Francis Fukuyama Quotes

We need a good alternative to Trumpism. There is a majority in favor of that, but... the other party is really not providing that alternative in a very clear way.

The final thing... the question of the nation, and the role of the nation in liberalism... [T]here would seem to be a tension between liberalism's belief that all human beings enjoy... the same basic set of human rights, and the fact that we are divided up into s, in which the authority to enforce those rights is territorially limited. ...[T]his contradiction can be bridged because... there is a liberal form of national identity which is not only possible, but... necessary if a liberal society is going to succeed.

The attack on modern natural science has come from a number of sources... [I]t starts ...on the left with a series of intellectual developments... French structuralism that then develops into post-structuralism, postmodernism and ultimately into different varieties of contemporary critical theory, the premise of which is that there's... a subjectivity in the way that we perceive the world. We don't so much perceive an objective reality, as impose reality on the world through the words that we use. This... culminates... in the thought of Michel Foucault, who's a very brilliant philosophical observer, but he began to argue that... modern science is not an objective cognitive technique, it is really something that elites use to manipulate people... [I]n previous years they could simply order the death of one of their subjects, but now they use science and the authority that science carries, to convince people of certain things that are essentially a way of holding power over them... [H]e applies this to things like incarceration, homosexuality, mental illness and the like, but by the end of his career had... broadened the idea of to... include much of what we understand to be modern natural science, and so the skepticism of science really starts on the progressive left. It has now completely moved over to the nationalist populist right. So during the COVID epidemic and... to the present... there are many people on the extreme right around the world that... argue, just like Foucault, that what the public health authorities are telling you about vaccines or about masking is... not based on objective science. It's based on... the elite desire to manipulate you, and it's really a game about power, rather than about the truth. You combine that with the internet and the new digital technologies that have wiped away all of the former gatekeepers, like the traditional media or... other credible sources of scientific information that used to certify information. You combine that with a principled belief that there really is no such thing as objective truth, and you get the situation... we now face, in which, at least in the United States... we can't agree on whether vaccines are safe, ...who is the winner of the 2020 presidential election and the like...

Fundamentally we are highly social creatures. We feel a big sense of and discomfort when we are isolated from our fellow human beings. ...[W]e seek community in different ways. There's a right wing... and... a left wing version of this.

The practical reason has to do with that original purpose of liberalism, which was to lower the temperature of politics by taking final ends off the table, and allowing societies to govern themselves when they face religious or national diversity... [T]hat remains one of its biggest selling points. In India, the republic that was created by Gandhi and Nehru was a liberal republic. They did not define themselves in religious terms. They knew that they had to deal with the incredible diversity, not just religious but in terms of cast, , language, many other dimensions... [A] liberal republic was... the only way of accommodating that diversity. What prime minister Modi is seeking to do... is to shift that national identity to one based on Hindu nationalism, which then excludes the up to 200 million Muslims that live in contemporary India, as well as... Parsis, Christians, other people... When he was the chief minister [2001-20014] in Gujarat this led to communal riots, and I'm afraid that India is moving toward that kind of communal violence once again today. ...So that's the pragmatic reason.

[F]inally, and... somewhat belatedly, there is the growing of a left that... has now been energized and is increasingly vocal... in certain quarters of the cultural community, in the arts and the universities, in Hollywood, in the media... where in some versions it also engages in a kind of illiberal... politics.

[T]he invasion... exhibits in stark terms, the choice that is before us today between maintaining a liberal government that respects the rights of individuals, or moving over to a form of centralized illiberal dictatorship, even if that... illiberal government is somehow democratically legitimated. ...[T]hat's the central issue in global politics today. ...[T]hat's basically what the... Ukraine invasion is about, and that's why... all liberal societies that care about those individual freedoms... have a very powerful interest in the outcome of that war, because Putin and Russia are at the center of an international network of illiberal forces that are seeking to overturn liberal values in virtually every part of the world, and therefore... that's all part of a larger global struggle over our fundamental liberal values.

But there has also been the rise of populist movements within existing liberal democracies, and particularly within the United States and Britain, which were... the leaders of the neoliberal revolution... in the 1980s...

The limits of this strategy were evident as the century drew to a close. The Marxist left had to confront the fact that actual Communist societies in the Soviet Union and China had turned into grotesque and oppressive dictatorships.

The United States has been in a long term decline, with its political institutions decaying. ...[T]he single source of that decline is ...the pervasive polarization ...within American society that has made the United States unable to meet some of the basic governance challenges that it has faced. The most recent example... has been the COVID pandemic... [W]earing a mask, instead of becoming a health measure that people take to protect themselves and their loved ones, becomes as political statement... [Y]ou don't wear a mask if you're a Trump supporter, and you do... if you're a Democrat. This is... not the way that... coherent nations... meet systemic challenges like a global pandemic.

The End of History was never linked to a specifically American model of social or political organisation. Following Alexandre Kojève, the Russian-French philosopher who inspired my original argument, I believe that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the contemporary United States. The EU's attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a "post-historical" world than the Americans' continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military.

[O]ne of the problems... both on the left and the right is that the... individual autonomy protected by liberalism tends to take more and more extreme versions... and... becomes self-undermining.

Because the President has undisputed authority over foreign policy, President Biden... will be able to reinsert the United States into the international system. He will rejoin the World Health Organization, the Paris Climate Accords, he will go to NATO and reaffirm support for... our Asian allies, for Australia, for every other country that has depended on... American power, but... it's going to be extremely difficult to return to the kind of world that we assumed existed before 2016, because America does remain fundamentally divided. That bipartisan support for the liberal international order that we thought was extremely strong is no longer...

In the ... a third of the population of central Europe were killed in a bloody struggle between different Christian religious sects, and the pragmatic part of liberalism was to take final ends [defined by religions] out of political discussion... and to lower the sights of politics to defend life itself, and not "the good life"... as defined by a particular sect of a particular religion.

[I]t is hard to see how the discarding of liberal values is going to lead to anything in the long term other than increasing social conflict and ultimately a return to violence as a means of resolving differences.