Revitalizing Liberalism Requires Understanding That It Is a Natural Response to Diversity Everywhere
Part 1 of the closing keynote conversation between Francis Fukuyama and Pratap Bhanu Mehta at ISMA’s Liberalism for the 21st Century conference
On July 11-12 in Washington, D.C., the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, publisher of The UnPopulist, convened a conference of leading U.S. and international liberals from both the political left and the political right. The conference’s purpose was, as ISMA President Shikha Dalmia wrote, to respond to rising challenges in America and abroad by “illiberal movements, particularly those mobilizing majoritarian grievances, that question liberalism’s commitment to personal liberty, toleration, pluralism political equality, and a just rule of law that holds even the powerful accountable.” She called upon “liberals of all political persuasions” to “set aside their policy differences and come together in a renewed defense of liberal democratic institutions and values.” The conference was aptly titled “Liberalism for the 21st Century.”
In the days to come, video recordings of the conference sessions will be posted on ISMA’s website, and transcripts of select sessions of the conference will be published here at The UnPopulist. Today’s excerpt will be the first of two, posted today and tomorrow, from the conference’s remarkable final session, “Revitalizing Liberalism at the End of the History.”
This session featured Francis Fukuyama, author of the landmark 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, whom Dalmia introduced as a fearless and brilliant political theorist and newspaper columnist who “has made his mark in India as the most important public intellectual there.” Mehta opened the session by inviting Fukuyama to make a detailed opening statement to which Mehta responded, initiating a dialogue.
Fukuyama (speaking without notes!) proceeded to define liberalism in clear and inclusive terms; to trace its historical value in governing diverse societies; to discuss its moral and practical value in protecting human freedom and autonomy; to acknowledge, yet contextualize the past hypocrisies of American liberalism; to frame the current backlash against liberalism as a response to “distortions” of “core classical liberalism” emanating from both the right and the left.
The transcript below, lightly edited for flow and clarity, picks up immediately afterward—and quickly enters new ground.
The full video of this conversation, and other panels, will be posted on the ISMA website soon. So look out in that space if you want to watch (and listen to) a fascinating conversation with these remarkable intellectuals.
Meanwhile, enjoy this!
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: It’s difficult to say anything after that. That should be the last word.
But we have time. So let me introduce a couple of historiographical notes into this discussion, building on Frank’s history, in a sense. And I wonder if we can begin by making three historical points that might help us diagnose this moment and this crisis of liberalism in its specificity.
So here’s the first point I want to make. It’s a very obvious one, but in some ways it’s been missing, I think, in discussions of the crisis of liberalism. It’s that if there is a crisis of liberalism at this moment in the 21st century, it is also coming at a moment when there is a crisis of every other system as well. The Chinese Party state—I’m not saying it’s going to collapse; it is a very enduring political form—but it is experiencing a kind of legitimation crisis of its own. I mean, the degree of repression or enclosure you need to apply is an indication of that. It is facing an economic crisis. And other ideological systems—the prospect of a kind of modern Islamic constitutionalism—struggle.
So one thing to think about with this crisis of liberalism: Is there a kind of global governance crisis that is actually simultaneously affecting lots of different systems of legitimation that got institutionalized over the last 30 or 40 years? In some senses, this might actually be good news for liberalism, in the sense that liberalism has the capacity for self-renewal in a way in which its competitors might not.
But I think it is important to underscore this fact that it’s not just liberalism in crisis. It is almost, I think, every kind of ideological system. And that leads us to think about whether the crisis of liberalism can simply be read as a kind of morality play, as in, “OK, there’s liberals, and there’s anti-liberals; we are the party of virtue, they are the party of vice.” I think that that story of this crisis as a kind of morality play between liberalism and anti-liberalism is actually not going to work. It’s not going to work because that presentation is not going to address the deeper material crises out of which this crisis of legitimation is emerging.
“It is important to underscore this fact that it’s not just liberalism in crisis. It is almost, I think, every kind of ideological system.”
—Pratap Bhanu Mehta
It’s also not going to work, I think, for the following reason, which came up in one of the panels yesterday. There is a perception out there that the liberal script is still defensible ideologically, for all the reasons that Francis just kind of outlined very powerfully, right? But there is an immense social backlash against what people think of as liberal elites and liberal actors. Somebody once said, the liberal script is fine. We just don’t like the liberal directors. We don’t like the liberal actors. We don’t like the liberal producers. You guys are liars, hypocrites, warmongers, elitists. You have turned to oligarchy. You believe in truth, but you have, in a sense, denuded the power of truth-producing institutions.
If that’s the critique, then the political task is not going to be yet another philosophical defense of liberalism. I mean, I think that in some senses, it’s [still] essential, but not really the core of where we are at. So that’s, I think, one kind of historiographical point generally about the nature of this crisis.
I think the second historiographical point is really how we tell the global history of liberalism over the last 200 to 300 years. There is a tendency, and I think it’s come up in this conference as well, to sort of naturalize liberalism as part of the history of the West—that somehow Europe and America are the natural sites of liberalism in some ways. Yes, liberalism was always imperfectly realized; those ideals were betrayed; these are also the sites of colonialism, slavery, sexism, racism, all of that stuff. But still, there is that kind of Hegelian residue that in some senses it is Western Europe and North America that actually produce the ideological conditions, the philosophical ideas, that make liberalism in some senses possible.
Now, I think it’s going to be very important if you’re going to reinvigorate liberalism in the 21st century to actually do this as a global history of liberalism. And by that, I mean two things.
One, denaturalizing America and Europe as the sites of liberalism. You could tell a pretty cynical history of the last 200 years. Universal suffrage in the United States in effective terms comes into being after India’s and Sri Lanka’s. Switzerland doesn’t get universal suffrage until 1973. The number of years where almost all the attributes of a liberal regime that we value—entrenchment of individual rights, political equality, the exercise of political agency by citizens through democratic means and practices of justification: Count any Western democracy. How many years have these practices actually been institutionalized as a package?
“You could tell a pretty cynical history of the last 200 years. Universal suffrage in the United States in effective terms comes into being after India’s and Sri Lanka’s. Switzerland doesn’t get universal suffrage until 1973. … Count any Western democracy. How many years have these [liberal] practices actually been institutionalized as a package?”
—Pratap Bhanu Mehta
[The British historian] Mark Madzower wrote a brilliant book, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century. And the argument was, in some senses, that it’s not at all obvious that liberalism and liberal democracy, this package, would have won in Europe. So it’s only with this kind of post-World War II settlement, after that extraordinary catastrophe, right, that you actually got a kind of breathing space in which we come to think of liberalism and liberal democracy as kind of natural to the history of Europe and America. And I think it’s important to see that because it then will also prevent a kind of condescension towards the rest of the world, as if somehow these were natural sites of Hegelian self-fulfillment, where the real is rational, and the rest of the world is kind of stuck in this sort of stasis of history. So you do have to have a kind of history of the global that denaturalizes Europe and America.
It also means a kind of more Machiavellian reading of the history of liberalism. And by Machiavellian, I mean in the sense that [historian] John Pocock used it in The Machiavellian Moment: that liberal polities are extremely fragile, rare, snatched through moments of incredible struggle, often through violence and conflict. There is no natural ideology to them, and they can as easily be broken.
So I think we need to tell a different kind of history. But the flip side of a global history of liberalism is to also think of the ways in which the rest of the world participates in creating a global liberal order. Just take the [conference’s] last panel [“A New Theory of Liberal Internationalism”] as an example. When we think of an international liberal order, when we think of the 1945 settlement, 1948 settlement, and present it as a settlement of a kind of Western European order—as, oddly enough, even defenders of that order often present it—it’s just a colossal misreading of that history. That order came out of incredible struggles for decolonization around the world, the [1948] signing on to the United Nations Human Declaration of Rights by so many countries, and the shaping of it, including on women’s rights in some senses.
Names like Hansa Mehta or Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit will be obscure to you. But those were the Indian delegates at those meetings, arguing for women’s rights and taking an anti-apartheid position. Take even humanitarian intervention: One of the few successful examples of humanitarian intervention—it was aligned with self-interest—was actually India in 1971 in the Bangladesh war preventing genocide.
So I think it is important that this history now become a genuinely global history in every sense of the term. I think liberalism excites a lot of skepticism because it is still associated with a Hegelian parochialism that keeps cropping up in different ways.
So to take the conversation forward, let me just sort of draw out a couple of points you made and ask you to elaborate on them a bit. And let me begin with one historiographical point, just as a kind of example of a certain kind of parochialism in liberal historiography. So you rightly said absolutely that one of the core values of liberalism is political equality and equality of all human beings. But you also associated the equality of all human beings with a capacity for moral choice.
Now one of the things we know from the historiography of liberalism is that the invocation of the term “capacity” was itself used to institute and create hierarchies. Ambedkar, the greatest Indian liberal, was once asked to answer, How do you ground the idea of equality? And he said that if you have to ask that question, you’re probably not interested in equality. It just has to be a kind of practice of the way in which you actually treat other human beings.
So one question to you is the following: When you think of making this argument for political equality, is the cogency of that argument going to turn on thinking of what these foundational philosophical premises are? Or is the crisis that so many peoples around the world—or within societies they live in—still feel that the practices, the way liberals treat others, do not express equality? I mean, is it a problem of practice, or do we actually need deeper or newer philosophical foundations for this?
Francis Fukuyama: Well, I must honestly say I don’t know the answer to that. I would think that you’d need both the theoretical grounding, but also the practice.
But what you said about the “global”—that this shouldn’t be grounded simply in a Western experience—I think is very right. This gets me back to something that I thought was missing in yesterday’s discussion (“Liberalism Beyond the West”) about whether liberalism is culturally a Western invention and possession and can only take root in Western societies.
My view about this is actually quite Hegelian [laughs] in the sense that I think that liberalism as a doctrine and as a way of life is historically contingent. Europe was not liberal 200, 300 years ago. Most of the world was not liberal. It came at a certain historical juncture for different kinds of reasons, but once the practice was established, it turns out that a lot of societies found it very useful.
And I would say that my answer to the charge that this is simply a Western practice is to look everywhere around the world. Today you’ve got this sociological division as to who votes for liberal parties and who votes for populist parties. And it’s actually very highly correlated with modernization and urbanization, population density. So in every country, including India, Hungary, even Russia, if you go to the big cities, people are much more liberal because that’s where more educated people live. They have more opportunities. Those places are more diverse. So in their personal lives, they have to deal with people who are very different from themselves, and experience with diversity actually does make you more liberal. Somebody was noting that the people in Poland who are the most anti-immigrant are the ones who actually never met an immigrant; they’re just worried about it.
“My answer to the charge that [liberalism] is simply a Western practice is to look everywhere around the world. Today you’ve got this sociological division as to who votes for liberal parties and who votes for populist parties. And it’s actually very highly correlated with modernization and urbanization, population density. So in every country, … if you go to the big cities, people are much more liberal because that’s where more educated people live.”
—Francis Fukuyama
The actual experience of living in a diverse society, I think, teaches you that something like liberal tolerance is really necessary for you to get along, for your children to get along, and so forth, and that’s almost a universal discovery—that it kind of grows naturally from a process in which people are increasingly living in large cities with diverse populations, with many more opportunities that allow them to assume many different kinds of identities.
This is the old gesellschaft and gemeinschaft distinction. Once you move from the little village, all of a sudden you’re confronted with all of these different possibilities. I think that makes you more open to liberal thinking—and that’s not culturally determined. That’s pretty universal.
Mehta: Can I push you on that a bit—because I think this is important—and maybe register two disagreements with it? One, at least in the Indian case, is that it’s actually not true that rural India is less liberal in voting patterns than urban India. In fact, the opposite is the case in some ways.
And that has to do with that older law, which used to be stated as, “no middle class, no nationalism.” The yearning for a certain kind of exclusionary nationalism is also the product of a certain kind of middle-class urbanization—that the two have, in some senses, gone hand in hand, and that these very societies, these very forms of urbanization, industrialization, dealing with strangers also produce the most horrendous form of collectivism in the 20th century. How do we square these two stories?
Fukuyama: Yeah, so it’s true. That was Ernest Gellner’s theory about nationalism—that when you industrialize, you rip people out of their village identities. They don’t know who they are, and they need to be told, “I’m a German,” or “I’m a Russian,” or whatever.
So that’s true, but that’s also where, I think, experience of actual leadership and political organization makes a big difference, because that same loss of traditional identity can be turned in a liberal direction or a nationalist direction. The history of Europe is really a contest between these two strands. Unfortunately, the nationalist side won, but then people’s experience of living in these aggressive nationalist societies was pretty horrendous, and they picked the other direction.
But it still remains the case that in many places, it is the more cosmopolitan regions that tend to produce liberal politicians.
Mehta: So kind of just building on that, one of the things you’ve also written very powerfully about is, in a sense, having capable states. And there are two critiques of the state competing at the moment, right?
There’s the kind of right-wing critique of the state, which is that—and this is involving liberal democracies that are functioning states—the main challenge to economic growth and prosperity is overregulation. That’s the kind of rightist critique of the state. And then there’s the leftist critique of the state, which is that the principal obstacle is underinvestment in the state.
For a liberal in 2024, how would you adjudicate between these two critiques if liberalism is to be politically salvaged? You yourself have given a powerful critique of [rightist] neoliberalism in some ways. What do each of these critiques get right? What is right about the right-wing critique, and what might be right about the left-wing critique?
Fukuyama: Well, I hate to give this kind of “both sides” argument, but they both have elements of correctness. One of the big issues that I have been wrestling with in the last few years has to do with infrastructure, because I actually think that societies need to build stuff. Right now we’re facing this climate crisis, and you’ve got to build transmission lines and wind farms and solar farms and the like, and you can’t do it, because there are too damn many rules.
So the right-wing critique is clearly right in that respect—that liberals really like procedures, and they tend to pile procedure on top of procedure in search of legitimacy, but then that doesn’t allow them to get to outcomes, which is really what people want. And I think that’s a big problem.
The other critique is a complicated one, because, clearly, concentrated state power can be used for very, very bad purposes. That’s why you want checks and balances and limitations on states. It really depends on who’s running the state and for what purposes, and that’s a political issue whose outcome you cannot predict in advance.
But the one thing I do know is that without that fundamental [state] capacity, you’re not going to get an outcome, good or bad. I mean, you’re simply going to get, I think, underdevelopment.
End of Part 1. Part 2 of this discussion will be published in The UnPopulist tomorrow.
© The UnPopulist 2024
Yay for the transcript! I hate hate hate being forced to follow along with audio (plus seeing the transcript makes it much easier to turn off the real time response tribal thinking to applause lines).
A lot of intellectual red meat here. Y'all do good work. I thought I was a conservative but I might be a right-wing liberal.