Francis Fukuyama: Populism, Polarization, and National Identity

good afternoon and welcome delighted to see all of you here in pepto auditorium a special welcome as well to everyone listening live on Aspen Public Radio a special thanks to Bonnie and Tom McCluskey for sponsoring this series this is the first series of the summer I'm Elliot Gerson of the Aspen Institute and I'm absolutely delighted to have with us professor Francis Fukuyama of Stanford University as you know on the extraordinarily timely topics of populism polarization and national identity dr. Fukuyama will be signing his wonderful most recent book identity the demand for dignity and the politics of resentment immediately following in the lobby three decades ago Francis Fukuyama wrote an essay in a journal of relatively limited circulation that made him almost overnight a intellectual sensation not just in the United States but globally that essay was called the end of history and I should note and it's actually important it was not a declaration it ended with a question mark and he described in that essay the triumph of western-style liberal democracy as sort of the evolutionary direction of political ideology of course fascism had been killed off in World War two and communism was appreciably going to fall in the very year of that essay and in the years immediately following but back to that question mark as perhaps true of all essays that have that enormous impact it has often been misunderstood by people as signaling that he was saying that history was actually ending that virtual virtuous liberal democracy would inevitably flourish everywhere and forever but he did not mean end in that sense or he really meant it more of an in a Hegelian sense that it was the target or objective of political history and that there could be threats or regression or even worse and indeed since that essay and we'll talk mainly about this book in his books and his essays articles and lectures he's focused on how political institutions could decay including in his book the end of history and the last man which was written just three years after that seminal essay where he warned that while liberal democracy could deliver peace and prosperity it might actually falter if it did not also deliver human dignity to everyone and that's a theme that he returns to in this book and then in his 2014 book the origins of political order where he warned how political institutions in the United States were declining in the face of suffocatingly powerful political interest groups and in this new book which I hope you will enjoy reading and I know you will enjoy listening to him about identity the demand for dignity and the politics of resentment he returns to the importance of dignity and how today instead of people securing their dignity and some universal surd sense of humanity they tend to seek it in some narrow sense of identity be it ethnicity nationality gender religion or similar and then he argues and we'll talk about this how that kind of narrow identity politics has been fanned and exploited by both the left and the right imperiling liberal democracy fueling the kind of populist nationalism we see everywhere and leading to the kind of polarization that we're seeing not just here but all across the world so let's start if we can with this concept of dignity and then we'll talk to about some of the his political issues this how long has dignity as you described it been something that's been regarded as politically important is this a new concept of dignity so Eliot before I answer that question I want to thank you for that summary of my work you did a much better job and I could have done in explaining the end of history which by the way almost exactly 30 years ago that essay was first published so the question of dignity I think is an extremely old one it's as old as political life there is a term that is used by Plato the Greek word that he uses as sumos sumos is usually translated into English as spiritedness or pride but the idea behind it is that we all have this sense of our inner worth and if we do not have that worth recognised by other people we feel anger because we are disregarded disrespected and this is something Socrates lays out and book for the Republic and this was written 2500 years ago and I think it's been a central concept in politics ever since and it's something by the way that modern economists simply don't comprehend because the economists say well we have these things called preferences or utilities that's basically material desires and we have reasons so we use our reason to get stuff to maximize the the stuff that we get but they don't understand that in addition to material goods we sometimes want respect we want other people to evaluate us positively and in many cases we're willing to give up material values in order to get that respect and that I think is actually at the basis of a lot of politics and it has been since Plato's time at least but there were revolutions fought over dignity for a long time for many for must of history agrarian history most people really didn't think about any different identity than the one they had their father their mother and generations before them they lived farming communities and there wasn't much question about that but then flash-forward you start seeing things like the French Revolution and things more recently which you argue we're really in some respect fought about dignity well to give a a very condensed history of the last two thousand years you know in aristocratic societies not everybody has dignity only Warriors have dignity because these are built around violence and the ability to do violence I think this begins to change really in a way with Christianity because you know in in the Christian understanding all human beings Clau human beings are moral agents they're capable of accepting God and therefore in that respect they're equal in God's eyes and so you get a Christian universalism that all men are equal because of this ability to have human to have moral choice and I think that this then takes on a secular form during the Enlightenment thinkers like Immanuel Kant give a philosophical grounding so you don't have to be a Christian believer and I think today if you think about human rights you know a lot of people believe that there are these things called universal human rights among which is a right to respect for human dignity it's written into the Constitution's of many countries South Africa Germany Japan and the like and I think it comes from this understanding that in addition to our material selves we are agents capable of making moral choices and for that reason alone we have to be treated with respect as kahn says we have to be treated as ends rather than simply means to another end and and that that desire for respect and recognition of one's basic dignity you argue has been such an important factor just in very recent history you spend a lot of time for example in the in in in talking about the Arab Spring and Mohamed Bouazizi I think his name was what how does relate to this issue well dignity really lies behind many political movements including the movement for dignity so Mohamed Bouazizi was a Tunisian vegetable seller he was part of the informal economy one day the police took his cart away so he goes to the governor's office he says where's my cart and they don't give him an answer they don't even talk to him and as a result he douses himself with gasoline sets himself on fire and that was the trigger for the Arab Spring because millions of people in the Arab world saw themselves in this individual they were living in dictatorships that did not treat them with a minimal amount of respect I mean if if you're treating a citizen with respect at least you owe that citizen and an answer you know why did my vegetable cart get confiscated and he didn't get that and and that was the experience that was replicated by many people so I think many democratic political movements are waged against authoritarian governments that do not treat their citizens with respect in Ukraine a couple of years later you had what the Ukrainians themselves call the revolution of dignity their leader Viktor Yanukovych was trying to drag Ukraine away from the European orbit into Vladimir Putin's kleptocratic corrupt crony based system and they didn't want that because in that system unless you're well-connected you can't get ahead you know they wanted to be in a modern political system that respected their rights as as equal individuals and that was the issue for them and that's why they said that this struggle against putinism is a struggle for our dignity and then you draw a line to contemporary well not just contemporary but over the last 50 years movements in this country for example the civil rights movement and then even much more recently black lives matter me too is that part of that same continuum so dignity takes many forms in the United States we have a declaration of independence that says all men are created equal but we live in a society that does not actually treat individuals with equal respect even in cases where they're treated formally under the law equally socially there's discrimination there's disrespect there's disregard and I think especially beginning in the 1960s you had a big series of social movements beginning with a civil rights movement for African Americans but going through feminism going through the LGBT movement going through the movements for the rights of disabled for indigenous peoples every single one of these groups had been marginalized by a mainstream American society that in the early 1960s was white male probably you know Anglo Protestant and these groups felt mistreated and they were mistreated and so every one of them said we want the respect that's due to us as citizens of a country that has promised equality of respect as one of the fundamental premises of our democracy and I think that you know that explains you know the the the politics of our country in the years since then we'll come back to how those really virtuous efforts to get dignity have actually been played out in a way that may now have unfortunate consequences for the state of our democracy but let's just talk about the state of democracy and you talk about this extensively in the book too until roughly the last decade whether you look at the Freedom House statistics or many other things it looked like democracy was on an ever-increasing ascent more and more countries were democratic and democracy was thriving and the established democracies as well but in the last decade there seems to be a bit of a recession fewer countries are democracies some democracies are becoming autocracies and many democratic countries are beginning to show signs of autocratic tendencies what happened so this is the real crisis we're in we experienced about a 40 year period as you said of what my mentor Samuel Huntington labeled the third wave of democratization so in the early 1970s there may be thirty five democracies in the world by 2008 there may be a hundred and fifteen hundred 20s a really big expansion punctuated by the fall of the Berlin Wall which was the biggest expansion of freedom really in in recent world history but as you said there's a lot of challenges right now so some of them are very traditional in the sense that you have authoritarian powers like Russia and China they're feeling very self-confident and very assertive and you're returning to a kind of geo strategic game now great power game but I think the more threatening and unexpected development is something going on within liberal democracies themselves now a liberal democracy is actually two different sets of institutions linked to each other the Democratic part has to do with voting elections political accountability by popular will the liberal part has to do with a rule of law and a constitutional order that limits the power even if it's sanctioned by a Democratic majority and what we've been seeing repeatedly in many countries in many democratic countries is a party or leader who is elected democratically but is using that democratic legitimacy to undermine the liberal part of liberal democracy by trying to demolish the checks and balances that really go to make a true liberal democracy so this has happened in Turkey under President our Diwan it's happened in Hungary under Prime Minister Orban it's happened in Poland under the law and justice party and you know there's other Italy elected a populist coalition last year Brazil just elected a populist president ire Paulson ro and I hate to say it the United States elected Donald Trump in 2016 and I think that you know we have much stronger institutions than most other democracies so I think that the damage that's been done up to this point has actually been fairly limited but in a way he fits this pattern you know perfectly well you even say in the book that you would not have written this book if Trump had not been elected and you point to the fact that not only was Trump elected but you also see great global significance about the brexit vote that preceded that so you really wouldn't have written this book if he hadn't been elected well I think that it was a very surprising phenomenon that someone like him could be elected in the United States you know just to give you one example most in fact I would say every American president in my lifetime has made global democracy you know a cause even if they were hypocritical in the actual pursuit of it and did not like authoritarian or dictatorships Trump has thrown that out the window he really likes Putin and she and Kim jong-un he seems to really dislike all of the Democratic leaders that he has to deal with and so the moral valuation of the value of democracy itself has been turned on its head in a way that I really did not think I would see in American talk about what you thought you would see I mentioned how your early essay was pre tient in many respects but I think I'm right you actually mentioned Donald Trump I did in your book of how many years ago twenty twenty-something here's a what what did you expect him to be president why did you give him a cameo appearance in that book I was wrong about Donald Trump so in that book so this was my book the end of history in the last man that came out in 1992 and in that book I said that one of the problems that a democracy has to deal with is this phenomenon of what I labeled megalo sumia meaning the desire to be recognized as superior to other people in a democracy for obvious reasons that's the danger but I said democracies have weak ways bleeding off that kind of energy one of them is a capitalist economy so that rather than becoming Caesar you can become a billionaire really rich and make a lot of money and that should satisfy the ambitions of would-be Caesars and I gave Donald Trump as an example of this and at that point he was only a failed real estate developer so little did I know that you know 25 years later that wouldn't be enough for him that he would also feel that he needed to go into politics you know to really satisfy that desire for superior recognition so and well I want to talk about developments in other countries and then come back again to the United States but just one question generally with this rise of populism why and any election of President Trump why did the parties of the left and center-left parties not just here but everywhere take up the cause of these individual marginalized groups rather than a broad group of those economically disadvantaged because it seems like in your thesis that that choice of the Left parties to define their constituencies in these narrow verticals as opposed to across the spectrum of those economically disadvantaged has really been a major cause of the problems you see today so that is is an important background condition for the rise of populism beginning at the same time that you saw the rise of these social movements which to repeat I think were based on a demand for social justice that was completely legitimate you had this redefinition of inequality on the part of a lot of left-wing parties in the twentieth century they were defined around social class meaning the working-class and their trade unions and so every major left-wing party whether communist or social democratic saw the working class the proletariat is their chief constituency and in every country at that time the proletariat was the dominant ethnicity in that country meaning in this country they were white people they were white working-class people but with the rise of these social movements there was a slow change in the understanding of inequality and marginalization away from that economic understanding to the specific ways in which groups experienced injustice and and you know it's understandable right the way that a black woman or a gay you know man living in Texas experiences discrimination they're simply different right so there's a logic behind this but I think that one of the problems is that under this redefinition increasingly the parties of the left began to lose touch with that working-class base you know the white working-class base that had formerly been their single biggest constituency in the United States in the 1936 election you know something like eighty to ninety percent of the white voters in the south voted for Franklin Roosevelt voted for the left-wing party because he was bringing them the TVA and a lot of social programs that were actually helping them out but you know that white working-class voters in the Democratic Party beginning sometime in the late in the in you know in the Reagan years began shifting to the Republican Party that is exactly why Donald Trump got elected because in three states in Pennsylvania Michigan and Wisconsin enough working-class voters defected they had voted Democratic preview in the previous election which put Obama in office but they defected to Trump and that is what put him into the White House this has been happening all over the developed world so in Europe left-wing parties have been in decline the German social Kratts today get 20% fewer votes than they did you know 20 years ago the French Socialist Party has basically disappeared let's just say in Europe again for a minute we'll come back to the United States we mentioned brexit very briefly I mean brexit also you know seems in some respects to make no sense economically and is driven by a sense of nostalgia for an imagined great past are there what are the similarities that you see between the brexit phenomenon and the Trump election so I think there are a lot of similarities the first of all the sociology is almost identical the way that you can predict a populist voter is really the inverse of population density so if you live in a big city that's well-connected to the global economy with lots of educated people lots of job opportunities they're gonna vote for the liberal order they're not going to vote for the populous and vice versa and that's exactly what happened in Britain Greater London voted overwhelmingly to remain in the European Union and was the smaller cities and rural areas that supported the vote I don't you know I think if you think about dignity and famos it's not so hard to explain the thing that I think the the leave voters held against the European Union you know they don't like Brussels bureaucrats telling them how to label their cheese and things like that but the real thing was immigration and there's been a huge amount of cultural change in Britain this is a little remark statistic but in one 18 month period 800,000 polls moved from Poland to Britain in the last five years so this is a country of 60 million people and if almost a million people from one country move there in that short a period of time that's a lot of change and this was happening across the board and so I think the leave voters said you know our country is being overrun by foreigners we don't seem to be able to do anything about it because we're members of this damn thing called the European Union that doesn't allow us to control our own borders and that's why we want to vote to get out so that rural-urban divide you say it's global i mean you mentioned her to one and in Turkey I mean Istanbul and Ankara you know are not supportive him of him and and and you look at Paris and the countryside so is it is it just that the advantages of globalization have gone primarily to urban areas and also ironically this the sphere of the other or of immigrants is primarily in areas where there are relatively few immigrants and relatively few others and we see that in the United States too no it's the fascinating social change that's happening across the world where agglomerations of educated people are taking home the vast majority of the economic rewards that our modern world provides and the richer they get the bigger these these metropolitan areas get and it means that everybody else is left behind so there is definitely an economic component to this but there's also a cultural component because it is these big urban sophisticated well-educated areas that produce culture you know that's Hollywood that's the media centers of New York and Washington in the US and I think that people that don't live in these big cities that are less educated you know live in less densely populated areas with last economic dynamism feel correctly I would say that people that do live in these cosmopolitan areas look down on them culturally you know as being less educated I mean you know so in that in the brexit debate you had all these remain spokesmen that said you know what's wrong with you people didn't you take a basic economics course don't you know that this is really bad for the British economy and I think the leave voter would say in return yeah well I don't care you know if this is what it takes to keep these foreigners out I'm gonna accept that and in any case who the hell are you to be speaking to me this you know you and your arrogant recent polls in Britain show that even when people are told that the economy will be far worse off they don't care well but that's dignity politics well that's the politics of identity trumping economic self-interest and I think I mean can it affect explain some other phenomenon unrelated to some of the ones we're talking about for example XI and China talks about a hundred years of humiliation so in a sense that sense of lack of dignity lack of respect for China over the last hundred years is partially perhaps fueling his and support and enthusiasm I think if you scratch the surface of almost any major political phenomenon you will find an element of dignity politics involved so as you say the rise of modern China is all about China reacquiring the the Middle Kingdom status that it once enjoyed without any question China if you look at its long history was the center of the universe and it did undergo this 100 year period of Western colonialism where it fell apart it became one of the most impoverished countries in the world it became synonymous with poverty in the early 20th century and now they feel we're back but countries like the United States don't want to accept that you know they they want to continue to see us as poor and weak and impoverished and we don't like that Russia you know saw him I'm no friend of lady Amir Putin but you know I don't think it's that hard to see that you know you're the former Soviet Union your nuclear power your the second big great power and up in a bipolar world and all of a sudden in the 1990s your country falls apart you know a third of the country simply leaves as independent nations you're left with this rump Russia that is now the award of the IMF and you know begging for handouts from Western countries it's a huge loss of status and I think what Putin is all about is regaining that status and regaining a self-respect the trouble is that for many countries and I think both Russia but Russia more than China can't respect itself unless it dominates other countries and that's really the problem and and Putin is using Russia's relatively limited resources to exploit the very divisions that you're talking about and way he's doing that is with social media and I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about how social media is exacerbating if it is all of the trends that you're talking about well you said it I think that social media is almost perfectly designed to facilitate identity politics so you want to identify with the small group that is like you in terms of your preferences and social media allows you to be in touch with them no matter what continent they live on so in cells or you know people that believe that you know Hillary Clinton is behind a sex ring out of a pizza parlor in Northwest Washington you know in any given town they're not more than one or two people like that but on the internet there's there's thousands of them and they can reinforce each other and they can spread you know very outlandish conspiracy theories because the Internet has removed all of the fact checkers and editors and you know filters that used to exist in traditional media so I want to get before we turn things over the audience to some some some sources perhaps of optimism and things we could do please please but just practically speaking given the situation we're in what for example do we do and there are other countries with comparable situations there what 10 or 11 or 12 million undocumented people in the United States and they are a key factor in the appeal of of nationalist populism what what do we do about that as a policy matter I think there is a straightforward solution to this that has been staring us in the face and it's a it's a consequence of our dysfunctional political system that we've not been able to implement this you basically do this tray that was it was embodied in the attempted legislation under george w bush where you give those 12 million undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship an eventual path to citizenship in return for real enforcement of existing citizenship laws in the future that's been a trade-off that I think is politically the only possible way of solving our immigration problem the reason that you can't get there is that our system privileges well-organized interest groups and on both the left and the right there are groups that are absolutely against you know what on the right is called amnesty and on the left is basically border enforcement and as a result of that we can't get this deal that should logically be the way for it on you know this particular issue well it's one of the other things you talk about and this gets back to what we need to do about our problems is you know identity politics in a sense they're inevitable and and you also talk about how important it is for their be to be national identity one of the problems in Europe today is there really is not a European identity but we don't have enough of an American identity today and you point to Syria as an example at the extreme of what happens when there is not a national identity so in the United States context you know you say that the movements for the marginalized whether it's black lives matter or LGBTQ rights or or gender rights generally or or you know civil rights disability rights these are all important movements that you agree with but you also seem to argue that celebrating diversity isn't enough to create a national identity could you just expand on that oh so that's absolutely right I think that you can pursue and you should be pursuing all of these social justice issues you know police violence is a big problem in a number of important American sees so you you need to solve that sexual harassment is a big problem in workplaces right so you need to solve that but you also need a democratic national identity and what that means is a set of values that Americans as American citizens hold in common and I think that one of the great advantages of the United States is that it's one of the few democracies that by the end of the civil rights era had worked its way to what I call a civic national identity meaning it was an identity based around belief in the Constitution belief in the rule of law belief in the principle of equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and what it meant to be an American was to believe in those principles and you know and it's it's something I mean if you want an illustration if I don't know how many of you have attended a naturalization ceremony in the United States in Europe they're not ceremonies I mean it's just a bureaucratic procedure you go to an office to get a piece of paper in the United States it's a big deal you take the oath of naturalization you have all these people from different countries and at the end of it you swear allegiance to the United States and you can say I'm an American and nobody is gonna laugh at you for that whether you come from Korea or Guatemala or Iran or wherever because as we've defined americanist it does not have a racial meaning it does not have a religious meaning it has a civic meaning based on certain you know democratic political principles that underlie our constitutional form of government and unfortunately I think that because of the emphasis on you know these smaller identities we've lost sight of the need to in addition have these integrative types of identities that you know bind us together and the result is you know political polarization where we cannot agree you know even on that basic historical narrative that we ought to teach our school you know to school children as to what does it mean to be an American and that's I think part of what we need to recover that's what I think we need some political leadership for I think it has even more moral power when you say something like that I think you had some near relatives who were in internment camps and yet you were such a passionate advocate of common identity for Americans yes so that's right I mean my grandfather lost his business in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles because he had to go off to an internment camp and a lot of my relatives spent the war there but you know that did not you know that's something that the United States officially apologized for it paid a restitution and I think that the opportunities that you know my family had overall far outweighed you know that particular injustice and so this is the thing about this American narrative you know we don't want to teach American history that glosses over all these bad things you know we don't want to deny the reality of slavery of Jim Crow of continuing discrimination based on race or ethnicity or religion but it does seem to me that we can also tell a progressive story which has unfolded in my lifetime right I was born in 1952 and you had you know official segregation in the United States even in Washington DC where I lived for 20 years black people could not walk on a lot of streets in downtown Washington because it was a segregated City when I was growing up and we've gone past that so you know I think this is the kind of narrative that we really need to spin out and work on a little bit harder to give us a sense that we you know have had a lot of problems and a lot of engine in the past but you know these are something that as Americans we really need to you know to work on and and make progress so as as a first-generation American born in the same year I couldn't agree with you more about these things what did I I said some things we could do about this one thing in your book you talked about which actually had an important as episode here at the Aspen Institute is national service you know a few hundred yards from here a few years ago General Stanley McChrystal spoke about the importance of national service if not military service civilian service as something that could create a common experience across sip codes nationalities ethnicities race to bring young people together in common activity and is that something and that until this president had been a bipartisan goal do you think that could make a real difference well I'm all in favor of national service I think that you know as a society we become incredibly compartmentalized and segregated and I don't mean that just in racial terms I think in class terms if you live in one of these bubble communities like I do Palo Alto California you never see a working class person unless you need some work done on your kitchen right and there's many divides like that that have to do with region that have to do with ethnicity race and social class and I think one of the great things that you see in the actual US military you know that's what a you know as many people said that's one of the few American institutions where a black man can boss around a white man you know and does it you know and they do this pretty regularly where you have this kind of mixing of social classes and regions and so forth now where obviously we don't want I think to bring back the draft although it's something to consider we probably would get involved in fewer Wars if everybody sent their children into the military but I don't think that's going to happen I do think civilian service is something that you know would have potentially that kind of beneficial effect of putting different people together in a common you know struggle what about the role of public education as a possible engine to help advance this treadle sense of what it means to be American well look I'm in favor of civic education there's all this poll data on how little American high school students know about their own country they can't name a single right in the bill of rice they can't name the three branches of government you know this sort of thing so that's obviously bad the problem is that our degree of polarization I think right now is such that if you said well that's correct that by having better civic education I don't think we could agree on the narrative right now that we're going to teach our children because we've got very very different narratives I'll see what happens with the Texas schoolbook controversies what about and then I'm gonna open it up to the audience we'll have 15 or so minutes left me what about the English language bilingual education multilingual education what do you feel about that well I'm skeptical that it's actually helping it's complicated because if you live in a society where you've had a linguistic minority that's been living in the same region for generations to impose a single national language on them is actually not a good idea on the other hand in the United States because we have such a long history of immigration and people learning to speak English as part of their process of cultural assimilation I think that that's you know not an unreasonable demand my father so my grandfather came from Japan in 1905 he did not speak English terribly well my father grew up speaking English the way I do in the Los Angeles public school system and in that era they made no concessions whatsoever to multiculturalism or bilingual or multilingualism and he always to the end of his life thought that was the greatest thing that was ever done for him he went on to get a PhD at the University of Chicago he became a university professor you know because he spoke English like you know other Americans and so you know so my personal family experience you know tells me that if you can do that it's probably a good thing because that's really the basis of a common culture is being able to communicate well thank you very much I'm going to open it up now and we need to wait for microphones because I thank you very much I'm I'm gonna need help from the people with the microphones but I think there's someone right on the aisle here I've thought for a long time that one of the problems we've had in this country is we do no longer have and haven't had for about 30 years a viable external enemy to hate and so what we've done is taken a human inclination to hate others and turned on each other and I'd like you to comment on that and if that's the case this is a big problem so it's true that common enemies often times increase the degree of national unity and national identity but that's not a good formula for promoting national identity because you know that dislike of the other oftentimes turns into actual aggression and conflict and I don't think it's necessary I think you can build national identity based on a lot of other things I mean you know Australia Canada I mean there's lots of countries that have national identities that are democratic and meaningful and they don't have enemies you know I mean Canadians have problems with Americans but I don't think they I mean it aside so that's a little bit complicated because in a way Canadian I is sort of built around not being American but it's it's it's in a more positive sense that we're better than Americans but not you know in the kind of aggressive way of you know you're our enemy so I think that's you know probably not the route to take do we have a question over here I can I can't [Music] thank you I have a good friend who voted for Trump adheres to Trump he's a retired New Hampshire State Trooper and in trying to explain this to me he said if you're not black or gay or refugee they don't care about you anymore he was speaking specifically of his very mainstream white Protestant church parish but I think that they was actually a bigger group than that how can a person how can people like us who probably don't feel that way do anything to address that man's problem well first of all I think you got to start by getting it out of your mind that he's the one that's got this problem and you somehow have to fix this because quite frankly I think that there is something to that narrative in terms of the kind of cultural disrespect that a lot of people in his situation feel now it may not be that actually you know refugees and immigrants and and you know African Americans are pushing him aside but it is the case that the white working-class in the United States has gone through a breathtaking social decline and I think the elites in this country did not pay attention while that was happening this was the result of the broad deindustrialization that was taking place throughout the Rust Belt in the manufacturing centers you know in the Midwest of the United States over the past 30 years and it's led to remarkable statistics you know drops of income where people are made especially white male working-class people are earning less than their grandfathers were in real terms there's also a gender component to this because in many of these households the man is no longer the chief breadwinner it's it's a you know it's a woman there's an opioid epidemic so I think now we're all aware of that but in the last year for which the CDC has numbers something like more than 70,000 Americans died of opioid-related overdoses that's more than the total number of traffic accident deaths in the United States and a lot of this was going on under our noses and I think it really took the 2016 election you know I remember actually the first confrontation was this was in the New Hampshire primary where it turned out the single biggest issue for New Hampshire voters was this drug epidemic you know who would have thought at that point i mean i living in palo alto california i was not aware of this fact right and so i think that you know there is something to this feeling that the elites you know educated people that live in big bustling cosmopolitan cities really did not care about this particular group of people you know this older working-class certainly the two political parties the media you know the elites in this country didn't pay attention I think they're trying to pay a little bit better attention now and I think the first thing that we can do if we want to heal some of this divide is to actually listen sympathetically to what they're saying and you know not simply think that this is a misguided you know I mean the worst version of is say well these people are just racists and bigots and so forth because they actually do have you know there's there's a core to what they're saying that actually reflects a certain reality and dignity Martis right here I'm wait for the microphone please can you say something about the growing weakness of international institutions as a result of this great emphasis on nationalism all over the country all over the world I mean we have the European Union which you briefly mentioned but we have the Paris Accord which the United States left the Pacific Partnership which the United States left and even the Iran nuclear pact which had lots of allies attached to it you know you said it you know I think that's bad I think that we need more international cooperation you know one of the consequences of globalization is we have a lot of problems that no one nation can solve so you need this kind of cooperation and the United States you know under this administration has been leading the way out of all of them and that's bad and I think you know that should be that should be reversed I think that in Europe you have a similar phenomenon where the European Union is seen as the source of a lot of problems that are really not you know where it's really not to blame and so I think there is a you know another example of an international institution that's actually worked pretty well that's unfairly getting blamed now I should maybe this is a good time to make this general point so you were you're asking about points of optimism and everybody laughed I actually do think that there are some points of optimism for example as a result it breaks it I don't think there's a single country in the EU today that's thinking of leaving given what a big disaster it looks like it's it's produced in the United Kingdom and I think for democracy around the world there's a lot of hopeful signs and so you've had an uprising in Algeria in Sudan you have a new leader in Ethiopia that's turned an authoritarian system into a much more open one you have pushed back in Turkey so air dawuan lost this big vote in in Istanbul to a more you know democratic kind of opposition to protests in Hong Kong protests in Hong Kong that forced that government at least temporarily to back down so I think the impulse you know there is a people don't like living under these authoritarian governments and they're mobilizing you know to push back against it where they haven't been so successful is creating viable institutional alternatives to them you know successful democracies that deal with corruption and poor service delivery and all this sort of thing and that's really the agenda that I think a lot of us have to face but basically you know a lot of this is going to be decided at the ballot box just as it was in Istanbul go back to optimism back to the Palo Alto bubble in the students that you see every day a very cross section of presumably very bright students adduce that you have reason to be optimistic are there good ideas coming from these from the kids that you see every day or are they totally overwhelmed by what's what's happening around them well it's very difficult to generalize I think that there's certainly a higher degree of student activism today than there was you know 10 years ago and in some respects that's a really good thing because students shouldn't just be you know careerist and not caring about public issues and you know things happening in the world around them the kinds of things that they mobilize over are sometimes you know really excellent and you know world hunger and you know human trafficking and you know lots of issues like that some of them I think are a little bit short-sighted I just find it very hard to you know make any generalizations because I do think that there is a tendency in our media world to act make generalizations by don't write so you know for example Charles Murray was involved in this really nasty incident at Middlebury College where he was physically attacked you know for simply daring to speak there and so this goes around in the conservative media as a you know free speech is dead on the American campus case well so Charles Murray came to Stanford last winter I debated him we had a very polite conversation there is a little protest but not enough to shut the thing down he said you know after Middlebury he probably spoke at 50 different campuses around the country and so I think you know freedom of speech is actually still alive and kicking I think we write a question here I can't say ah over undecided can you speak about Muslim immigration we see in Europe where there are no go zones and a lot of push booked back against them can you talk about that in the United States and also this the clergy who many times speaks ugly terms so the problem first of all I think we should be very clear the problem is not with Islam right Islam just like any other large religious system is subject to lots of different forms of interpretation and many of them are quite liberal right so in many parts in many Muslim countries you know they're good democracies you know there's not a kind of intolerant form of religion practice the real problem I think has been Saudi Arabia because after 1979 when the Grand Mosque was attacked they tried to protect their own legitimacy by putting a lot of money into the propagation of an extremely conservative in fact reactionary version of Islam known as Wahhabism or Salafism and so they funded a lot of madrasahs all over the world and if you trace the origins of a lot of the radical islamists you know that's where it comes from so our friends the Saudis are really the ones that are doing this sort of thing I think that that is a problem that actually could be controlled quite easily because it is really not the practice of a lot of the you know a majority of the Muslim communities you know around the world but in Europe it is a you know a much bigger problem than here because you know there are immigrant communities that essentially don't want to assimilate down the road I think in this country that's not true of virtually any immigrant community you know they they ultimately want assimilation in the second or third generation but there's definitely a significant you know population of European Muslims that don't have that as a goal and how you deal with that I think is going to be one of the biggest challenges for European democracies one of the problems is you know it is a political correctness problem because a lot of people really don't want to talk about this and if you don't talk about it you can't come up with solutions and sort of have an honest conversation about the extent of the problem and you know what possible solutions you know might exist do we have a last question um can you speak about the rise of populism causing the rise of anti-semitism you know traditionally the two of them were very closely linked that was certainly the case for the populist movements in you know the 1930s and so forth and it's certainly the case that you see lots of anti-semitism among all right you know white nationalist types in the United States but it's you know we're living in a much more complex world in which the to in many cases have become detached from one another so for example here at builders in the in the Netherlands who runs the VVD which is their big populist party loves Israel you know Israel is you know for him I mean it's a it's a funny thing that he's so anti Muslim that he likes the Israelis because they're anti-muslim or in his view they're they're anti Muslim and so it produces some you know very strange bedfellows I think that Prime Minister Netanyahu has become a populist he didn't start out this way but you know Israeli identity has been shifting from you know this older liberal one that was you know in many respects trying to be an you know Israel as a European liberal democracy to one in which Jewish identity has become much more central and you know he's using a lot of the similar kinds of mobilization techniques and other populist leaders as he loves Donald Trump you know and he loves he actually gets along with Putin and with you know a lot of other European populist and so it's it's a complicated world we're living in you know I think that there's not a simple correlation like all bad people don't necessarily believe the same thing well we do need to end on time this has been a great privilege for all of us we could listen to you for a long time thank you very much [Music] [Applause]

Channel: The Aspen Institute

Views: 35,200

Keywords: Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, decline of institutions, The Origins of Political Order, identity politics, Aspen Institute

Id: AWakIqF-ITU

Length: 58min 46sec (3526 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 13 2019