Liberalism and Its Discontents
Francis Fukuyama
I don’t think Francis Fukuyama is saying anything new in this little book, but what he does say is representative of a lot of mainstream elite thinking on the subject in ways that are worth taking note of.
A believer in classical liberalism, Fukuyama sees it as threatened on two fronts: from the Right by neoliberalism and libertarianism, which leads to gross inequality, and from the Left by the woke revolution and identity politics, which leads to social breakdown. Pulled to the Right the result is nationalist oligarchy or fascism, to the Left there is anarchy.
While I don’t like either extreme, I have trouble understanding the equivalence made between the different threats. Neoliberalism has been the dominant political and economic ideology, worldwide, for going on fifty years. And on the other hand we have the mobocracy of cancel culture, campus free speech drama, and Drag Queen Story Hour? The excesses of the Right and the collapse of democracies into illiberal authoritarianism continues apace, even while, as Fukuyama admits, “It does not appear at this moment that anything like the full progressive agenda is likely to be realized” in the U.S. or anywhere else.
This sort of both-sidesism is a kind of propaganda, with socialism and wokeism invoked as bogeymen by the Right to justify ever more extreme, reactionary policies. But there is no equivalence. The Right poses a very real threat to liberalism, democracy, and the rule of law, while the Left raises the spectre of culture wars that mostly exercise people in the media and universities. Fukuyama may sincerely believe that it is the undermining of “modes of cognition” and speech that is the most acute threat to liberalism today, but that’s only because he’s an academic.
The sins of the Right are grounded in vicious selfishness, those of the Left in cynical hypocrisy. The latter is despicable, and far from even being the debt vice pays to virtue, but it’s not as great a present danger.
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