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Francis Fukuyama

80 quotes

“It is in the very design of democratic capitalist countries like the United States that the most talented and ambitious natures should tend to go into business, rather than into politics, the military, universities, or the church. And it would seem not entirely a bad thing for the long-run stability of democratic politics that economic activity can preoccupy such ambitious natures for an entire lifetime. This is not simply because such people create wealth which migrates through the economy as a whole, but because such people are kept out of politics and the military. In those latter occupations, their restlessness would lead them to propose innovations at home or adventures abroad, with potentially disastrous consequences for the polity.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Neoconservatives believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support. …"[W]ar" is the wrong metaphor for the broader struggle, since wars are fought at full intensity and have clear beginnings and endings. Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a "long, twilight struggle" whose core is not a military campaign but a political contest for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims around the world.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From the essay "After Neoconservatism" in the New York Times Magazine (19 February 2006)
“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.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In "The history at the end of history", The Guardian (3 April 2007)
“[P]rogressives on the left have shown themselves willing to abandon liberal values in pursuit of social justice objectives. There has been a sustained intellectual attack on liberal principles over the past three decades coming out of academic pursuits like gender studies, critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and queer theory, that deny the universalistic premises underlying modern liberalism. The challenge is not simply one of intolerance of other views or “cancel culture” in the academy or the arts. Rather, the challenge is to basic principles that all human beings were born equal in a fundamental sense, or that a liberal society should strive to be color-blind.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I]n the 1980s and 90s there was an extension of the autonomy of individual property owners in... a movement towards neoliberalism represented by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and... by the Chicago school of economics that denigrated... the role of the state in the economy, that said the private markets would be able to solve most social distribution problems and the like. This was true in many ways. The world did become much richer in this period, but it also became much more unequal... [W]ithout adequate regulation and... effort to protect people against the excesses of market capitalism, you had people... left behind, even as their societies as a whole, grew. ...[T]his ...became one of the triggers for the kind of populism we've seen arise in many rich countries.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The right wing version really sees community represented either by... religion, or by nation, that these are units that... get dissolved under a liberal world order, through globalization, through the movement of people, goods, ideas and trade between nations, national identity becomes diluted and that sense of national community that held people together in democratic societies appears to be lost. ...[S]ecularism ...is perceived as a loss by people that have religious faith. They believe that there is a form of militant secularism that is not allowing them to practice their religion, and for that reason a lot of religious conservatives in places like the United States, have turned against that liberal order.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[B]oth of these forces are driving illiberal political movements in many parts of the world... India was a liberal society created by Nehru and Gandhi but under the BJP and Prime Minister Modi it's shifted its national identity to one based on Hindu nationalism. In Hungary, with the rise of Viktor Orbán and the party Hungarian national identity has been redefined. Orbán has said Hungarian national identity is based on Hungarian ethnicity, which... is one of the reasons that World War II happened, because the Germans wanted to define German identity on the basis of German ethnicity, and there were many Germans living in... surrounding... central Europe... and that was... the trigger that led to the outbreak of the Second World War.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Identity politics in the United States started on the left, after the Civil Rights era, with specific groups like African Americans, women, s and lesbians, indigenous peoples, the disabled. Every one of these groups felt marginalized and disrespected by the dominant white male society that existed... in the early 1960s... [E]ach one of these groups began to demand recognition, not as part of a generic working class, but rather for their particular form of disrespect. ...[T]here's ...a lot to this belief that injustice takes these very specific forms tied to narrow identities. The problem with this is... it began to alienate the traditional working class, which had been the base of the Democratic party, as of every other left wing party in the 20th century... [I]ncreasingly working class whites began to abandon that party because they felt the Democrats were no longer catering to their interests. They're the ones that had lost their jobs to overseas competition. They're the ones who were falling behind in terms of status... income... social respect... [T]hat generated a huge amount of resentment against the elites living in big cities, that had jobs that were secure, that were comfortable in a multicultural, very diverse environment.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you look at the sociology of populism in the United States, it is tied most closely to population density, which... is correlated... to these types of cultural differences... to belief... in traditional cultural values, in family, in religion and the like, and conversely to... belief in immigration [and] diversity as strengths... [T]his is the fundamental division that's taken hold of the United States. It has been augmented by technology because the internet has succeeded in... destroying every other source of authority that used to filter news and facts and information that... formed the basis of a democratic ability to have political discourse.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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...”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[A]ny American ally will welcome Biden as president, will be happy that he was elected, but will be a little... distrustful because the Republicans could make a come-back in 2022. They could win the presidency again in 2024. ...[T]here's is still a good third of the American public that remain very strong Trump voters. They're very angry and... are not going to go away... [T]herefore the ability of the United States to resume its role as the chief defender of the liberal order... is going to be contested, both domestically and... by American friends. If this leads to more self-reliance on their part, that may not be the worst thing in the world, but it is going to mean a very different kind of world order than the one I grew up arguing with about.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have a broad definition... Liberalism is a doctrine that was developed in the middle of the 17th century, at the end of Europe's wars of religion, in which a number of early liberal thinkers... said we need to lower the aspirations of politics, not to seek after "the good life" as defined by a particular religious doctrine, but simply to protect life itself by cultivating a virtue of tolerance, whereby, at that time Protestants and Catholics, but... today maybe and could live together peacefully, allowing each to individually choose... what to believe, what to speak, and the like. It believes that all human beings are endowed with a certain basic level of dignity that is equal among all those human beings, and it is institutionalized through a rule of law, by constitutional provisions that prevent the excessive power of the state to limit individual choice. It's not necessarily associated with a particular economic ideology, except that it does protect private property rights... [S]o you can have an expansive social democratic government, like in Sweden or Denmark, or you can have a more limited one like in the United States... [T]hose are all... liberal societies because of that commitment to rule of law.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[L]iberalism has been very severely threatened in recent years. It's been threatened from a number of sources. So internationally you have two great powers, Russia and China, that are definitely not liberal polities, that have expansive ambitions... [A]s Vladimir Putin said... in an iterview with the FT in 2019 "Liberalism is an obsolete doctrine." But the threat... also comes from other places. ...[Y]ou have the rise of a populist nationalist right in many countries. This is Viktor Orbán in Hungary. This is Narendra Modi in India, Donald Trump in the United States, ...Marine Le Pen in France. All of them criticizing liberalism precisely for the tolerance that it permits and tries to deal with, in diverse and increasingly ethnically and racially diverse countries.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 5:36 Ref: Vladimir Putin says liberalism has ‘become obsolete’ (June 27, 2019) Financial Times.
“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.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The second reason has to do with the moral basis, which is the protection of human autonomy. ...If you ask, in what sense could a liberal believe that all people are equal, when they differ by skin color, by gender, by intelligence, by many other characteristics. The answer... goes back to the fundamental insight... in the Book of Genesis... that Adam and Eve are told not to eat of the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil by God and they disobey Him. ...It gives human beings a moral status that other parts of created nature don't have. They can make moral choices. They can distinguish between right and wrong, and it is that ability to choose morally, that ultimately is what makes us all equal because we share that despite the more superficial differences... [I]t's that right of autonomy... the decisions on what to do in life, where to live, who to marry, what beliefs to engage in. These are all essential characteristics of every human being that every human being wants, and the liberal regime protects that autonomy.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Then finally, there's a good economic reason for choosing a liberal society because among the rights that liberalism protects is the right to own private property, to transact, to engage in commerce, and therefore it is the basis of a market economy. Liberal societies like England and the Netherlands in the 17th century, were the leaders in terms of creating the modern economic world precisely because they respected property rights and trade. Even Communist China, when it opened up in... 1978, did so by adopting certain liberal principles. Deng Xiaoping allowed peasants to keep the fruits of their labor, and as a result of those incentives, quasi-property rights, agricultural productivity doubled in the space of 4 years, and in general, the most dynamic parts of this amazing Chinese growth story come from the private sector where people are allowed to buy and sell, and... in effect to own property. So even in a... politically illiberal society, economic liberalism has led to tremendous prosperity. So those are the 3 reasons.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The one on the right concerned the shift from an older understanding of economic liberalism to what is now called "neoliberalism." Neoliberalism is not... a synonym for capitalism. I don't see how you can have any kind of modern economy without a market based economy. Neoliberalism took that basic insight and stretched it to an extreme seeking to deregulate, privatize and basically pull back the role of the state, which many neoliberals regarded as simply obstacles to individuals, to entrepreneurship, to economic growth, and as a result markets did their usual work. They produced a great deal of inequality, as... global corporations searched for very small cost advantages by moving jobs to low cost areas... [T]hey destabilized the global economy in certain important ways by deregulating the financial sector. As a result of the deregulation that occurred in the 1980s and 90s we had an escalating series of financial crises. In the sterling crisis, the Asian financial crisis, Argentina, Russia, and finally culminating in the big American subprime crisis in 2008. The... cumulative effects of this instability were political and they were very serious because many ordinary people were hurt... a lot of people lost their homes, lost their jobs, and the elites that ran these big banks and financial institutions suffered only a momentary disruption in their incomes, and went on to continue to dominate their respective economies... [T]his had a direct impact on the rise of populism in subsequent years, both on the right and on the left.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On the left you had a different aspect of individual autonomy that was pushed to an extreme, which really had to do with the autonomy that individuals have to create their own lifestyles. ...[T]he basic concept of liberal autonomy has to do with your ability to make moral choices, but as time went on the emphasis came to be not on making the right moral choices within an existing moral framework, but rather to be able to make up that framework on your own, that that was the ultimate expression of individual human freedom, and it has obvious problems for a society because all societies have to be based on shared norms that allow people to coordinate their actions, to communicate, and the like... [I]f you believe that the rules can be... set by anybody and that transgressing existing rules is automatically a good thing, you're not going to have... a stable society.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[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.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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...”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[[Russian invasion of Ukraine|[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.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[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.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[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.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[[Identity|[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.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source