate form of state regulation—kind of the sweet spot where the state should be. I mean, India has the kind of same parallel: We lurch between this sort of total skepticism of the state versus an overinvestment in state capacity.

Intellectually and politically, why has that conversation become so difficult? I say “intellectually,” because I think even amongst our colleagues in social science—at least ones who write publicly—you see, in a sense, this kind of verging towards the extremes.

Francis Fukuyama: Well, I can’t speak to the Indian experience. I do think that there is an aspect of American political culture that has made this very polarizing. This is the thing I learned from [sociologist and political scientist] Marty Lipset many years ago in his writing on American exceptionalism—that one of the deepest characteristics of American politics is anti-statism, which comes out of the particular American experience. And I think that it is carried to a point where it becomes utterly self-undermining. You don’t trust the state; therefore, you don’t give it enough resources; you don’t send your best people to work on it; and it doesn’t do the job that it’s supposed to do. And then people say, “Well, look, government can’t do anything.”

And that, by the way, is true of a lot of other societies. In Latin America, you have exactly that same kind of pathology. There aren’t that many countries that actually get that balance right. I think in Northeast Asia, in Japan, in Korea, and in most of Europe, they’ve actually had a different experience with the state, where it’s regarded as a more positive protector of the public interest, and therefore they’ve had an easier time finding the right balance. But I think in the United States, it’s just been very difficult.

Mehta: We’re going to talk a bit more about your critique of neoliberalism, because I think that’s really important. In a way, [neoliberalism has] allowed liberalism to be defined by its critics.

Now there’s one reading of neoliberalism, which is that neoliberalism was itself a response to a previous economic crisis, and that the stagnation of the 1970s created the conditions for neoliberalism to work. And I also completely agree with you that in North American histories of neoliberalism—by that, I mean roughly the period 1991 to 2009 (1991, the Shanghai Stock Exchange is reopened, India’s liberalization started)—it is still the case that this 20-year period is the most significant period of convergence in economic growth in the world and in the reduction of intra-country inequality. It’s an astonishing fact about that 20-year period. Standard histories of neoliberalism coming out of America, I think, just ignore the rest of the world.

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Having said that, that period also produces its own, in a sense, dead end—the dead end that [historian and legal scholar] Sam Moyn talked about [in the conference’s previous panel]. Intra-country inequality increases radically. There is a sense that neoliberalism is an ideological project. There used to be an older term for it called “hypercapitalism.” All the critiques that we are making of neoliberalism, the ‘60s and ‘70s had made them, in a sense, much more powerfully: in the book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air; the argument that it is in the nature of capitalist relations that they will eventually undermine almost all other kinds of stability in institutions.

It’s also led us down to a path where there are two other crises staring at us. To me, the most interesting statistic about American politics is the claim that 60% of Americans now believe that their children will earn less than they did. India is experiencing great stagnation despite high growth. And it’s an open question how much China can grow.

So the question for you is this: In a sense, liberalism has always depended on a certain kind of optimism about growth. The future will be better than the past. There’s a sense of futurity to it. Are we in a deeper crisis where that confidence is actually waning across the world? Layer on top of that the climate crisis and the crisis of the Anthropocene. What would a liberalism look like that cannot as confidently take for granted that sense of trajectory of economic growth that more or less we’ve been accustomed to since World War II, or certainly since 1991?

Fukuyama: I always run into this argument, especially talking about issues like climate. So somebody says, “Well, what’s liberalism going to do about climate?” Well, what’s any system going to do about climate? I don’t think that if there is a general slowdown in productivity growth, it is going to be unique to liberal societies. And in fact, I would think that liberal societies, because they are liberal, are more likely to come up with the kinds of innovations that would be necessary to sustain growing productivity. The historical record of the last, say, 150 years kind of indicates that liberal societies are able to adjust.

“Liberalism has always depended on a certain kind of optimism about growth. The future will be better than the past. There’s a sense of futurity to it. Are we in a deeper crisis where that confidence is actually waning across the world?”
—Pratap Bhanu Mehta

I really think this economic problem is, in a way, the lesser of the big problems that we face. We’ve had this pendulum swing between more state intervention in the interest of more equality and social stability, and then times when the pendulum swung back—so, very liberal in the late 19th century, and then you get the big crisis in 1907 that leads to the formation of the Federal Reserve, and then the Great Depression, which creates all these new institutions. I just think that we’re in the midst of a pendulum swing. We never get the pendulum to just rest in the middle. It always goes a little bit too far, but this has been going on for a long time, and I don’t see any reason why you’re not going to continue to make these adjustments. Just think about what the Biden administration has done to neoliberalism: It’s destroyed it. Industrial policy, protectionism, they’re all back in a big way.

In a way, it’s easier to fix those kinds of worries about economic growth than it is on the other side to fix this expansion of people’s understanding of what the realm of individual autonomy ought to be. It’s much easier, in other words, to say, “Yeah, we should regulate tech. We should do antitrust. We should not go for free trade deals with quite as much enthusiasm.” That’s relatively easier to do politically. What’s harder to do is readjust people’s sense of their individual rights and say, “Well, maybe we need to scale those back.”

Mehta: But doesn’t the current kind of critique of neoliberalism and the turn that the Biden administration has taken [in terms of industrial policy and protectionism] while eminently understandable and defensible in some respects, also not risk creating a world of more zero-sum conflicts? Because the nice thing about that neoliberal illusion, 1991 to 2009, was that you could think of a global geopolitical order where there were, at least on economics, fewer zero-sum conflicts. One of the ways in which the Biden program is sold domestically—and the rest of the world worries about this—is as a project of American primacy. And at the beginning of the 21st century, any project that describes itself as a project to reestablish primacy, however motivating and energizing it might be, runs exactly that risk of liberal parochialism that got us conflicts in the 19th and 20th centuries. How do we reconcile this tension?

Fukuyama: I’m not so sure that the primacy argument was that critical. It seems to me that the general proposition that you can’t sustain liberal democracy without economic growth is pretty clear. A market economy produces inequality. You can mitigate it through social policy and social protections and so forth, but you’re going to have this fundamental inequality that will probably grow over time. The only way that you can make democratic publics not revolt against that system as a whole is by having what they call “shared growth.” It may not be equal growth, but people’s living standards are increasing.

And I disagree that it was only in this brief period in the 1990s and the early 2000s that was true. If you look back over the last 200 years, growth has been happening globally. That’s the “hockey stick” [graph] that someone referred to earlier [in the conference], where all of a sudden, productivity growth can be counted on.

Now, you’re absolutely right: If that stops, then we’re back in a zero-sum world, where the only way you can get rich is by taking something from somebody else. That’s going to be a disaster. You can’t have a liberal democracy under those conditions. But look at what’s going on now with the new technologies that are coming online. I’m not really convinced that we’re back in this Malthusian situation where you can get rich only at somebody else’s expense.

Mehta: Okay, so let me turn to the other part of your critique, which is your worry about [an essentialist identitarian] “wokeness.” You said something interesting—that you actually think that’s a harder critique in some senses for liberals to handle than the critique of neoliberalism. And I want to draw you out on that and ask why.

One of the aspirations modernity unleashes is the aspiration to individual autonomy, and part of the aspiration to individual autonomy is the power of self-definition. It’s one of the achievements of modernity. And it is inevitable that that aspiration to self-definition will lead to circumstances and situations where individuals will assert the right to define themselves and will refuse to be defined by objectified, objectivist categories.

“We’ve had this pendulum swing between more state intervention in the interest of more equality and social stability, and then times when the pendulum swung back. … We never get the pendulum to just rest in the middle. It always goes a little bit too far, but this has been going on for a long time, and I don’t see any reason why you’re not going to continue to make these adjustments.”
—Francis Fukuyama

So isn’t “wokeness,” on that interpretation, just an outgrowth of liberalism—an inevitable consequence and realization of one of its core values?

Fukuyama: Yeah, that is the argument that [political theorist] Patrick Deneen and a lot of post-liberal critics make—that this expanding realm of autonomy is just a one-way street, and there’s no way of rolling it back. I think that this is an empirical question that I don’t think I could definitively answer.

But I do think that one of the big obstacles to an ever-expanding realm of individual autonomy is human nature. We’re hitting right up against this in the whole transgender movement, because there are a number of people who would say: “Gender is completely voluntary. That’s part of human autonomy. You can decide what gender you’re going to be.” In fact, under a new German law, you can kind of change it once a year if you want. You don’t have to have a doctor’s permission or anything.

And I just think it’s not going to work. I think that you’re already seeing a lot of evidence that policies based on this assumption that gender is purely an autonomous individual decision leads to bad outcomes.

I would just give you one other little example. Alexander Stille, a journalist, wrote this very nice book a year or so ago called The Sullivanians. This is an amazing thing. I had no idea that this movement existed. It was a cult in the upper west side of Manhattan: They were all very much on the left, and the people that set it up believed that the reason that communism never succeeded was because of the nuclear family. This was actually a fairly common left-wing belief—that you couldn’t actually implement communism as long as the family was there. And so they acted on these beliefs, and they raised their children communally. They took young babies away from their mothers and gave them to somebody else to raise, as a kind of commune.

And to read it today—first of all, the doctor that was running this whole thing would be accused of basically rape and sexual abuse, because he believed that all men should have access to all women. This was a common belief earlier in the 20th century, and nobody believes that stuff anymore, because it’s kind of run into the fact that there is such a thing as human nature, that parents do have a natural love for their children, and it’s not simply an ideological outgrowth of capitalism that I’m going to take care of my kid and give my kid priority over a stranger’s kid.

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And so I do think that there are certain limits to human autonomy. Technology has affected this very greatly, because in previous years, you couldn’t have done the hormone treatments and all this other stuff. But I don’t think it’s going to actually negate the fact that we are embodied; we are not free-floating wills who can just decide to do anything we want. We actually live in human bodies, in human societies, with certain natural limitations.

Mehta: But—I mean, I agree with that, and of course, that kind of attack on the family goes on even during the French Revolution, right? In the Jacobin tradition, the family was considered the obstacle to the revolution. But if that story is right—that there are limits that we will in some sense discover—then the political attention to this kind of wokeness seems way disproportionate to both its actual effects and perhaps its enduring power.

Fukuyama: Yeah, maybe so. So I’m contradicting myself now. Maybe it is the case that you’re already living through a kind of pendulum swing against wokeness, and that a lot of the current concerns of conservatives actually are way overblown. And that’s perfectly possible. But I do think that in the area where people believe that they’ve got fundamental rights, it’s a harder ask to walk that back than to simply say, well, there ought to be a little bit more [economic] regulation.

Mehta: So we are coming to the end of our time. I want to end with one large question. It goes back again to your definition of liberalism.

When we think of liberalism, we think of individual dignity, freedom and equality of all persons, checks and balances, entrenchment of individual rights. But historically, one of the great aspirations of modernity (and even the communists have tapped into this) is the aspiration to create a social world that is a product of our self-conscious choice—that empowers us as agents individually in our lives, but also in the kind of circumstances that we in some senses inhabit.

Now one of the criticisms of liberalism historically has been that it has maintained a very uneasy relationship with this aspiration and with democracy in particular. That uneasy relationship is still reflected in the way in which we talk about ordinary citizens wanting to exercise their democratic capacities. I think even in this day and a half, I counted about 14 to 15 phrases like—and it was understandable in the context—“Voters would not understand. Voters do not care.”

One diagnosis of this moment is that there is a kind of crisis of democracy in the sense that nominally our procedures are all fair and free, with equal elections and so forth. Yet so many sections of society feel incredibly disempowered, and that disempowerment actually produces a deeper form of resentment, because now they can’t even call it unfair. They lost fair and square by procedural means.

So what can liberals do to repair this reputation that they fear democracy, deep democracy? I had this conversation with somebody in Maine once—I was kind of taken aback—who believed that the [2020] election was stolen. But behind that belief was an even deeper belief. It was easier for him to believe that the last election was stolen, because, he said, “Look, the whole system is already stolen.” It was that in some sense, our very institutions of democracy have systematically disempowered or not given full expression to the agency of lots of different groups. They just don’t feel they can control their cultural world, economic world and social world.

“One of the aspirations modernity unleashes is the aspiration to individual autonomy, and part of the aspiration to individual autonomy is the power of self-definition. It’s one of the achievements of modernity. And it is inevitable that that aspiration to self-definition will lead to circumstances and situations where individuals will assert the right to define themselves and will refuse to be defined by objectified, objectivist categories.”
—Pratap Bhanu Mehta

So how does one reinvigorate that democratic project beyond simply saying there are some bad guys whom we need to keep out? Because those sections that are disempowered don’t trust liberals to actually empower them in their full democratic agency.

Fukuyama: Well, we have a little over two minutes left to talk [audience laughs]. And you are now introducing a gigantic subject that really gets into this bigger issue of human cognition.

One of the biggest issues, I think, for liberalism is the kind of the Enlightenment premise about the way that human beings process information: We take in empirical information; we think about it; and we make inferences from our experience. And then it’s a social activity, so the information gets better and better, and we actually make progress.

The last few years have certainly demonstrated to me that that is not the way the human mind works. I think [social psychologist] Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind describes an alternative process by which we start with the outcomes we want, and we use our cognitive capacity to build an empirical case for why what we want is actually the truth. And when you add that to the internet, where basically anyone can say anything, and where, as [social media researcher] Renée DiResta says in her new book, what’s true is not what any expert says, but how many likes you get, you have this very toxic mixture where you can’t convince people of things, because they’re simply immune to empirical information.

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I have no idea how to solve that problem—I mean, I honestly don’t—and I think that unless we do solve it, we’re going to all be in deep trouble.

Mehta: So the idea that somebody can say, “I have no idea” is such a perfect example of liberal humility and the strength of liberalism that I think it’s appropriate to end on that hopeful note and thank Francis for this wonderful conversation.

End of Part 2. Part 1 of this discussion was published in The UnPopulist yesterday.

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