Hello and welcome to VARM blog. And today we are talking about Francis Fukuyama and something that I'm going to call the crisis of the crisis of liberalism, after one of my favorite in Bertha Eke essays, the crisis of the crisis of reason. And that's because, as we talked about in our discussions of early Christopher Lash, we've been talking about the crisis of liberalism in some sense since the 1960s, although the right wing crisis of liberalism that we're seeing today is also somewhat new. And then we can talk about, you know, the long end of history, which even Fukuyama himself can't decide if it's happening. So I've read many updates on it.
Speaker 1:There was Fukuyama's turn against the end of history at the end of the war on terror, where he also left the Republican Party and turned against his new conservative friends. And then, oh, about four years ago, he even started talking about the need for like democratic socialism, by which he started, like he meant something between like European social democracy and Fordism actually not socialism as classically understood and then, about a year ago, he's not turned against that call for, you know, a kind of more robust whereabouts state, but he's been talking about like well, the end of history still seems pretty ended after all, which led me to ask you and talk about it, because I am not a Fukuyama defender of the book everyone hates. But I've also pointed out that they don't seem to have read that book, that Fukuyama is an interesting sort of particularly in that book conservative Hegelian who occasionally unknowingly pulls out a bunch of concepts from ancient Greek and misapplies them and uses them in ways to obscure his argument. But there's also a lot of useful information in that book. And nor is he saying that the end of history, a lot of the 80s in Japan, is a unilateral. Good thing the way a lot of people seem to have read it.
Speaker 1:So we were talking about subjects on this crisis of liberals and stuff, and you mentioned we should talk about Fukuyama, and so I wanted to start us off with that context. There really hasn't been a real competitor to we'll call it post neoliberal liberalism in the United States or, frankly, in Europe, even when the national conservatives might win a country like Maloney and Italy to a lesser degree, because it's actually been more thorough. Orban and Hungary are Aldragon and Turkey. They haven't really actually posed a serious threat to the economic order at all, or have even when they've adopted fairly conservative social policies. Those social policies actually resulted in what they wanted. So where do you see us now, and why do you think it's important for us to kind of give Fukuyama a fair hearing?
Speaker 2:So I think that the reason Fukuyama remains important is because, as you say, no substantive challenge has arisen since the end of the Cold War that seriously threatens the ideal of liberal democracy as the probable dominant system worldwide, and especially the capitalistic element of liberal democracy.
Speaker 2:I think Fukuyama's argument distinguishes very forcefully between a historical and a post-historical world, and in the post-historical world, especially as you've mentioned, there hasn't been any challenge in what we call the historical world, which is the world that has not yet culminated in liberal democracy. Liberal democracy is certainly not dominant. I'm not totally sure I agree with Fukuyama's argument. To be very clear to everyone here, I don't. I think that predicting the end of history at any point is usually a bad call, because if there's one thing you can bet on, it's that not only will events keep happening, but new problems will arise, and the long sweep of history demonstrates that nothing sticks around for long. But at the same time, I think that the reason why we're still arguing about this book 30 years after its publication is that within the shorter sweep of history, recent history, there's been nothing that substantially challenges that, despite many people's desire for a substantive challenge to arise, and in fact, liberalism in some form or another, has limped through several major challenges to its hegemony and emerged relatively intact, if under continuing duress.
Speaker 1:I think that's a fair point, one thing I would actually kind of ask us to think about. I've been reading Weymann Goises how Not to Be Liberal and one of the things that he points out is that movements that are fully substantive, like liberalism, christianity he lists a bunch of them, but he gets this from Nietzsche. He's like you can't really pin them down in definition, which is part of why it's hard to see them when they come and go away, like when we think about liberalism. Okay, we know that it comes from the European Enlightenment, but unless you're one of those frankly revanchist people who thinks that we can just have John Locke again and that there's just a set of ideals to which bourgeois society tasks the world, you have to ask yourself well, that's clearly not the world that we currently have, nor, frankly, did we ever have Like. That is like a mythic origin story of the origins of liberalism. But even in the case of the United States and France, that's not the dominant actual order and it never has been. So I guess the first thing we have to ask ourselves is what history in the in the quote liberal world didn't end. I mean did end. What does he mean by this?
Speaker 1:And I know he's following a particular argument from Andre Kojeve and I think his you know which has the whole end state Hegel reading plus some Nietzsche that's where the last man's in there and he's arguing that while Americans believe in God and national sovereignty in the military which, by the way, they don't anymore by that I mean religiosity amongst people under 45 is only 50%.
Speaker 1:I mean that I think people really have. When people talk about the rise of the Christian right and it's usually like older liberal baby boomers and whatnot I'm always like you guys don't understand the youth culture at all today, or even what younger middle age culture, because it's not religious. Like you're still fighting the battles of the 70s and 80s today and that's over. And the religious right is actually so vicious right now because it is, you know, dying basically. So in some ways Fukuyama was even more right now than he was at the time you wrote the book that the whole America bucks the trend of Europe and the developed parts of Asia and say secularization. That's not true anymore. We're now just on trend like the rest of the developed world. So why do you think there's such pushback to these claims?
Speaker 2:I mean I mean, I think the main reason that there's pushback is because, as Fukuyama says, the end of history is not a happy thing necessarily.
Speaker 2:The idea of the end of history is the coming about of a universal and homogenous state, which is a state which is replicated in every country and across the world, that is like unassailable and has answered the fundamental contradictions to human life, be they economic production or what he talks about a lot, which is the struggle for recognition and sort of this like metaphysical need to be seen as a person, and he sees liberal democracy as having done that.
Speaker 2:The reason there's pushback is and he identifies in the book it comes from two, basically, strains of thought about these things is either the contradictions haven't been resolved in terms of recognition or in terms of economics, and a lot of these are tied together. So he sees left critics of the book or the idea as saying a capitalist order does not generate universal recognition because it implants recognized inequalities that make no sense and impair the ability of man to see man properly. Or he talks about the challenge that comes from the right, which is that universal recognition actually goes too far and there's a need not only to be recognized but to be recognized as superior and to be recognized in that way, in a way that's incompatible with liberal ideals of citizenship. I think both of these challenges are really potent and basically correct that these are things which liberalism does not address in its current form and continuing. But the question within the book and the thing we often discuss is are these fundamental contradictions or are these just issues that for some reason won't bring liberalism down?
Speaker 1:Well, I think we need to be a little bit more circumspect.
Speaker 1:I mean I think you're right in these two tendencies, but we should break down the right-wing tendencies, which have been two that have really come up that are based off that critique that you just said right there. But one then the most common one, was made by people like Benjamin Barber in 1995, samuel Huntington, over and over and over again, fellow neo-conservative but way more bellicose one, after 9-11, george Willem Friedzikaria, one from the center left, one from the center right, talked about Islamicism and its need for particular recognition and supremacy and civilizational recognition being disproof of Foukei Amethesis. What I find amazing and that is under understood but is particularly true in the United States I actually think there's a better argument against Foukei Amethesis in Europe is that massive waves of Muslim immigrants to the United States through refugee programs have not led to the kinds of conditions that we see in, say, britain. Where are France, where there's like reticent Islamism as a real political force?
Speaker 1:I mean, I'm not one that actually threatens to actually take power in any real sense of the word, but it's a significant minority force, because in the United States Even Somali immigrants are a pretty solid progressive voting base, even if done on particular moral issues. They may be personally quite conservative, and I say that because that, to me, is a pretty strong indication of, like the religious class of civilizations argument just not being particularly true in the United States. Like there's a way in which you have can, can incorporate even you know it used to be said well, most Muslim immigrants aren't poor, but I'm like it's still like look at Dearborn, michigan, that's a bunch of Somali refugees. That's not I.
Speaker 2:Think. For that reason that argument is made much less frequently nowadays than it was in the early 2000s.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was a big late 90s, early 2000s argument. It's kind of disappeared and I find interesting because Because people kind of out like the book doesn't address this, but he actually talks about Islam in and the end of history is like well, you know, fukuyama, in short and in my very, very bastardized summary, says that doesn't really have an appeal outside of North Africa and so in the Gulf.
Speaker 2:He says for something to not be the end of history. This is an important distinction, it's something If to be a different, alternate end of history, it has to be something that is universal and homogenous. And Islamism in his reading is not that because it is specific to a national or civilization. All Ideal or region which is distinct from liberal democracy or say communism, which can be and you know ideally is, is implanted everywhere and governs the entire world order. And For this reason, you know, he kind of dismisses the, the clash of civilizations, islam argument.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I wanted to bring that one up first because it was the most common one I remember when I was coming up, but it's also the easiest one to dispute the other one that I think is interesting that is also based on the supremacy argument, but it's a different one is that Russia and China are Not part of this Democratic liberal polity order, for a variety of reasons, and that Autocracy is increased. Our Tim said autocracy has has increased even in the the core. This argument started really getting Pushed by, as our Gatt and Robert Kagan Robert Kagan, yet another neo conservative, but he's he's not arguing for the class of civilizations, he's arguing that, like that, that Autocratic governments actually have a lot of appeal and even, in some cases, a higher citizenship satisfaction. In the case of China, then Then the West, probably speaking Now, when that was first proposed in 2007, 2008, fukui Yama actually responded to it and said, like Look, even who.
Speaker 1:Jin Tao has to make concessions to democracy and so does Putin, even if it's an anti-democratic System. Look at, you know, mediative. Well, we always forget about the Mediative at period, but Mediative and stuff like that, you know he's still. He Like even Putin still technically follows kind of liberal constitutionalism, even if it's just nominal. Now Fukui Yama has walked that back a little bit in 2022, saying that he worries about, like Chinese and Russia becoming more millet, more militarist, particularly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and and he he seems to think that the end of the end of history might be marked by, basically, war. But even that, what I find interesting about that is that he's not arguing that the nature of quote the West are, you know, the, the democratic world would actually be significantly different. This just it's no longer the only dominant world power.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think he includes this and the idea of like Clashes between the historical and the post-historical world. So a lot of these concerns revolve around the idea that the historical world is more More Powerful and more potent than he previously expected. It's important to note that the book was written in 1992, with the original essay being written in 1989 1989, yeah, which wasn't a much more optimistic time for the idea that China and Russia would, would, democratize and or become liberal democracies, and I think that both countries have, in certain ways, as you say, a seated to the international forms of liberal democracy, but without substantial internal reform, marching headlong towards Fukuyama's prediction right.
Speaker 1:I mean, what one of the one of the things we have to ask ourselves about China, like, for example, the Chinese welfare state, has been developed under Xi Jinping To some degree, as in like there's now national insurance and stuff like that again, although it's still warm, it still functions remarkably closer to the United States than it does to Europe.
Speaker 2:Yeah it. China has the most comparable fiscal distribution between the federal government and state or regional governments to the United States of any right.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's one of these strange things where the post-Dengue's world was a hyper liberalization, it actually was a more deep, deeper liberalizing move than happened in Europe or even the United States, which I don't think is well understood by a lot of American leftist in particular, like I mean. But I even point out like they got rid of public schooling for women in the countryside, like that's how far it went for a while. They did reverse that in the 90s. G-men see Jim in Particularly, who's in town now GGP King have really push for a lot of reforms and developments of of you know, stronger state supports. But what we've also seen is we have seen limits, the Chinese state capacities and a lot of like American leftists and Canadian leftists Just do not want to look at and deal with. They don't seem to be like there's a.
Speaker 1:There's clearly a business cycle in China now the. While their growth rates have been better than the West, they've dropped precipitously over the last 20 years. Until 2015 or 2016, it had a higher genie coefficient than the West. That's no longer true because because of GGP King's development of the rural areas. So you know, got to give credit where credit's due. But what I find interesting about this is. China did economically liberalized in a lot of ways, but it didn't democratize significantly. Now I also think the idea that China is totally autocratic is not entirely true, particularly at the state levels, and there has been a lot of consolidation of centralized power, as Mike Davis lamented in his last essay for New Left Reviews blog. But when people talk about China as an autocracy, it's kind of true that the party has an autocracy there and it's kind of true that Xi Jinping has consolidated power within the party in a way we have not seen since now, but it's not true that it's even an autocracy like Russia. So I kind of see that. I mean, I see the threat there.
Speaker 2:Well, his explanation of which I just looked in the book he talks about Singapore, and I think this is also comparable to what he would say about China is that he has the same objection to it that he has to the idea that Islamism would be a potent threat. He doesn't see this as a universal threat, and I think that this this is one of the most interesting things is that China's attempt at universalizing the China model have been dramatically pulled back in the last decade.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. It's not even part of the Belt and Road Initiative, and so much of that still exists. Yeah, belt and Road is over.
Speaker 2:There's no serious threat to existing multilateral institutions from China. In fact, the main international power plays conducted by China and Russia are still within the UN. The addition of China to the WTO is still relatively unassailable and it's a useful thing for the Chinese government.
Speaker 1:Right, and even attempts to weaken dollar hegemony, which they are actively trying to do, has not led for them to try to replace the dollar with their own international order, despite what BRICS people want to project upon the world. And there's also no consolidate Like when people talk about BRICS, for example, they ignore that India is far more politically even though it's politically defending Russia right now. It's far more politically aligned with US foreign policy than Chinese foreign policy, like actively so.
Speaker 2:It's collaborating right now with Australia and Japan and the United States to move critical mineral production from being exclusively in China to India and Australia, because they do not want Chinese international economic hegemony Right.
Speaker 1:And when China has, also, we tried to weaken the dollar. Sometimes it's allowed with yes, nearby trading partners of oil holding countries like Saudi Arabia, to trade in yuan, but often it's trading in things like Franks or other subsidiary currencies because also, china does not want to open its international order to basically global capital, to the sense that it would have to float its currency and lose currency control and also become a more investor-friendly economy than it already is, which is already a lot more than you expect the communist country to be. So there's real limitations there. And again, the people who want to argue the picture on the left, actually, ironically who want to argue that China is a real threat to the West, as in the history, and that it can basically fix all the problems on hand right now, from climate change to dollar hegemony. I basically think that that's a pure fantasy that has to be hidden under complete ideological language and not actually talk about what China is doing.
Speaker 2:I think this is that in the past, certainly like 40 years, the dream of Chinese foreign policy has been more regional actors that are dominant over their region, including China, including most of the BRICS countries. This is the idea behind BRICS. But what that does is that doesn't provide another end of history. It insists that history will continue, which is a different thing because it doesn't offer a final resolution. It doesn't offer a serious contestation of liberal democracy. It just says you have that over here, we don't have that here. It's not universal.
Speaker 1:Which is why. This is why I've seen the language of 19th and early 20th century British geopolitical theory, aka the Polars theories, which I think people forget was picked up by fruit from Kharia but really became crucial to the Eurasianist tint in Russia, particularly for foreigners, for Alexander Dugan. But it's not the only place you find. It has been picked up by a part of the Chinese policy establishment. They're like people clearly tied to China using the same language. But it's not for the same reasons that the Eurasianist promoted China would not benefit from Eurasian using Russia. It just benefits from Russia being able to resist Western hegemony.
Speaker 1:I don't think people really understand that China's economy has been hurt pretty severely between Belt and Road limitations. You and I are one of the only people just like, yeah, that's mostly over. They have finally because it's over. They've finally been diplomatic for ways of places like Saudi Arabia to reach out and pull them into a much more China friendly orbit. But there's no real attempt to create a real competition to the international Keynesian, trannat-latin and quasi-super state of the global markets created when the United States took over the British Empire and then also integrated with continental Europe.
Speaker 2:There's only one NATO and there's only one World.
Speaker 1:Bank. China's not really. It's learned from the sovereign debt crisis, which are continually popping up in weak countries and middle-income countries, that it can't actually really be the IMF and that it still has to play with the IMF to settle these debts, that it can't eat all those losses. One thing that I think is not understood and I've only gotten this from I don't read Mandarin, but I got this from people who do that this is a pretty big debate that is not even that veiled within China itself, which means that the PRC, the CPC, really knows that it doesn't actually have a clear answer to this if there's so much debate going on on the topic. Also, in the case of Russia, there's a want to protect Russia from rest and hegemony to protect it from NATO, but China has not benefited actually significantly, even as much as the Russians, from this whole realignment strategy at all. It's lost its ability to say try to separate Europe from the US orbit.
Speaker 1:Macron can say a couple of things when there's a riot in France, to try to blame his problems on the United States, basically, but that doesn't really seem to hold power. I think it would be good if Europe was more independent. I even think it would be good for the United States if Europe was more independent economically. Not so much for foreign policy, because Europe would actually have to do a lot more of its own defense development, which is conservative parking point, but one that's not entirely wrong. I mean, the only real parts of Europe that really have strong defense development is France, and that's partly because France isn't totally willing to give up all its African holdings, which it doesn't technically have anymore.
Speaker 2:But they're still paying. How many active in the Sahel?
Speaker 1:Right, french soldiers are constantly getting called in chat. It's definitely something to see. On that point, I think we just have to admit that the multipolar world is just saying, yeah, well, history can stay ended in most of the planet. We're just going to be a different managerial actor here in Asia. I do think, for example, that when we talk about multipolarity, it's clear that United States longer has the capacity politically or the ability to be the sole person holding together the globalized open water trade, but it's also clear that nobody really wants to fully replace it, including China.
Speaker 2:I mean in Fukuyama's reading. The end of history looks less like the US also and more like the EU, which is funny because the history seems more ended in the United States than it does in the EU, which includes some actors who would like history to resume.
Speaker 1:And I think that's because the EU is actually, frankly, much more internally weak than I think most people realize, particularly as Germany is not quite the production powerhouse that it's been for the past 20 years. It's still pretty strong, but it's not as strong as it was, and we've seen the real limitations to EU energy policy, eu food policy. But we've also seen the money laundering capitals. Britain was able to basically act like it had currency sovereignty because of its arrangement with the EU and act like it was still a productive economy, even though it really wasn't anymore, in a way that the US still is, and so we're watching Britain try to enact its end of history and things go to shit really fast. But what is fascinating is, despite Although there's a lot of leftists who I think are absolutely batshit on a couple of things, because I keep on hearing people say well, why aren't we in the streets like in France?
Speaker 2:I'm like motherfuckers, we just were only three years ago Also, the being in the streets in France didn't really do very much.
Speaker 1:Right, and neither did, frankly, the BLM insurrections for Floyd, the street stuff. That doesn't mean much and I actually said that at the time. I'm like the French people in the streets aren't winning.
Speaker 2:I think that also doesn't demonstrate conclusively that history hasn't ended Like to return it to Fukuyama, like he's not suggesting that there's going to be no events or no public protest or no problems. He's suggesting that all of those things will be solved under the IEJS of liberal democracy.
Speaker 1:One of the things I think he's actually quite good on that he doesn't deal with in this book but has deal with updates to it, and this is but also came out of two books. He wrote in the OT that I actually these are my favorite Fukuyama books the Origins, political Order and Political Order and Political Decay.
Speaker 2:I think he's always great on this stuff because he's actually like pretty. He gets accused of being like so authoritative and being like nope, this is the way it's going. But he's incredibly flexible actually in what he says. He means which defends him, and his like proof of his overarching thesis in these two books you're talking about is a fantastic series.
Speaker 1:I mean, one of the things is, while I was complaining about all of his use of, like you know, identity recognition and ancient Greek stuff and all that in the end of history, which at points I find frankly annoying and lax, he doesn't do in the Origins of Political Order and Political Order and Political Decay, those two books really kind of are materialist history Like, even though it's not Marxist materialist history, but like he's looking at like well, why was the family ordered in this way? Why did social production what weirdness that came out of these reforms in Europe through the reforms of institutions with the church led to this being so volatile and liberalism that couldn't seem to happen in the Islamicate world or in ancient China or whatever. And he's pretty good at illustrating this and one of the things I think we can now talk about you know his flexibility here. He has now a decadence thesis for the post-historic world, like he does think that there is that political decay really is a problem of post-historical liberalism. Would you like to talk about that?
Speaker 1:And then we can go back to the book, because I think that to me when people are like oh, he doesn't deal with this, I'm like no, he himself criticized the book for not having criticized the end of history and the last man for not having a robust enough theory of political decay, although, I'm going to add, it's hinted at by the last man part of the title, right Like that Nietzschean component of it. He is kind of saying like things aren't going to be as robust and there might be problems.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean he basically says like we can choose to resume history as his decadence thesis, meaning not that we can do anything beyond liberal democracy in his reading, but that we can slide back into a historical world of conflict and excitement and horror If we choose to allow our political structures to deteriorate, though he also insists that we're going to end up in the same place at long last, that there might be a cyclical element to it, but that it doesn't. It doesn't change the end point.
Speaker 1:That second part, I think, is the part where I don't know that I follow him, like the idea that we're all going to, that this is really going to all end, and something like.
Speaker 2:The universal and homogenous state.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I just I don't. I don't know that. I actually believe that, yeah, but I will say that, like he's a, I mean one of the things that he was worried about why he became more concessionary to things like fortism and Democrat, now Right. He's because he thinks that, like capitalism's monopoly tendencies, leads to quote Coenie capitalism and that erodes internal competition, and thus you have basically a government, a government of hyper complexity.
Speaker 2:It undermines the possibility of recognition Right.
Speaker 1:And I suppose this is this is my critique of him, as he's right about this, but Ron, like he's so concerned about recognition that he's not really looking at like the complexity of the order.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think, and he I think he's definitely over simplistic A lot of the time, which is one reason he's so readable, but also one reason why, like, if you actually look at most of his arguments, you disagree with them until you get to the political theory and then you're like huh, you know, I guess, but that's like the non empirical portion of his arguments, right.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, I feel like his. That's why I found his history books. Frankly, I still find them more convincing that his end of history books is like, I think, how he explains how these societies develop their bureaucratic classes, how they ended up being important, including in the quote liberal West, what that meant for the liberal West when capitalism developed, etc. Why it had an advantage. I actually think he's really good on that stuff. It's the current stuff where he sees everything in terms of recognition which I get does define. I mean to go back to my, to me in your last thesis. He kind of just sees like the culture of narcissism and the politics of recognition for him, like he would just be like yeah, lashes, right, but it's like not bad.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, he mentions national, which is like he doesn't, which is funny things, because I think he's like, because I think that it's really fun to read the end of history next to the true heavenly heaven, because they have such, they're like published within a year of each other and they have such opposite conclusions about where the world is headed, you know, in or maybe, maybe not, because lash doesn't really like argue that he just argued. He says progress is bad and that the developments that Fukuyama says are necessary and will continue or not, in fact intrinsic, I do think, but I do think. Yeah, basically, fukuyama says like I don't know if he says the culture of narcissism is like good, but I think he says that it's on.
Speaker 1:I didn't say he said it was good. I said was he? I think he says, I think he implies it's not bad, which is a different thing.
Speaker 2:He judges it to be morally neutral and also not to be a new development, no, to be something intrinsic to the human experience and the human political experience.
Speaker 1:Right, which which I think lash would probably not see, and this is one of the problems I have with lashes use of Freudianism, even though I find a lot of his argument somewhat convincing about Fordism and the relationship to self and all this that there's a fundamental Part of the ideological apparatus, our ideological technology I won't use apparatus because I don't wanna sound like an Althusserian of liberalism is this self-recognition, but paired with self-responsibility, and thus, like the quote cult of the individual really emerges right. I think that is part of the ideological framework of liberalism. I don't think it's inherent to the liberal subject. I actually don't. I think it's a myth there too, but it is part of the justification. And following that, you know the constant expansion of who counts and who doesn't count in liberalism and that being the contested grounds. Really, the contested grounds is who's included? Not like, you know, not what should this be?
Speaker 1:And I find it interesting that I mentioned Michael Sandel in our last discussions. But I also think it's interesting here because what basically Sandel caused? The shift from a democratic or a democratic republic which has a civic republicanism and that's like a necessary, like identity and community base, versus an administrative state, which Sandel doesn't because he's not, you know, always the most thorough person in political economy, and even compared to Lashifukuyama, justify in political economy, but makes perfect sense, right, like even from a political economics standpoint. The development of huge corporations and the incorporations of multinationals meant that political subjects needed to be more fungible and seen primarily as administrative, and there might be cultural politics, but that actually needs to not actually matter much. I guess the big counter proof to that is, you know, the reversal. Roe v Raid's been the first time where that's actually really changed in the last 40, 50 years. But which is not to say it isn't important, but it's something to really consider.
Speaker 1:I think there's an interesting coalescence of these three thinkers on this and I find it interesting that people like agree with Sandel and they agree with a lot of people, agree with Lash but utterly reject Fukuyama, and I'm like, but they have different political conclusions to what this means to some degree. I mean particularly Lash, sandel too, because Sandel really does not think. In fact he thinks the current crisis mode of management is because the administrative state isn't a viable enough way to build a society out of. And so you know now that the administrative state, the administrative state, is not trusted. You have this perpetual justification to crisis. That seems to be his current thesis. But if you were to like, strip away the different ways in the different frameworks these people are using to talk about it Fukuyama's kind of political theory, hegelianism, lash's like Marxist, post-marxist, freudian populism and Michael Sandel's communitarianism although he doesn't like. No one who's a communitarian listed as a communitarian actually likes to be called a communitarian as they slide. Now Someone's like well guess.
Speaker 2:He cornered the market.
Speaker 1:Huh.
Speaker 2:Etzionic cornered the market.
Speaker 1:It's what I say Etzionic and Slobomov-Verni are the only two people I know who actually like to be called communitarians, anyway. But I think if we were to look at the thesis of these three thinkers Lash from the cultural history, fukuyama and Sandel from political science, really political philosophy we see that they're making parallel claims and people read Fukuyama as more triumphalist than he is, and that's part of the problem. I think Danny Besner and pushing back on all the Fukuyama hate was like you actually really haven't counted his argument. All these emergent anti-liberal political theories that are coming from like national conservatism to democratic socialism which isn't that anti-liberal really either, but like to think it is sometimes to like internet Stalinism they don't actually have any effect on the actual running of these states, hardly at all, even when they and in the case of like someone like Trump even when they come into power. So what does that say Like? And you know Besner brings up Maloney Like Maloney has not really been that different from a center-rightist in their relationship to the larger EU.
Speaker 1:And I've had a friend of mine that says you know, we might get the Le Pen win in France because Macron is hanging on by threads and Mellishon is almost clearly not going to be powerful enough to defy Le Pen. I have my there's a lot of right-wing conspiracy theories like, oh, the EU will find a way to take her out before that. I'm like I don't think so, but I think you'll be surprised how I don't know that it's actually going to be. What she's promising are the catastrophe that it's being spelled out to be. It might be Like if it happened in enough places at once, it could be Like Fukuyama talks about.
Speaker 1:You know, we could return the history if enough within this area, if enough people, you know, wanted it to go that way, if political decay got bad enough, and so if you had like a DeSantis win and a Le Pen win and I don't know, the ADF came into power into Germany, which I can't imagine actually as bad as things are for the S-Pay Day right now, then maybe. But you know, even things like Adragon and a lot of these sort of like outside or populist, you know, civilizationalist projects have kind of fallen apart, like Adragon's holding the power by his teeth, basically because there aren't, but like his project, what is it? Even now, like it's not clear at all. So I guess we should, you know, talk about what we think the implications are for leftists.
Speaker 2:So I mean, I think that I think that one of the implications from all of these thinkers that I think about is I do think it's necessary to address recognition and including the ideal that some people want to be recognized more highly than others. If you're going to present a compelling leftist politics in the Western world or in the post-historical world, let's say, because I think that the most compelling challenges to liberalism thus far have been organized on that basis, not the traditional basis of saying liberalism affords insufficient recognition to everyone. I don't know what that entails, because I certainly don't think it should entail a acceptance of power inequalities and a naturalization of hierarchy in the way it does for much of the right, but I do think it means that you have to start taking seriously the idea that people want to dominate others in some way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think that's true in the current social order too. It just happens through basically nepotistic ends.
Speaker 2:Yeah and I mean, you know, and there's different. The current social errors proof that the modes of domination can shift in ways that are preferable, like. I think that the mode of domination through contracts is certainly preferable to the mode of domination through, like, futile power right, you're not a Foucaultian who thinks the king should just gut people, and that's actually true.
Speaker 2:That's really bad, like that would be awful, that'd be terrible. But you know and I think that this is one of the things which speaks to me about Lash so much also is that there's a real sense that there's a need for people to self-actualize and to gain meaning and to impose, as a collective mass, new forms of meaning onto the political scene.
Speaker 1:The other thing I would think I would push back to is not just on the superiority of certain kind of like domination, both in group and individual having to be accounted for. I would also say human collectivity, Not in the collectivism. You know that I also think that's just a bad. Like collectivism is just a nonsense idea. But like that people's atomized daily nation really is bad for them, Like in a psychological way, in a social way, and while people complain about how lonely they are under liberal conditions, they also exacerbate those problems themselves.
Speaker 1:Like you know, it's also a matter of personal habit in the waterways as much as social ones, and I don't like the left that they refuse to talk about the personal habit and personal discipline of all this. But I do think that's something we have to deal with. Like you know, when people talk to me about what communitarianism is, about the fading of the proletariat and the proletariat's really bad, but even in periphery and I'm like I always push back on that, I'm like one it just doesn't seem to be true that there's a large proletariat that's super politically active in the developed world when you're having more and more developed world just pushed out of both agrarian and manufacturing labor. There's just more and more people who don't have jobs at all.
Speaker 2:There's a mass unpeathering of social boundaries and social connections, which is considerably worse for the proletariat than it is for wealthy people.
Speaker 1:Right and it's considerably worse. And the developer, I mean in developing world, in the developed world too. That's why concepts like the global precariat and stuff aren't totally insane, even though they're just ways of renaming stuff that we already have concepts for. I Think that's fair right. But I do think that, like there's a reason why, even in these quote communities with active proletariat you know that people talk about link but they don't organize themselves as communists most of the time I'm sorry there's no evidence for that they were gonna have themselves as, like, religious movements and and Social movements and, and you know what might be called a denicarium, movements both in the right and the left, although there's a lot of left-wing liberals. You don't like using the word a denicarium, that things that make sure right wingers, because, fuck, those guys are stupid. But um, I I do think that you have to ask themselves like, okay, well, even if it's a proletarian movement, why doesn't ever see itself like that? That's not itself conception of most selects different forms of recognition of right.
Speaker 2:I think, and I think one reason is that Selecting oneself in terms of religious Identification is a more egalitarian form of recognition than looking at one another as proletariat, as typically, because it assumes the possibility of universality in a way that you know is not true of class identification, um, except for you know that the older ideal of a universal class, which would not be the proletariat, it would be, you know, the intellectual class, the bourgeoisie, whatever like, and it attempts to wish away class antagonisms. So I don't think that's a particularly effective form of class universalization. But the dream of Socialism is the elimination of class as a category altogether, would you say. I mean, you'd say that's true, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, although now you sound like an ultra leftist.
Speaker 2:I'm, well, I'm just, I'm not. I'm just saying that like that's not something which, when you're thinking in those terms, leads to permanent, a permanent sense of recognition. It's a very it's a ideally Temporary sense of recognition.
Speaker 1:So this is, this is the problem that I've always had with, like, the class consciousness idea.
Speaker 1:All right For, and this is something that actually Giles duvet I think it's how you say his name, I miss pronounce it every time Actually I think has a point on, even though I disagree with almost everything he says and the end most of his books is that there's a fundamental paradox and calling for a recognition of the working class, we're also calling for its ambilition in a way that no one has really squared and I think, like, for example, if you look at like, say, a yin and a shi li, or the communist movement and a communist movement, and like Latin America, or when there's pink waves or whatever, there's a reason why you'll see both an appeal to the dignity of workers, but also appeals to, like, the solidarity of Christians or the solidarity of Some national group, or are like the recognition of indigenous rights against the Criola or whatever, like.
Speaker 1:It looks different than it does in North American quote PMC politics, but it's not fundamentally different, which, which, to me, leads to an interesting point is. I'm like okay, part of the problem with class politics is Is that if you try to present a unified class, you have to, like hide the divisions within the class itself, which itself causes all kinds of problems. So if we talk about, like the working class, there's this constant push and pull and quote class politics in America to both shrink and expand the working class, constantly depending on what, what one's annoyed by in a particular instance, like Do you take the wage dependent view or do you take the productivity view or whatever. And you see this in these debates and one of the things I point out is sometimes both views actually render classes and identity In this way of which you just want to recognize, but most people don't want to be recognized as their class. That's the one thing they don't want to be recognized for, like If you have our dudes good on this.
Speaker 2:Well, that's also something that lash talks about in his like last books is the idea that what made American democracy unique originally was that it Did not tie Recognition, social recognition, to class position. You know, which is like, not necessarily accurate, it just was fundamentally not accurate. It's fundamentally not accurate but it does. It does reflect, you know, the dream of citizenship as just as something which is in Integral to your, your personhood, not not an effect of your relation to the world around you. Ideally, which is, you know, is, is different. You don't want to be necessarily recognized always as the things you do. You want to be recognized sometimes as the things that you are. Um, though both are, you know, part of who you are.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's. I think that's something that, like Marxist and stuff, have tried, have tried unsuccessfully to deal with. And I say this the person who believes in class solidarity and class autonomy and class politics, but like, even if you look at, like the debates about what, what actually counts as a class political movement, you look at like the Dylan Riley, robin Brenner Seventh thesis is peace and and you left review and what they're like, well, the new left isn't, I mean the new left isn't class politics, but neither was the new deal, but the civil rights movement is, and I'm like, okay, some of that to me, I think, is I'm trying to get out of some, I think it's trying to get them get out of current political problems by, you know, making claims about the past. But in some way I have thought about it, because lash actually does make the similar argument not that the civil rights movement is a successful populist movement but and also, broadly speaking, benefits All of the working class, not just the black working class. And so much of the civil rights movement was successful and we have to say, you know, seventy, sixty, seventy years out, as success is limited, although it wasn't completely unsuccessful either is probably the most successful left wing, left liberal political movement in 150 years.
Speaker 1:I think we have to ask ourselves, like, why does class politics, when it exists, often not present itself as class politics, like because that that is a pushback on the Kind of Lucca shian, you know, class of itself and for itself? I think that's a good point. Because I think that's a good point of itself and for itself way of thinking, because I just I can't find a whole lot of history where that's actually been the way either the working class or socialists have actually organized, like they claim that they organize that way, but that's not what they actually did. And then when you look at like socialist movements that were successful in Latin America or Europe, they also don't really organize along those lines. So it's like, you know, they might talk about dignity for workers, Workers, rights and all this, but they don't generally flame it solely in terms of the class itself. So you have this paradox right that I think kind of comes up and one of the reasons why class politics hasn't been a good answer to to Fukuyama's recognition problem is, as the proletariat or as well. We won't deal with the contestation to what proletariat means I'm gonna use the term as the wage earning class expands. That way, no one can come at me.
Speaker 1:The divisions within that class and the recognitions within that class are more important to people's daily lives and the fact that they're wage earners and that plays itself out an obvious race of gender and race, but in a lot of unobvious ways, to regional tensions, sectoral tensions, stuff like that. We're like, you know, worker politics, for example, will reflect the dominant industry's interest in their area, not Like independent class politics. And why is that All right? Well, I think some of that's, some of that's, frankly, the, if you're in Capitalist sectors that are besieged it actually best issues, as a worker, to protect your job by hoping it does well, but there's also a sense in which, like, there are local, regional Identities and stuff that you're not gonna get rid of, and you know. I think this is why, like, the Marxist answer to the national problem has never, ever, ever made sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, it's a fact right, which is right. Series on it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, and we keep on pointing out to most of the successful theories of it aren't completely speaking, formally Marxist, like they might have Marxist origins but they don't have Marxist implications, right, and it's also why stuff like Harun Yelmez's book about, yeah, you know, the Soviets really split nationalism as a way to like modernize, you know, subject peoples of the Russian Empire.
Speaker 1:But they kind of thought that that nationalism would just go away, the way it is done and like it actually kind of has done To some small degree, and that developed West amongst the, the better off peoples, like you know, not all of the United States, but the well off of the United States, kind of have a common some apollon to eat those, what you know. But that doesn't happen and like I don't know, to va and so, and so what to make of that? You know, it does seem to indicate that like there there's something that that doesn't understand. And I do think the politics of recognition Is important to deal with, which means for me, for a successful, you know, like I'm a, I, like I said, I believe in class autonomy and believe in class solidarity and may even believe in class unity, but that also means that I'm gonna have to recognize people In ways that are not just about their class position, to get them on board with my politics and if you can't do that, I think your politics is doomed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I agree with that.
Speaker 1:And to turn it back to both the Fukuyama end of history thesis but also a little bit about, like you know, our discussion about the crisis of liberalism and why the center seems to hold, even though there aren't really even centrist anymore, and I think a lot of it has to do with this like the center does have a way of building a better political system. It does have a way of, like, recognizing people and then dispatching with that and not fundamentally changing anything. Like if we look at what happened I mentioned a little while earlier, like the Floyd riots, well, what happened with the Floyd riots?
Speaker 2:slash insurrections, we see you, we hear you and we stand with you.
Speaker 1:And then we do nothing, and then we do nothing.
Speaker 1:It's, you know, I will say, my right wing and left wing forearms like, well, that's the perfect stance for mental management to take, because they don't have to change anything, but they can, but it will expand their controlling power. I'm like, yeah, that's true, absolutely. But you have to ask yourself, like, why did this happen in this way? Even in the case of, like, the French working class? I don't think they're appealing to the universal working class. I think they're appealing to their Frenchness, like we have these rights as French citizens and you are messing with them, macron. You know, and I do think that's something we have to ask ourselves about the way people view identity in this scenario. Like I've even, you know, I've talked to people in class unity and a lot of them are like, yeah, well, you know, nations exist and I'm like, okay, so how is national competition really about class unity? Doesn't that like limitably, methodologically nationalist? And then, like I get a bunch of like and I'm like okay, but so let's talk about why you feel that way. What is actually going on there? Some of it's, you know, there might be all kinds of reasons and I don't think all of it's bigotry either. So what is going on there and I officially kind of think that a whole lot of the left, when it's like oh, we aren't liberal, you know, yes, you are.
Speaker 1:Because you think that just acknowledging you know things will be enough and because we recognize you as an equal and a clear way that that's enough to make you homo economicists and also completely rational and like systems of domination that aren't about exploitation aren't in play, and I think that's just not true. Like human competition is a little bit deeper than that, frankly, but I guess maybe my, I guess my one counter pool would be so is the tendency towards human equality, which is also pretty deep. All right, I'm gonna give you the. You know we've been bubbling on for an hour. I'm gonna give you the last little bit. Where do you think people should go and their response to Fukuyama, beyond these things that we've talked about?
Speaker 2:I think that the I think that what matters more than than just what Fukuyama says is what he's responding to, which is what we've talked about a lot over the last couple of sessions, and that's the fact that liberalism is simultaneously dominant and in crisis, and I think that people should really reckon with why those two things are simultaneously true.
Speaker 2:See why liberalism is dominant. What is the good in liberalism? Not just why is it dominating, but why has it proved to be a compelling answer to a lot of problems over the past, you know, however, many centuries, because I think there's a lot of focus on the left in the crisis portion, but not enough focus on the dominance side. Besides to to claim that it's purely power, you know, it's hard to know what to do from here. If we do live in the end of history, then it dramatically curtailes the sphere of what is possible. At the same time, if we don't live in the end of history, then it just means you have to be more compelling and harder working and dream bigger and work harder, and I think all of those things are possible and all of those things can be done.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's a good answer. I think we need to do better about thinking through what is and is not liberal. That's true.
Speaker 1:And then these other, these sub-problems, like let's talk about human domination, not just exploitation, because I do think where there's a whole lot of the left that doesn't want to deal with it. Conversely, there's a whole lot of the left, people often called shit libs or whatever, rad libs or whatever. The ins and outs of the week is that only focus on domination and don't look at exploitation at all, definitely, and that division really has meant that, like a lot of the liberal technocrats, they can dominate us with recognition games. But those of us who think, oh well, we just need class solidarity, our class unity or whatever, and I'm like well, we do need that Absolutely. I want you to prove to me, though, that that's ever gone under that name, because I don't know that it has.
Speaker 1:And we do have to recognize that, like one of the reasons why the religious calls actually seem to be effective, even in secular societies, is they are, truly speaking, utopian in a way that a lot of what we offer is not. But that's my takeaway. I would tell people, before you say Fukuyama's wrong, actually read his book. That's true too. Like he might be wrong, I suspect that in the long run he is wrong, but in the short run. So far it's held, you know, and that brings a lot of people on.
Speaker 2:It's not the fact that I completely disagree with most of the arguments in the first half of the book the End of History.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, that first part of that book is bad.
Speaker 2:It's not talking about that. But you know, the center holds, apparently Don't know how, but it does, yep.
Speaker 1:I've actually you know, my big thesis is in 2018 was like the center will survive because everything else is in such chaos that it's the only thing that actually has power, and I still kind of hold by that. But it does seem kind of amazing that nothing, that even when the alternatives come to power or have a chance at power, they don't even really do anything about it, like that's the more surprising thing. And on that note, and on that cheery, happy note, we will end.