Top 15 Francis Fukuyama Quotes

[I]dentity is something that is universally desired by people. In a liberal society... people can associate based on... identity affiliations... and that they're free to do so... [T]he danger... resides when the state begins to endorse identity categories as... fixed... and then to distribute resources or... access to institutions on the basis of those... That's the point at which... you risk... hardening these notions of identity into self-regarding groups that are living next to each other... In the UK you get state supported religious schools... for Jews, for Muslims, for... other faiths. People should be free in a liberal society to set up private schools... to bring up people in a religious tradition. I don't... see why the state ought to be supporting that, because what you don't want to do is to have... young people educated in closed communities where they have nothing to do with people from other communities. ...[T]hat's fundamentally illiberal... [T]hat's... a mistaken policy that's... going to harden those divisions rather than to encourage a more... open and tolerant society.

What's interesting about the world today is that the fundamental division is... a... sociological one between people that have better educations, that live in big urban agglomerations, that then can then benefit from... a global economy, versus people who live in... smaller cities and towns, or in the countryside... with more traditional values. That division exists almost universally, in Turkey... Hungary... the United States, in Britain... [I]t does reflect different economic opportunities, but more fundamentally... it reflects a... way of life, that in the urban case is... liberal and open, but in some cases... people would say a little... too open and too tolerant of... people that want to break traditional norms that are still maintained by... other parts of the population. So it's really that cultural fight... that's at the center of populism, related to,.. but certainly not fundamentally driven by economic inequality.

[C]ulture is a much better predictor of populist sentiment than economics. ...[T]he average Trump voter in 2016 had a higher per capita income than the average Hillary Clinton voter, and if you look at the people in the January 6th riot, the vast majority... were comfortable middle class people with good jobs... [T]here is a core... white working class base to Trumpism, but... a lot of the people that are aligned with that movement are there for cultural reasons. They really don't like the kind of identity politics that's being... put forward by the progressive left... [A] lot of Hispanic voters, for example, don't like socialism, and they don't like the fact that the Democrats are using the word socialism as if it's a perfectly normal set of economic choices.

The mainstream media does have a liberal bias, as does a lot of... higher education, academia... and so forth... [A] lot of people see that and they don't like it. ...The problem is that the solution ...offered by the extreme right is... a lot worse... [T]he critics of the mainstream media don't... appreciate that fact that there is diversity... that there are actually journalistic standards that... The New York Times and ... adhere to. All of which is being tossed out the window on the far right... in reaction to the perceived bias. ...[T]here's a difference between bias and outright... lying. So the bias... has to do with what kinds of stories are covered... the kinds of slant that's given to the reporting... but what's going on in large sections of the conservative media is just outright... untruth... people will just make up facts... without sourcing them properly... [T]hat's another sense in which... the solution is a lot worse than the... underlying disease. ...What we need is a responsible right wing media that does adhere to certain basic journalistic standards. ...[T]here's a tendency on the part of everybody to... take particular anecdotes and instances of abuse and then generalize it to say that... the entire media universe is corrupt... without... appreciating the fact that... that's not a universal problem.

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.

[T]he Republican party has really gone off the rails and has become... in many ways a quasi-authoritarian party because many Republicans are not willing to accept the results of a... free and fair election. ...[W]e've learned a lot from the... House committee that's studying the January 6th insurrection... [W]hat that committee has revealed was that this wasn't just a demonstration that spontaneously got out of hand. It was planned very deliberately by the White House as a way of pressuring former vice president Pence to overturn the election and keep Donald Trump in office, and right now a lot of state level Republican legislatures are trying to modify their rules for counting votes in the next election so that they would be in a better position to do what they tried to do in 2020, but didn't get away with... [S]o this is probably the most severe threat to American democracy... since the Civil War... and I'm quite worried about that.

[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.

So this is something... we see happening... in the war in Ukraine. A lot of people raise the question, "Why are Ukrainians resisting the Russian invasion as ferociously as they are?" and there's been a little bit of a debate over whether this is due to the fact that Ukrain is democratic, a liberal democracy, and Russia is not, or whether it's simply a fight over sovereignty... I think that that's a false dichotomy because you really don't fight for liberalism as an abstract principle. You fight for it as it is embedded in... your nation... [F]rom my... frequent visits to Ukraine... I believe... that's what's really going on, that Ukrainians want their sovereignty, but the reason they want it so desperately is that they want to have a free Ukraine and not Putin's Ukraine, not a... centralized dictatorship, and that's why they're willing to fight so tenaciously.

The other big issue is an emotional one. We tend to feel the greatest bonds of solidarity with people that are close to us. There are very few true citizens of the world. We're citizens of individual countries and we really feel the closest bonds to people that live within our nation, and therefore... the nation becomes a kind of social glue. But if you're going to make a national identity compatible with liberalism, it has to be the right kind of national identity. It has to be one that is open to all of the citizens that actually live in the territory of the nation. It can't exclude certain groups by race, by ethnicity, by religious belief and the like, and therefore it needs to be an open identity that is based on essentially liberal ideas.

A right exists in theory... [A]ll human beings have the same set of rights, but rights need to be enforced by the state. It needs to rely on the coercive power of the state... its army, its police force, to actually make those rights something real that citizens can enjoy, and the enforcement power is not universal. ...[W]e wouldn't want to live in a world in which every liberal state wanted to enforce liberal rights in every other state in the world.

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.

[I]n a liberal society you're not going to agree on the deepest... moral frameworks, but you are going to agree on factual information, and... if you can't agree on factual information it's very hard to deliberate in common... [on] what needs to be done in the future, and that's the situation we now face.

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...

[A] further threat to liberalism has to do with the mode of cognition that we call modern natural science. The early liberals were very closely aligned with the founders of modern natural science, people like Bacon and Descartes and Newton, who believed that there was an objective world beyond our subjective consciousnesses, that we could perceive this world through the experimental method, and then come to manipulate it. Natural science gave us technology... that made the world much more habitable, by conquering disease, by inventing things that vastly increased human productivity. So... it's closely related to the wealth, and... the safety and comfort of a modern economically developed world.

There was... an attack on the individualistic premise that underlies liberalism through a new kind of identity politics. There is a liberal form of identity politics that says that liberalism does not live up to its promises of the equal treatment of individuals. So... black people, other racial minorities, women, LGBTQ people, have been marginalized and excluded from... full participation in the promise of a liberal... rule of law... [I]dentity politics was simply a means of mobilizing people and getting them to push for their inclusion. So that's a liberal and... perfectly acceptable and... desirable understanding of identity. But there is another view that's grown up very powerfully, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world... places like the United States or Britain or Australia, where identity politics is seen as an attack fundamentally on the individualistic premise of liberalism. That is to say, individuals are not really free. They're determined by the categories, the racial, gender and other categories into which they are born, and that the society needs to respect not what they do and decide as individuals, but to look first to that category, the racial, ethnic, gender category, and use that as the means of determining... the distribution of resources, hiring, promotion, the other goods that society offers, and that... is fundamentally illiberal. It divides the society which had previously been held together through a set of... common values shared by individuals, into a society of groups, and at the end of that process you can ultimately end up with a place like Lebanon or Bosnia where identity politics... defines the whole of politics...[T]here is a kind of effort to move our modern liberal democratic politics in that kind of identity based direction, coming out of the contemporary left.