The Future of History: Have We Reached the End of History Again?

This special episode of LCHP’s History-Politics Podcast features a recording of an event titled “The Future of History: Have We Reached the End of History Again?” This event was the first in a multi-part series by the Luskin Public History Program in conjunction with the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy at the Wende Museum. LCHP Director David Myers moderates a conversation between Miloš Jovanović (UCLA Assistant Professor of History), Natasha Piano (UCLA Assistant Professor of Political Theory, and Terry Tang (Executive Editor of the Los Angeles Times). This panel revisits the conclusion of political scientist Francis Fukuyama in his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, that we have reached “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” The scholars discuss whether the rise of illiberal authoritarianism marks a new end of history. From the rise of China and contemporary challenges to democracy to the role of journalism, education, and historical thinking in a “post-truth” age, the panelists examine the enduring appeal of liberty, equality, and human dignity. In an era of constant change, how should we think about the next phase of history? As part of an unfolding journey into the future, or as the beginning of the end?

Miloš Jovanović is an Assistant Professor of History at UCLA. His research looks at the Balkans, Ottoman and Habsburg Empires, capitalism, and Marxist theory and history. His first book, Cities of Dust and Mud: Urbanism and Bourgeois Fantasy in the Balkans (Stanford University Press, 2026), explores the social costs of elite-led urban change. His new project, Spaces of Empire: The Habsburg World and its Afterlives, examines the diverse trajectories of urban spaces after imperial collapse.

David N. Myers is Distinguished Professor of History and the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History at UCLA. He is the founding director of the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy. He also directs the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate, the UCLA Dialogue Across Difference Initiative, and the UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute. He is the author or editor of more than fifteen books, including American Shtetl (Princeton University Press 2022, winner of the 2022 National Jewish Book Award).

Natasha Piano is Assistant Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at UCLA. She specializes in democratic theory and the history of political thought, focusing on realist and empirical traditions in political science and Italian political theory. Her book, Democratic Elitism: The Founding Myth of American Political Science (Harvard University Press, 2025), examines how misinterpretations of elite theory shaped American political systems. She is also the co-editor of Florentine Political Writings from Petrarch to Machiavelli (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

Terry Tang is Executive Editor of the Los Angeles Times. Appointed in 2024, she is the first female editor in the paper’s 142-year history. Before joining the Los Angeles Times in 2019, she served as director of publications and editorial at the American Civil Liberties Union and held multiple editorial roles at The New York Times. She holds a BA in economics from Yale and a JD from New York University School of Law. She was also a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. 

Transcript

Justin Jampol 0:05

Thanks so much, everyone. I'm Justin Jampol, the executive director of the Wende Museum. I love it. Yes. Oh my gosh. Uh I'm gonna take a recording of this. I want my Sunday mornings to start like this. And by the way, guys, Sunday morning. This is a packed house tonight. I told David this is his star power, but that's amazing. This is amazing. Go turn around, David. Go go look at everybody. That's incredible. What's that? It's like graduation, David. And we're so pleased to be joined by so many important people in our lives here. Our board uh member Stephanie Lunkowicz is here. Where are you? All the way in the back. There you go. Stephanie, thanks for being here. Scott Schaefer is here from our council and all kinds of wonderful friends of ours. Um, this is a really special occasion because you're here for the launch of uh our portion of the Future of History series, uh, which is a multi-part series through the uh Meyer and Renee Luskin Public History Program at the Wende uh in conjunction with the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy. And we're so grateful to the Luskins whose extraordinary generosity and friendship makes all of this possible. Um, that's why we're all here today to uh to spark and inspire and encourage civic dialogue. Um, it's helped us to create so many of these dynamic conversations throughout Los Angeles and of course right here at the uh Gloria Kaufman Community Center at the Wende. I also just want to say how thankful I am personally to David from the very beginning of this initiative. Uh he's brought his wisdom, his guidance, his advice to shaping this project. Um, and I would not have been able to do it without him. By the way, I this is not on my remarks, but I don't know how he does it because I swear I get an email blast like every day, and he has a new program or a new initiative. He is everywhere. And uh I wish I had that energy. And, you know, I think one of the most amazing things about this is, and um I will say this, David, that this is this is a time and a and a place in which, you know, there's lots of ideas, there's lots of creative energy. But to have the follow-through that you do to bring this to life, it's very rare. Um, between the time of, oh, hey, I have an idea to like this is what it is, and here we are, it's really extraordinary. So join me in giving David a round of applause. And right before I call him up to the stage, um, I want to give you a short list of uh greatest hits. He's Distinguished Professor of History and Hold to Sadie and Ludwig Khan, Chair in Jewish history at UCLA. He's the founding director of the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy, and he directs the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate, the UCLA Dialogue Across Difference Initiative. See what I'm saying, you guys? And the UCLA Badari Kindness Institute. He's the author or and editor of more than 15 books, including American Städtl, which is on my bookshelf, as it is for many of yours, and which was the winner of the 2022 National Jewish Book Awards. Without further ado, my admiration, my affection, and gratitude to David Myers.

David Myers 3:44

Thank you, Justin. I just want to say um I put on a few programs. Justin built a museum. Let's just understand like what achievement is. And that really merits our uh our appreciation. Thank you, Justin. Um it's such a delight to be here to see you all, to um sort of gaze with astonishment at this full room on a Sunday morning uh at 1040. Um, it's really a delight to be with you here at the Wende, which is such a unique site uh on the cultural landscape of Los Angeles. Uh, it's been the site of so many stimulating moments in the cultural life of Los Angeles and will continue to do so. What it's done in its short history is really astonishing and remarkable. Um, and I just have to say that I feel such a deep kinship with the Wende uh because we share a commitment to bring historical perspective to bear on important questions of the day. Um, what I think is so desperately needed. Like, do we need more or less historical nuance and perspective in understanding how we got to where we are today? I think we would all agree we could all benefit from more. Um, as Justin mentioned, we have truly remarkable partners in Meyer and Renee Luskin, uh, who share our intense desire and commitment to learn from the past. They have enabled us to work in parallel uh through the Luskin uh Public History Program here, through the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy, and encouraged us to work together as we do uh in this series. Um, the this series devoted to uh the future of history, um uh which will have uh uh next uh installment on June 10th, about which you will hear um uh through the usual channels. So pay attention. Our focus there will be specifically on AI and the future of history, um, something that may preoccupy us even today. Um but in thinking of a future history, we have to sort of understand there there are various ways we can understand that expression. There is the kind of methodological perspective. How do we go about writing history uh in the future? Writing history in uh in the age of deflection, disinformation, deception, and artificial intelligence itself, which contains elements of all of those, but perhaps also uh contains the seeds for correctives. How do we go about writing history in the future? Um, but the future of history means something else. It means how do we actually ride the wave of history? Uh, how do we understand time and the unfolding of events, the very structure and pace of history? What will it look like in the future? Will it be accelerated? Uh will it be jagged? Um riding a seamless historical wave at this moment towards an ever better future? Or are we, as it so often seems, hurtling parrously toward a cliff? Um it's hard to avoid that latter question uh in this moment. Um a moment of urgency, of anxiety, um, of polychrisis, uh, a topic that we uh had a conversation about here um a year or so ago. This is a moment in extremis global warming, the ascent of illiberalism, conflict around the world, the demise of democracy, and of course the ever-threatening specter of artificial intelligence. It was all of these things that prompted us to develop this series on the future of history. Um and today we start in an ironic but perhaps fitting uh manner at the end, talking about the end of history, um, which has a somewhat daunting apocalyptic feel to it. Uh we hope that that apocalypse is far off, but we have to acknowledge there's much to be concerned about. Um, and I am reminded that out there in the tech world there are doomers who believe that AI will finish off the human race race with great dispatch, and there are boomers who believe we can survive and flourish, marshaling the strength of AI. So I'm just sort of curious, how many of you would define yourself as boomers in the current moment? And how many of you would define yourself as doomers? That's about it's split down the middle. Okay, well, maybe we'll resolve that question uh this afternoon. Um part of the consolation that history affords us is the realization that we are not the first to manifest anxiety or even to think about the end of history. 37 years ago, the political scientist Francis Fukayama wrote a short article in National Review that was published three years later in a book called The End of History and the Last Man, published in 1992. The book stimulated a very robust debate about whether we had indeed reached the end of history. And I should say that that trope of the end of history is reminds me, in a certain sense, about the very idea of a vendor. Wende means a change or a turn. Um and there are often turns that we're called upon to take stock of. So turns uh we get accustomed to. And so too we get accustomed to different varieties of the end of history. So there's a religious messianic version of the end of history, sort of moving towards the ultimate uh salvific goal. There's a Marxian version, sort of the triumph of the proletariat, marking the end of history. There's a Whiggish version, sort of a sort of liberal progressive version, uh, an idea that progress is unending, unimpeded, and constantly leads us to new heights. And of course, there are apocalyptic versions, um, which we all too often associate with that term in the current moment. And then there are more benign versions, like we've reached a plateau, and that's kind of where we are, um, an eternal present, we might say. Um, I think in this context of a book that is in many ways a precursor to Fukuyama's, uh, the the social scientist Daniel Bell's book in 1960 called The End of Ideology, in which he argued that the age of grand ideological theories uh was over, um, as was the revolutionary fervor that sought to dislodge capitalism. In a certain sense, capitalism had sort of won the day, leading to the end of ideology. And that book, as I said, is a kind of prelude to Fukuyama, um, who makes at one level a similar uh claim, a bold and buoyant claim that liberal democracy may be the final form of human government. Now, from today's perspective, that seems like um an outdated and misguided assertion. Umthough um it may have portended for many of us the prospect of living a very happy future. Um and that claim that um is part of Fukayama's book is unlike the fears about the end of history uh that we all too often think about today, the apocalyptic version, as opposed to this sort of plateau model. But we do think that there's much in Fukayama's book to recommend itself as a launching pad for our discussion, as a jumping-off point for indeed a conversation about what the end of history means, both as a trope, as a manner of speech, and as a specter, as a prospect for today. How are we to think about the end of history? How are we to think about Fukayama, the fate of liberal democracy, what society means and looks like at this end? Um, and so to engage these questions and to bring alive, as it were, the discussion about the end of history, um uh we have really a stellar group of panelists to take up these questions. And I um will introduce them very briefly. You can read their longer, longer um biographies somewhere, um, certainly on the uh Wende website, um, and maybe if there were a QR code there, but I don't see one. Um but um brevity is the order of the day, so we can jump into the conversation. So, first, um let me introduce my colleague M iloš Jovanović, uh who is assistant professor of history at UCLA. His first book, Cities of Dust and Mud, Urbanism and Bourgeois Fantasy in the Balkans, was published this year. It's appeared. It's appeared, right? And explores the social cost of elite-led urban change. And he's just back from a research trip uh to uh Bulgaria and other parts of East Central Europe to explore uh his new research project, which is entitled Spaces of Empire, the Habsburg World and Its Afterlives. Um, our next panelist, uh, I'll introduce them all and then they can come up and join me, and we'll sit down and jump right in, is Natasha Piano, who is uh assistant professor of political theory in the Department of Political Science at UCLA. She published in 2025 uh a book called Democratic Elitism: The Founding Myth of American Political Science, which examines how misperceptions, interpretations of elite theory shaped American political systems. And uh last but certainly not least, Terry Tang, who is the executive editor of the LA Times. Um, she was appointed in 2024 and is the first female editor in the paper's history. Before joining the LA Times in 2019, she served as director of publications uh and uh editorial at the at the American Civil Liberties Union, and she held multiple editorial roles at the New York Times. Please join me in welcoming our panel. Okay, dear colleagues and friends. Um welcome to the new arrivals. Uh and thank God we came up here so we can make some seeds for them. Uh I don't know what we'd do otherwise, yeah. Um, so um Fugayama writes in that first iteration of the article, and then again in the book, um, in 1989, of the endpoint of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. This bold assertion seemed like it might be true for eternity in 1989, uh, as the Berlin Wall came down and as the Soviet Union began to dissolve. But the past 37 years um have called into question um uh that assertion. And so I'd like to begin by asking um what you think is still worth thinking about in Fukayama's prognostication. What did he get wrong and what did he get right? So we'll begin with you, Terry.

Terry Tang 15:07

I think what he got right is that um the ideals of equality and um liberty are something we just now see as part of our human um consciousness. That there, I don't believe there are societies that would eschew um liberty or individuals that would eschew liberty and eschew equality as something that is um part of what they would desire. And I think we see that everywhere in in societies that are not Western. Um there are, and so I think you got that right. I think that that kind of the course of human development science and economics created those principles, to my mind, as um universal. Um so I think so.

David Myers 16:00

What is new, different from what was before, say in the 18th century, is the presumption or the 19th century or the 19th century, where the changes are beginning to uh emerge. What is new is this aspiration to understand each as equal, sort of a kind of uh the outgrowth of the Enlightenment project that is that that assumed that every human being is possessed of equal capacity to reason about the world.

Terry Tang 16:28

Right. And I think that our communications, either through mass communications and technology, that over time that that communication has moved across the world. There's no, I don't believe there are societies that are unaware or don't aspire to that. Certainly people in those societies aspire to that. Right. And I think what he got wrong, and I think it was a little bit partly because of the the title he chose, a lot of that at that moment, it um even at that moment, he seemed like it was entirely Western facing. And I think that's where it was um it was understood to be um Western, Western values. But I don't believe in that all societies that have those aspirations necessarily see those as Western values, not at this moment. I so I think what he got wrong was that if if one were to say is that um that that was Western, or that there would be no hit, there would be no backsliding. I mean, I thought was really interesting in his book that we were all reading again is that in 2019, in his afterward, he talked about that we are in a moment of democratic recession. The democra the idea of democracy is in recession, and whether we will actually move to a full-blown democratic depression is interesting to me. But that idea of recession and depression is also in some way cyclical. It's it's the i it's it's an economic trope. So it doesn't mean that that is that that is progressing to that point, that we will roll back the ideals of equality and you know uh liberty.

David Myers 18:20

Good. So I mean, we were all talking about um before the um the panel started, about our renewed appreciation for Fukuyama and the sort of the scope and depth of his erudition, uh, which is which are really uncharacteristic of sort of um intellectuals today to have that kind of capacious mind and and and and subtlety and and and nuance and depth. Um and yet he put forward, Natasha, this claim, right? That that liberal democracy won the day. And we sort of entered into this new phase of of human history. How do you how do you read it?

Natasha Piano 18:57

Well, you know, I I'm only going to actually double down on how capacious and extraordinary this book is. So thank you for giving me the opportunity to actually read it because I think I came of age in a moment where it was all too fashionable to roll your eyes at this book and say, oh, you know, he just wrote it for this the general audience and he just tried to make it provocative with this salacious title, the end of history. And um, so and I I kind of so I never really read it. And now in in doing so and actually engaging the work cover to cover, I was blown away by his command, but also how much of his thesis remains true. And I think there are three main biases that I had towards the book that um that were overturned in this rereading of it, um, that I think you know still remain true. One is this idea, you know, what does he mean by the end of history? And it is easy to think that he's just saying, oh, you know what, liberal democracies are gonna continually keep cropping up and uh in this immediate succession now that the Berlin Wall has fallen. And that's not what he says at all. In fact, he has some anxiety that there's going to be no Cold War monster enemy to confront. So he never, by the end of history, he just means do we think that liberty and equality are two principal ideals that are founding to our self-understanding? And are they going to continue to be so? How the different variations of that, that um, uh that instantiation of those two ideals will it be undermined surely, maybe in the short term. But is this end of history? Is this continual expansion of liberty and equality? Is it a useful way to think about human freedom and the advancement of human freedom over a trans historical period or at least over millennia? And so maybe just returning to thinking about the end of history as a heuristic or some kind of device about the expansion of liberty and equality and the end of human history as an advancement of human freedom or human agency and autonomy, maybe that's something that is still useful today. The other thing that I think is really that I brought to the book, thinking that it was bias that I brought to the book, was I thought that it was this triumphant piece heralding the victory of liberal democracy worldwide. And my second reading of it, or this reading of it, I didn't come away with that kind of raging optimism that we typically portray when we think of Francis Fukuyama. It's actually a book in my reading that's filled with anxiety about our conceptual confusion. I mean, why is it that we are defending liberal democracy? And his main claim, the ostensible point of the book, is that we don't really understand why we like liberal democracy so much. We're confused. About it. We think that we like liberal democracy because we want VCRs or smartphones and we want to be rational individuals who stay at home and are more interested in private affairs over public ones. And he's saying that's not why we like it. That's not at all what the defense of liberal democracy should be. We like liberal democracy because it imbues every individual with a sense of dignity in this continual struggle for recognition that defines human history. And liberal democracy might be the best way of assuring equal recognition and containing the more, containing and properly channeling the more problematic excesses of ambition in a way that expands liberal principles of liberal liberty and equality. And so in that sense, he's saying we're confused about why we like liberal democracy. We need to change how we think about it, what we think isn't good about it, what we think is important about it, in order to really align ourselves and be able to properly defend it from authoritarian attacks, from illiberalism and from any other host of ideologies that might want to compete with it in the future. So there's this profound sense of pessimism that might be productive for us today, even though it doesn't really accord with how we think about this book.

David Myers 23:23

Tremendous anxiety. So I'm just curious about the reception. Like, why do we cast this as we cast it? Which is to say a kind of cranky conservative optimism, you know, some of, you know, of competing sensibilities, um, you know, an uh uh, you know, a cranky conservative weighing in on, you know, um uh on this long tradition of of political theory, and yet arriving at what seems to be uh a hopelessly naive utopian vision. Like, why do you think we misrepresent it as such? What's your best understanding?

Natasha Piano 23:56

I uh well, I mean, I think the choice of title was probably intended and made him very famous. So uh I don't begrudge him for that. Um, but or his editor thought that was the Well, you know, it's actually it's Kojab's title and uh idea. Um, you know, yeah, maybe it was his editor, though I I happen to think that he might have it might the book wrote itself, right? Like the title usually writes itself. And so the end of history is the proper, I think that it's the proper title, but I think there's two he didn't do any himself any favors in two registers. The first is that he decided to equate communism or socialism with the totalitarian, authoritarian manifestation of the Cold War. And by the logic of his own argument, he didn't have to do that. Communism divorced from this historically narrow interpretation, communism as or socialism or a planned state, a planned economic state as totalitarian authoritarianism, isn't necessary. We don't, you can think of a vision of a socialist or a planned economy that need not have that Cold War baggage. And so I think that he didn't do his favor himself any favors by cr reinforcing the Manichaeanism of a Cold War binary between East and West that ended up falling apart so clearly as it did. Um, or maybe not so clearly, depending on your ideological inclination or political inclination. Um, so that's one thing. And I think that he even entertains the idea that maybe a communist or socialist iteration is the apotheosis of liberal democracy, of these principles of liberty and equality. And uh in the book, I think he does a better job, though. End of it, you can see that he falls back into the binary thinking that characterized the post-war period. So that's one thing. The second thing is um this he does this post-historical versus historical states kind of reductionism between third world countries who haven't yet reached this liberal democratic ending and the other ones. And it's not clear whether they're gonna have that much interaction in a globalized world where we've experienced so many different iterations of global relations since 1992. That just stopped being convincing or a helpful way of thinking about the world or helpful heuristics. So I think those two things encourage this neoconservative reading of Fukuyama that maybe need isn't in the text itself.

David Myers 26:19

Okay, great. Um, Miloš, what's your sense of uh the the validity of the claims? Claim or claims.

Miloš Jovanović 26:28

How to follow up these two wonderful responses. I mean, it's uh hard to do. But I think you know, there are two things that came to me and I've that I found really striking about what he wrote that seemed very prescient. One is it's actually in the essay where he has the sentence what destroyed fascism was not universal moral revulsion, but its lack of success. And I think the recent revival of fascist ideology, fascist thinking, um, fascist movements within the ruling party of the United States elsewhere uh uh really shows very clearly, right, that that in fact one of the things we failed to do after 1945 is to uh to demonstrate a kind of uh uh universal rejection of fascist ideas, of ideology. In this that sense I disagree with you, uh, Terry, a little bit, because uh I think that there are very strong political currents and sort of beliefs. There are a lot of people who believe very deeply in hierarchy, who are actually deeply opposed to the notion of equality, the notion that all of us are human and in some sense have uh sort of inalienable rights, right? Uh and in, in some sense, find security within that idea of hierarchy, whether on the questions of gender, of race, of nationality, of belonging, that seems to sort of that's in some sense also an anxiety in his book, right? Um and the second thing that I think he really gets right is he talks a little bit about nostalgia for history as as something existing, as a kind of significant political or social factor. And I think nostalgia plays a really profound role, um, a profound political and social role. And it's it has potential. It has potential to be something emancipatory, it has potential to be something uh that uh brings a, I would say it brings a future futurity, brings a future. Um, and at the same time, it's also a kind of nostalgia that looks back. I think later I want to talk a little bit more about that question of nostalgia. But I think he gets those two things very, very right. Um he talks about an exhaustion of viable systemic alternatives to Western liberalism, I think that's, you know, we see China as the most serious challenge to that today, right? If we think about a future-oriented society that looks forward, a society that actually deals with climate change, unlike the West, that seems trapped. Uh, you know, that's where are all the solar panels in the world built, not not in the West, right? Uh, where is all the high-speed rail being built, not in the West? Where is the technology, you know, moving forward, right? It's in China. And I think there's, but China is not a liberal democracy, and in fact, very explicitly not so. Um, so this appearance of a very serious challenge to the very model uh is something that I think challenges his uh notion. Um the and you mentioned very much this relegation of socialist futurity to the past. I think we all, you know, today that seems a little bit uh strange. It's very clear why he would feel that way in 1989, uh, you know, um, where it seemed that way. But today, uh, I looked at this UGOF poll in 2025. 62% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 had a more positive view of socialism than of capitalism. Of all Americans, 39% of Americans view socialism more favorably than capitalism. That is not something that would have been predictable at all in 1989. So I think those things are really interesting. And I guess the third one is this question of sort of nationalism, economic liberalism, imperial expansionism. Um I think those things um are things that really marked the sort of end of history period. And perhaps I think people criticized him in some ways because they seemed to see those things on the horizon in some ways. Uh I think there was both a sense of fear in his writing, but also an optimism that seemed uh, you know, after the crises of the 80s, perhaps a little too hopeful.

David Myers 30:44

Yeah, so lurking beneath the anxieties that you both talked about, there is an optimism. And you've given voice to it. Um, a kind of a new baseline, right? A new baseline in which principles like uh liberty and dignity um are shared as aspirations. And we might say the problem is only the sort of uneven implementation of those principles. But there's another way to look at it, as Milosh has just offered, which is there are not just competing models like China, um, where you don't see the same um aspiration um uh that you might see in a Western liberal democratic tradition. But you also see um the collapse of that very edifice of human rights um and the international order that was built up after uh the Second World War. Um you see, in some sense, the detritus of this um uh system to safeguard liberty and dignity. Um and it seems uh almost uh unimaginable that one could begin to build anew uh an edifice that could capture these ideals that would have universal appeal. So I just want to thank you, Milos, for productively uh unsettling us from uh this uh otherwise quite convivial embrace of Fukuyama's claims in the best tradition of a debate over the end of history. So I'm I'm wondering how you respond to both the Chinese example and sort of the the dismantling uh of the edifice of human rights, of international jurisdiction, of uh of the international the global order, um, in sort of that very optimistic uh sense that followed uh the catastrophe, the catastrophe of the Second World War.

Terry Tang 32:45

I guess I would say that those ideals, very basic, um, can't really be destroyed. And those ideals just carry on, whether whether in China there is a different model in which it's a completely authoritarian state with uh booming economy. That doesn't, to my mind, change the ideals of equality and liberty and the fact that even in China there is um and the Chinese government spends a tremendous amount of time trying to appease that force of protest and locking it down and doing everything it can because it knows that that is kind of the sleeping threat. The fact that that is a threat, the fact, but on the other hand, if you did a poll, most I imagine that much of the Chinese population is supportive of what the government is doing. One in terms of its economic growth, and they also don't want chaos. That's a big, big part of Chinese history was the idea of chaos. And so um they may be able to live with that, but but those ideals that have now been disseminated and is part of you know history for quite a while, for you know, 150 years, I don't think you can just wipe that clean. I don't think there is turning back the clock. Um so um so in every part of in many different cultures, those ideals, just because they aren't fulfilled and just because there's power within governments, sometimes popularly elected governments to suppress those ideals doesn't mean that those ideals don't exist and they will ultimately be defeated and they will be forgotten.

David Myers 34:37

So let's leave for a second the example of China and turn our attention to our own country, um, where those very ideals seem to be torn asunder every day by a regime intent on doing exactly that with ideological fervor, uh at least the second and third tier uh implementers, um, in ways that make it hard to imagine how you repair the damage that is done uh quickly. Um it seems like the damage done will take a generation to repair. So I'm wondering how, Natasha, how do you see um the fate of those exalted ideals in this current moment of uh what Viktor Orban called somewhat ironically, illiberal democracy. Um we might call it illiberal authoritarianism that we see from Turkey and Israel to uh to the United States.

Natasha Piano 35:31

Yeah. So funny, I'm gonna become the Bukayama police when I spent my life uh contesting teleological claims of history. But you know, uh here it goes. Well what an aesthetic uh one of the anxieties of the book is that he says political and economic liberalism don't actually always go hand in hand. They did for a second, and they might splinter apart. Look at China, he said, look at Singapore. That's why he's obsessed with Singapore, spends so much time talking about Singapore because he thinks that this is the best example. But also, to your point now, um, within liberal states himself, he is so concerned that we don't have the right understanding of liberal values, such that they will be internally undermining, such that we will start to accelerate the splintering of economic and political liberalism, which he doesn't think necessarily go together, which he thinks sometimes can be easily broken apart. And therefore, what you need to do is when you are when those liberal ideals are challenged, as he says at the end of that that second four uh afterward, he says, I never said that this is necessarily going to be an advancing teleological or um continual process towards liberal democracy, like or or the advancement of liberty and equality. I never said it was unstoppable, like a Marx, maybe. He says, we have to fight for it, especially in moments where liberalism has undermined itself, so much so that we don't believe it anymore. We don't believe that there might be this march towards the ideal or an asymptotic, like a continual um appreciation and uh and yeah, I don't know, exposition of those ideals. So I think in moments of illiberal authoritarianism, we might do well to identify the causes within liberalism itself, in turn, whether those are plutocratic threats that come up within all liberal polities. What exactly do liberal governments have? What kind of reflection self-reflection do liberal polities have to do? Say, okay, you know what? That's an internal threat to liberalism. This is a problem. This is actually a contradiction in liberal government. We need to address it so that a liberal authoritarianism doesn't become an attractive option because we become disillusioned with the ideals that Terry explicated.

David Myers 38:01

Turn back, maybe step away from Fukuyama for a second and just turn back to this idea which she raises of a divergence between economic and political liberalism. I think that's a really important point because we see, in some sense, sort of the ongoing and uh at some level inexorable logic of economic liberalism as manifested in capitalism, sort of moving forward, leading to tremendous strains on the very project of political liberalism. So uh on notions of equality when you have such yawning chasms between rich and poor? Um, how can you have a meaningful notion of dignity and equality when when economic liberalism in that hypercharged form is proceeding at the pace it is? So uh as from your perch as a political theorist, like what course correction needs to be made? Where do you think we're at in terms of that that grand divergence? And what do we need to do to recapture a meaningful notion of dignity and and equality that has been rendered so problematic by the march of whether they're called liberalism or neoliberalism of the economic variety?

Natasha Piano 39:08

Sure. I think that how much time do I have? Uh I think there are a few things that uh we have to be honest about when we look at the salutary and pernicious effects of liberal representative government, even especially by those who want ultimately to defend elections uh and all different sorts of liberal norms and procedures, toleration, um, due process, all of those things. The first thing is that we have as I I don't know if Fukiyama exactly addresses this specifically, but we have to come face to face with economic inequality as a benchmark for understanding how to give meaning to the political equality that we all like to defend in liberal government and the relationship between economic and political equality that can be internally addressed. Uh, you know, it doesn't, it can be addressed, but not internally. It's not like elections will necessarily address problems in severe plutocratic capture of government. Elections can't, that's not their job. Their job, elections' job is to elect and better represent polities, not necessarily avoid plutocratic threats that um that are inherent to the system themselves. So that's one major, major conversation we have to have. That doesn't mean if you talk about plutocracy, that means you want to throw away all of liberal government. Sometimes that can just mean that you want to better enrich representative electoral institutions away from plutocratic capture so that they can work.

Terry Tang 40:42

He also made a very interesting argument that economic inequality, severe disparity, economic disparity is a real threat to liberal democracy, which I I believe to be true, but I thought it was really interesting that he would make that argument. Um, because it undermines faith and it creates, you know, uh despair, despair about equality, despair about the ideals of liberty. You aren't free if you feel that this um that this society is completely um divided. And that's the disparity that he picks up on. And I think that, you know, we can see that in in our own elections that are coming up. People are very um moved by or outraged or enraged by the idea that, you know, even in this city, you there is a huge disparity where you can't afford to live, where your children can't afford. So these kinds of things, you know, relatively small on the big scale of what we're talking about. But nonetheless, those are the things that make you despair about why should I vote? What can government do for me to cure this problem? And they expect government to cure what is an economic problem and uh economic structural problem. And Fukuyama is very wise in picking that out as a as a real weakness and a flaw. The other thing that I thought was really interesting that he felt that we are experiencing now is that populism itself is um is a threat to liberal democracy, because that is kind of the um the movement of the masses in some ways that is a response, an emotional response to um distrust of government, of a governmental structure. So I thought that was, you know, that's what that's what I feel that we're living through. A lot of this is populist-driven. Like, what can I do? What can a populist do? What is their rhetoric that can get me beyond what I don't trust structured government to do? Yet I have to say, there was one thing that made me very optimistic, not very optimistic, but optimistic this week was that um in Hungary they are passing a constitutional amendment to limit the um prime minister's um position to just eight years to in order to make it impossible for Orban to come back. And the fact that he was defeated, and that you know, most the Western press was surprised by his defeat.

David Myers 43:29

All desperately clutching to that history. One example, maybe desperately clutching, but that's wonderful some days.

Terry Tang 43:44

But the idea that today that this week that they would pass a constitutional amendment to prevent him from coming back suggests that it's more than just, you know, we were voting because there was corruption and that, you know, our growth went down to negative five and Nobody could afford anything. So it it actually meant that the populace and the new government is looking at what is the structure that's wrong with our government that can bring back faith in these ideals. So that you actually feel like, yeah, I should vote. Like it's not a why bother situation.

David Myers 44:20

Constitutionally, Terry, it sounds like you're a boomer, not a doomer.

Terry Tang 44:25

I think yes.

David Myers 44:27

Okay. All right. All right. I want to gain a little bit more historical traction, if we can, um, Milosh, uh, this question of the divergence between economic and liberal uh uh political and economic liberalism, um, and really asking you to reflect on a very big question. But I mean, in the spirit of Fukuyama, we should be posing big questions because that's what he so spectacularly does uh in ways that are kind of at odds with academic discourse where we ask smaller and smaller questions uh about smaller and smaller chunks of time. But I mean, I'm thinking of that great ideological contestation that Bell wrote about uh amongst um three major contenders, sort of liberal democratic uh values, a value set uh informed by liberal democracy, communism, and fascist totalitarianism. Uh I mean, you're a modern European historian. The plane that you devote your time to studying was the battleground, uh uh a battleground that can kill tens of millions of people, but also saw um uh a battle amongst these ideas. I wonder very briefly if you could kind of chart your own sense of the that contest um and and and do so in light of Fukayata's claim that one contender emerged victorious out of that battle.

Miloš Jovanović 45:48

No, I think this this is a really great question because I it forces us to think about okay, what do these three things have in common? And what is it, what have they had historically in common? And then what how do they differ, right? In what way? And I think if we look historically, we can think about sort of periods where these three liberalism, communism or socialism, and fascism were in contestation. We can think of the interwar period, right? The period between the two world wars as a kind of central space of literal street street fights between people who you know supported one or the other and sort of argued with each other based on that point. Um we can also go to the 70s and 80s. We can go to another period of crisis where you had a similar or period of change of the Vende, right? Uh where you had a similar kind of contestation, again with street battles, thinking of the years of lead in Italy, for example, the the RAF in um in Germany, uh the the 70s in the United States, after all. Um the interplay

David Myers 46:59

You're talking about political radicalism, yes, political and contestation.

Miloš Jovanović 47:04

Violence, yes, the weather underground. Right. Yeah, right. And but also the root, for example, uh the development and uh solidification of the American fascist movement and neo-Nazi movement happens around the same time. Some of it coming out of the John Birch Society, something out kind of other sort of uh groups or movements. It is around the same time, the founding of the government.

David Myers 47:24

Southern California as a huge incubator of radical right uh extremists and neo-Nazi movements.

Miloš Jovanović 47:32

Precisely. And I think so it's really interesting, I think, to think about the difference between that moment of the 70s and and and 80s to an extent and the 20s and 30s. Uh, liberalism, communism, and fascism in the 20s and 30s, all of it was deeply connected to the idea of modernity and the potential of a state form that could usher that modernity, right? Whether that would be the liberal democracy of the Weimar Republic and the institution of uh structures and laws and that that celebrated precisely those individual rights that you're speaking of, whether it's the potential of the socialist state to create things like economic development, economic justice and equality, uh whether it was fascist potential, right, to create a kind of racial utopia, right? Or a common uh commonality, a corporeal state, right? A state that's that's corporate, the that represented the body of the nation in other ways. Um that isn't necessarily the case in the 70s and 80s. The idea of the state as a potent actor, right, as a kind of expression of a collectivity, doesn't have the same kind of appeal anymore. And here I think this is where liberalism comes out victorious in some ways or another, because liberalism, especially, it's kind of a neoliberal manifestation, which divorced the economic from the political. Uh, and this actually, I thought sorry you said short. I'm sorry, but I'll just say uh shortish.

Natasha Piano 49:06

Yeah, they're big questions.

Miloš Jovanović 49:09

It's really interesting, right? Fukuyama in some ways sort of is Hegelian. It looks to Hegel as the idealism, kind of pushes back against Marx in some ways, but Karl Marx would agree with him, right? For him, socialism was an expression, right, of liberalism, right? It was the ultimate kind of expression of the ideas of freedom and liberty that were inaugurated with the French Revolution, for example, that sort of fateful moment that Nank talks a bit about. Yet the 70s and 80s is this kind of big crucible, uh, where uh created the conditions for a liberalism beyond the state, right? Where the state retreats both from economic structures and power, but also retreats from the idea of managing space and society. Thinking of Margaret Thatcher, right? There is no such thing as a society. There are only individuals.

David Myers 50:01

And there are the American analog analog, the the the of the second great American Revolution, Ronald Reagan. Yeah. And deregulation as sort of the instrument of stripping down government to its appropriate size.

Miloš Jovanović 50:16

But also stripping uh collective forms of belonging, right? Think about the death of American unions. Now they have a revival, but the Pat Coast strike was uh the kind of you know hammer and uh the the last nail in the coffin of of that that idea of collectivity. And and suddenly we're all wound up bowling alone, right? In some ways. Suddenly. Suddenly, suddenly. So I I think there's something there, and we can talk about that.

David Myers 50:46

Let's spin ahead to the present. Because you hinted in your recitation of the Yugo statistics that something new is happening. So could you speak in light of what you've just described in the 70s and 80s, and a kind of version of a very um uh a very kind of um uh sterile and and lonely form of liberalism. Can you speak to the Mamdani effect? I mean, what are you seeing? You're seeing something, is what I'm picking up. What are you seeing?

Miloš Jovanović 51:16

Well, I mean, think about Mamdani. Uh I think Mamdani is not the first. He's a kind of result. We can think about Bernie Sanders and AOC periods. Uh, it's interesting who the ideological precursors that he speaks to, for example, are. Uh, you know, uh, he's not, even if he's seen as a kind of anti-colonial actor, he doesn't speak to Franz Vanon in his victory speech. He cited Eugene Debs, right? The kind of American socialist thinker, um uh political actor. Um I I want to take us to another place, actually, to respond. I want to take us to Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and the kind of site of the most brutal siege of the of the 20th century, of the second half of the 20th century, pardon me. Um the anthropologist Stef Jansen wrote this really great book called Yearnings in the Meantime: Normal Life and the State in a Sarajevo apartment complex. And it was a really interesting book that kind of looked at an apartment complex during the siege in Sarajevo during the war and a kind of post-war period after. The post-war period that was marked by things like the creation of a plurinational state, the European integration, privatization, economic privatization, neoliberalization, the kind of post-socialist transition that was in this case also post-conflict. And what he finds is really striking, right? He finds that people yearn very deeply. You touched on this as well, Harry. Yearn for a state, right? Yearn for something that will provide them with normal lives, right? Secure, ordered, modern, Fordist lives with very realistic aspirations of forward movement. And at the same time, they understand that these things are always out of reach, right? They're always somehow not there to be grasped. Now, this is of course nostalgic, right? It kind of looks at a path where these things worked, but it's also trying to imagine a future. And I think what it's trying to do, it's trying to think about or it's trying to articulate. And I think the sort of American democratic socialism version tries to do something similar. It's trying to articulate a future beyond neoliberalism, beyond an economic, like sort of a deeply economic liberalism.

David Myers 53:34

Shorn of political liberalism and its ideals of equality.

Miloš Jovanović 53:37

And in fact, what they are articulating, right? Uh, you know, Jansen talks about uh that despite a vast dispersed governmental apparatus, uh, his interlocutors talk about how there was no system, right? There wasn't a normal state. Um, right? They they they often talked about sort of feeling dispossessed by corrupt elites, uh, political reasoning that winds up being anti-political in some ways. Um, and uh in some ways, right, they see politics as a kind of immoral play of crooked kleptocrats. And I think there's something to be said there about the ways in which the neoliberal model failed sort of fundamentally because it didn't hold up to the political principles of equality, accountability, rule of law, right? All of these structures. So I think that the current yearning for a state, the current yearning for order that we find in Bosnia, but we might find in Los Angeles, we might find in New York, uh, elsewhere, uh, is also in some ways a yearning for political, um political voice.

David Myers 54:49

This is yeah, so it it it may well be that the form of liberalism that won the day is economically inspired neoliberalism. If I that may have won the day. And so sort of is that is that the predicament we face today? I mean, I'm curious what do you think? Is that is that is that kind of what requires the repair? And is did did Fukuyama not grasp that prospect that we'd have a kind of hypercharged capitalist version of economic liberalism that would sort of surpass and and best and marginalize and undermine political liberalism?

Natasha Piano 55:33

Yeah, I I I I think that's right. You know, I I think that's right that um and maybe something that he was anxious about and therefore tried to optimistically overcome. I think um something that Miles said that reminded me of the kind of conservative that Fukuyama is, which is ironically not a neoliberal and not a neoconservative, at least as he presents himself in this book. He doesn't, he's not satisfied with this economic version of man who's satisfied by his appetitive desires. He thinks that we um we're not we're not convinced, we're not happy with that depiction of man and that ideas matter. Those are the two things that he thinks I'm gonna do.

David Myers 56:23

This is the most unreconstructed idealist one has ever seen. He believes in the constitutive nature of ideas.

Natasha Piano 56:30

Exactly, exactly. He he believes in that ideas shape reality. Yeah. Okay.

David Myers 56:36

And shape matter, materially matter.

Natasha Piano 56:38

They materially matter. The ideas that we have become might become real in the real world. It's it's Plato, but it's also something that's so foreign to us because we don't like to say it. He says, we don't like, we're uncomfortable with it because we think it goes against our capitalistic selves, our those who believe in modern natural science or the scientific method or any of these other progressive, cumulative tools that we have been working with since the 17th century. And he's like, Yeah, but so what? Ideas, our ideas about liberalism, our ideas about democracy, our ideas about capitalism, uh, and our ideas about political liberalism will shape the future, uh future, the end of history. You know, the end of history is kind of like a trope. A trope is vende, I guess. It's it means to turn away or pivot or something. So he's I think inviting us uh with this term

David Myers 57:26

for the political theorist and the intellectual history, this is food for this the starving artist. But is he wrong? Is he wrong? Is he wrong about this? I mean, I I'm completely drawn to that idealist. But the the question I posed was has in fact

Natasha Piano 57:44

Look, this is so weird for me. I um so I think it's I think it's worthwhile to like talk about what he thinks in this respect. You know, the ancients, they thought that time moved in this circular way, right? There's a circadian with them. Fukuyama and Hegel, they they think that there's no a direction to history and it's progressing forward, advancing human freedom every day, whether we know it or not. And I have spent my life opposed to this latter directionality, this progressive view of history. But I I I don't think it's necessarily just circadian cyclical regime changes when we go from democracy to tyranny to all these things. I think actually it's more like a slinky where where we, you know, where it doesn't slinky of history has a nice sound to it. But isn't that good? Slinky. It's like a slinky, you know, because we're we're we're suspicious of these directions. We don't like that he called it the end of history because we don't like the certainty. Uh it seems, it seems arrogant to think that we know that this is a progressive directionality. And yet we, as last men, as modern men, can see all of the different iterations of revolution and regime change that have come before us. So, what do we do with that? I think that it means there's some kind of equilibrium to political change and that ideas matter once they are placed alongside of materialist, um materialist circumstances. And the slinky approach kind of helps us understand the role of ideas, but also come and temper it with economic realities that um that that kind of work synergistically with those ideas.

David Myers 59:24

So I'm just sort of curious. I mean, I I want to hold on to as much of that idealist perspective uh as possible too. I I mean, I I wonder, and you sort of nuanced it by talking about sort of idealism in material. Yeah, the slinky. Um Do you think ideas are driving the illiberal moment that we inhabit as well? Like do you think there's a there there's an ideological, a coherent ideology that's that's that's driving that as well? I mean, you could say it's as I tend to think of it, as it's it's kind of a highly predictable reaction to the sort of boundless optimism of the globalization push in the early 20th century, that we that it would manifest, that reaction would manifest in ethnocentric nationalism that very much privileged the local rather than the global. It's all very predictable, but that's not really an idea. That's a it's kind of a backlash. I'm wondering, you know, in your neo-idealism, would you would you say that?

Natasha Piano 1:00:19

I've heard that one before. I love it.

David Myers 1:00:21

Yeah. Would you are there ideas that are driving the ill illiberal moment?

Natasha Piano 1:00:25

Um, yes. I I do think that because look, I I am somebody who's so suspicious of denigrating the popul from a liberal perspective. From as a defender of liberal democracy myself, I am somebody who is suspicious of denigrating populism as some kind of incoherent or fraught ideological, narrow-minded perspective. I mean, everything is incoherent to some degree. You know, we all maintain ideological and political positions that are incoherent. The the problem that we face, I think as citizens in liberal democracies, is to give credence to the complaints. Uh, I don't know if it's their time, their perennial, they're kind of perennial ideas, a complaint of the unfounded optimism that electoral government, shorn of any economic redress, is going to actually make citizens feel like agentic beings filled with dignity. You know, I think that that's probably um that's misguided. So, like our errand as citizens of in liberal democracy is to understand where this populist complaint is coming from or where the illiberal attacks are coming from?

David Myers 1:01:36

I want to just cut to the chase. Is it a different model of civic engagement? I mean, that is not as sort of um episodic as you know, showing up to vote in the ballot at you know, to submit one's ballot. What what what form of civic engagement then can sort of answer that complaint about the inability of elections to instrumentalize change? Yeah.

Terry Tang 1:01:59

I think it's two very different conversations. I mean, the idea of liberal democracy, I mean, I don't I don't I think that that phrase, that that label has been leached of meaning because you know many things can be called. I mean, you can go down to a to a microscopic granular level as how local govern how local elections work, whether the California top two um, you know, elections in the governor's race works, is that liberal democracy or or a much broader philosophical idea of liberal democracy. So, unless you're separating, you know, um how elections work, how we rep truly represent what the people want, recognizing that the minority has a very important role to play in any society of choice, versus the that election problem, that election representing what what the populace and society might want in the direction and choices of policies from their representatives. That's what we generally mean by liberal democracy. And then the much bigger, much vaporous idea of what is liberal and what is democracy. I I think most Americans don't sit around thinking about what is liberal and what is a what is democracy. We kind of take it as you know what we just basically live with. And so we're all going to go to the polls or maybe voted, you know, in the California primaries already. Um that that to my mind is really different than the idea of what Pukiyama is talking about. Um and I so and also I think that he's an idealist in the way that he is an Aristotelian. So he goes all the way back to the ethics and looks at what government and politics, what Aristotle's politics and ethics means to a society. And those are big overarching ideas that you know whatever whatever society you're in, those are meaningful ideas. You would have read them if you were interested in how societies work. So I think Fukuyama is working at that level. He's not necessarily working at the level of what is, you know, what we typically mean by, you know, a democratic structure. Um, because you can have many different democratic structures. You can have, you know, all kinds of ways to vote and have a better outcome, have a better reflection of what people, you know, choose. So I I guess that's where a little bit of the confusion is. I think for people reading this book, it's like you can critique it that, well, it doesn't say anything about how messed up our elections are. It doesn't say anything about the fact that we have an electoral college that really actually distorts our popular desires. Um, he doesn't get into that. I mean, we're the biggest democracy.

David Myers 1:05:01

This is an interesting question. What what is the connection between the underlying idea and the instrumentalities or modalities that are intended to give expression to that very idea?

Terry Tang 1:05:12

The ideas. I think that the tools, the instrumentality is always imperfect. Um, you know, like maybe the idea is imperfect, too. The ideas, I guess, I guess I am a boomer. I guess I do believe in.

David Myers 1:05:27

I would knew I could pull it out again.

Terry Tang 1:05:29

I know. Uh equality and liberty. I think those are ideals that um certainly Aristotle was not talking about that, but those are ideals that I think are teleological. I think that, you know, with um with globalization, those ideals were globalized. There are that's why it's so I want to ask you this.

David Myers 1:05:51

Would you say that the fate of journalism from 1989 has you know been yoked to? This arc that has bent toward uh justice and equality for all. Like would you say, just looking at the way in which journalism has developed, that it has, you know, both accompanied and charted this teleological stream of history? Because it sure doesn't seem to a lay person, it sure doesn't seem that way.

Terry Tang 1:06:21

I don't think that's the job of okay, one thing. That's why it's such an honor to be with historians, because journalists, like we say, you know, Philip Grant said this back in 48, I mean, a long time ago, said that journalism is the rough draft of history. I wouldn't even say it's the rough draft of history. I think we are chroniclers. We are, it's very much we are in a pointalist kind of exercise. We will tell you with the best of our ability, with truth, what we see and what we hear and what we know to be facts, and we'll paint that every point of what we see. But we are not, journalists are not stepping back to do what you're doing or what you're doing in political theory and what you're doing in terms of understanding what happened in the 50s and in the 60s and 70s. So we provide um the points, like in a point-to-list painting, but we're putting those points on so that historians can then step back from it and understand what is the what is the picture that this, you know, provides. What is the picture that's being

David Myers 1:07:32

Well isn't it, we live in an era that has been described as post-truth. We live in an era in which uh the capacity to deceive and to deflect and to misinform is so great and enabled by the very technology uh that progress has brought to us. And I guess I I'm curious to know whether we think that that same idea of political liberalism that we have held up as worthy of aspiration is necessarily committed to a certain vision, a certain epistemological um perspective that believes in the very idea of truth, because there seems something has gone awry here.

Terry Tang 1:08:18

Well, something I would say that nothing we I hope you all are subscribers to the LA Times. Because we are doing our darnest to not have um fake news. We're the only industry, mainstream press, only industry that has corrections every day. So if we get it wrong, we will correct it. That is the only industry, uh commercial enterprise I know that will do this, other than people which, you know, Amazon will take back shoes that don't fit. But we will correct it on the record, and it will be in our archives for the end of time. Um the end of history. And you know, our history goes back 144 years, and I actually can look at everything that, you know, on PDFs, what we have written. Sometimes journalists are wrong, journalists are biased. We've done lots of kind of, I would say, wrong things. I mean, every human, every every part of history can be a crime scene. Journalism is just reflects society in many ways. However, American journalism is still a paragon because we go all the way back to kind of the founding, the founding, and um the idea that that the press um was as important as the government itself. That is nothing, that came out of something that is nothing of any other society had ever had that idea that there would be an independent press, independent critics, independent reporters. It was all the way back to Ben Franklin because he had a print, he had he had a press, he had to do something with it. So then he started writing things and printing things, and and that is an American innovation, um, of which, you know, um, you know, the LA Times is part of that tradition. So we cling to that. I mean, obviously, there are lots of there are lots of media outlets that claim to be the press, and they they are the press, but we still abide by um our our view that it has to be unbiased in some ways. That we are trying to tell you as the facts as we best see it. We're not making it up, and um and we our reputation um and our service to this community really rests on that. So that's never changed. Okay.

David Myers 1:10:52

I just have to clarify with our friends at the Wende what time are we wrapping up here? 11, but QA sort of cynical. 12. Yes. 12, I was gonna say okay, good. So we're gonna we're gonna move to the QA in just a minute, but I do want to um come to Neo-idealism.

Natasha Piano 1:11:09

To neoidealism.

David Myers 1:11:10

Well, yeah, the link, the linkage between political liberalism and sort of our epistemological state of being, like in this post-truth, or as the great Stephen Colbert would say, truthy world. Like what's what's the I I mean, do you share Terry's optimism? I guess is one way to ask the question.

Natasha Piano 1:11:32

Um about the post-truth world. I uh I think that I think that all the

David Myers 1:11:41

Wait, I just have to say, one of the interesting things about Fukuyama's claim is this notion that in the end of history, art and philosophy will kind of wither at the vine. We won't the this this era, this era of ennui, you know, boredom. Korjev uh actually, you know, understood this and left his job as a philosopher and became a bureaucrat of the European uh community. Yeah.

Natasha Piano 1:12:04

Yeah. I don't know. Okay, he says that. He's like, it might be this moment, but then we might become so bored and oversensitized by banal art that we might start to fight again because we wanna we wanna struggle for recognition and we're gonna be bored. So we're gonna go back to being these primitive beasts who fight about nothing and who don't care about liberty and equality. And I'm so afraid that that's gonna happen. So let's let's correct our ideas, he says, because they matter in the real world. And there's sometimes there's a disconnect between politics and epistemology that, like, we need we we don't have to be a historian, you don't have to be the editor of the LA Times, you don't have to be a political theorist to kind of apprehend that disconnect between uh politics and what we're treating as truth. And so it's like it's I am optimistic in that I think that there this is a moment where we can actually address that. One of them, you're asking me to be more concrete, so I shall try one of them. You know, Terry was talking about liber liberal democracy and how that's kind of become empty of meaning. And I think that's completely right, but correctable because at bottom we can maybe entertain the possibility that democracy isn't voting. And liberal democracy isn't this mishmash term that just means voting or elections or representative government. Maybe liberalism or the liberal part refers to elections and a free press and due process and all these things. And democracy refers to other kinds of concrete movements, social movements, uh, referenda, different institutions that work with liberal government. And that's why we call it liberal democracy, because there are liberal parts and there are democratic parts. But when we mishmash them together, then we get all these claims that, oh no, representatives aren't doing their job, they're not serving our interests. Like, look at they're not, there's the electoral college, looks what look what it's doing. Instead, maybe we can correct our ideas so that politics and epistemology work better with our intuitions, with how we actually feel about what is democratic, what we actually feel is liberal, so that liberalism can be cool again and not as susceptible to illiberal authoritarianism. And I actually have faith that maybe we could do that. Not that it'll work itself out magically, not that it horrible other thing. It could go in a very different direction, very different, but it's kind of up to us.

David Myers 1:14:36

Okay. Do you want to say a final word before we open up? Um, and you'll or would you like to reserve your final word for the end?

Miloš Jovanović 1:14:45

I mean, I I suppose I will, but uh, I'll try to be quick. Um I think um a few things that I was thinking about as y'all were talking. Uh one was the the kind of uh trying to get at sort of it's an idea and we're trying to reach it, but it's unreachable, reminds me of the teleology of communism, which is always around the horizon but never quite reachable. And I think that's that's both something that's led to the collapse of the really existing socialism, as we'd call it, and then I think led to the collapse of the neoliberal order. I mean, I think neoliberalism is is very much dead. It's it's dead and should be buried, but we could perhaps rescue some wonderful things from it while acknowledging its crimes, I think. And I think if we do not do that, if we do not account for the criminality, and I mean that this is a very important thing.

David Myers 1:15:37

You're saying criminality?

Miloš Jovanović 1:15:38

Yes, explicitly, right? Uh two million people died, uh, two million excess deaths of uh the transition to capitalism in Eastern Europe to happen. Those people don't uh factories that have been shuttered, uh uh uh the the the death of entire social worlds, uh right, uh all of those things mattered a lot. The Paul Bremer's regime of reconstituting Iraq's politics, economics, and society as a kind as the imperial governor of the United States after their aggression on Iraq in a similar model to uh uh you know we think about Russia and Ukraine. So uh uh I think that we we must account for these things, and we must account for the contradictions of something that Fukuyama does not do because he wants to shy away from the material questions. But there there is a contradiction. If we push for democracy, uh right, can we push for democracy in the workplace too? What would it look like, right, uh, that we not only talk about what we do with society, but we recognize that society also involves things like division of resources, division of who gets to think about the world, who gets to think about history, right? And who must think about or do other things uh to survive. And I think both locally and globally. If we can solve that contradiction, then I think there is a future for freedom and for equality. But that's a challenge of the world. That's a big hypothetical for us.

David Myers 1:17:15

That's a very big hypothetical. And and you've put on the table a whole new question in terms of your call for accountability, which is what does justice look like? What does reparative justice look like as uh as a response to what you call the criminality uh of the neoliberal order? But um, maybe we'll get to that at the very end. I want to now open up to uh questions uh from this um impressive audience. Um we have a question right here. Do we have a microphone? Great. Maybe we'll just we'll take a series of questions first, and then we'll respond since we're gonna wrap up in about 10 minutes.

Audience 1 1:17:49

Hi, thanks. I'll try to be brief. Um so 1989. We're looking at the end of Reagan, uh, a person who has done more than anyone else in American history except maybe Donald Trump to withdraw the promises of liberty and equality for most people. Uh we're also looking at 1988 was the Jesse Jackson presidential campaign, the closest the American left has come to power between George McGovern and Bernie Sanders. Uh it's also a moment of incredible racial tension. Every time I hear the 1989, I hear the first line of Public Enemies Fight to Power. Um Well, I'll get to the question, but there's some important background to this, right? At the end, um, so Fukuyama's essay comes out in the national interest, not the National Review, edited by Irving Kristol, major neocon thinker. Uh, around these same couple of years, you have Alan Bloom's The Closing an American Mind, you have Charles Murray's The Bell Curve, you have the building of this sort of post-Ragan, extremely right-wing intellectual infrastructure, a sort of alternative public sphere. At the same time, you also have postmodernism, which was not mentioned at all today, which I think is fascinating. Um, the idea of the end of history as being carried by people like Baudrillard and Jean Lyotard and Frederick Jameson under the banner of postmodernism. Well, my question is why did you decide to read this book completely outside of its historical context and take Fukiyama seriously as an intellectual as an intellectual instead of as a symptom of the rise of fascism in America?

David Myers 1:19:50

Okay. Um I think we said we'll take a few questions and then we'll come back. Not not we said that at the outset. That's a very compelling question. I think we have a question right to

Audience 2 1:20:04

Is there any insight into uh how we can use this uh uh the reasoning, this complicated reasoning to help save liberal democracy when words themselves have kind of lost their impact. We're living in a time when the meaning of words is being challenged all over the place. So as a writer, I'm concerned with that. Right.

David Myers 1:20:36

We have a question here, and then we'll oh, whatever. Please go. Sorry, that's nice.

Audience 3 1:20:45

How can we introduce a slinky model to educational systems all over the country?

David Myers 1:20:52

Okay. How can we introduce a slinky model? Okay, you you may have to patent this. All right, well, maybe we'll address this first round of questions, beginning with uh the um uh uh challenge to our lack of uh about our lack of contextualization. Miloš wonderful.

Miloš Jovanović 1:21:10

I'll take it first. I mean, I I think we were I tried to be quite critical of him. Uh I think uh, and I had a whole thing written out about Jameson and postmodernism, we just didn't get to it. But uh we can chat about it later. I'll say one thing. You are right about the contextualization of this and the relationship between neoliberalism and sort of neoconservatism, which are not so separate, in fact, and fascism. There is a kind of continuity. But Fukuyama is not a fascist, right? Um he is many, many things, but he is not a fascist, particularly not in the ways in which fascism is exists and is experienced today. So the denial of the notion of equality in the first place, the role of extreme laurel of hierarchy, the questions about race and gender that are sort of fundamentally foundational to the thinking, they are not foundational to the thinking of Fukuyama. So I think we we we have to think about it in that relationship. And the the con the specific context of this, um, I think we touched it on a broader, uh, on a broader sense, so we can put it um so it can be intelligible, I think, without the sort of explicit details that you that you outline. Um because in some ways, I don't think it matters that like the specificities of which journal or where uh you know it was published, I don't think matters as much as the kind of specificities of the uh broader structural transformations that happen, and those start before the 1980s.

Natasha Piano 1:22:50

Can we do it again? Because I think I read the room wrong. You want to we I could talk about Leotard for an hour. Um but no, I think this is a really important question because our instinct, there's a very clear lineage here, and academics love to do these genealogical games. Fukuyama is uh hunting, he wrote this article for the national interest article because he was invited at the University of Chicago by Alan Bloom, who is co-jev student, or uh to give this give this piece. And so it's really seductive or tempting to create these really linear genealogical lineages and then make political accusations about each of these intellectuals giving rise to an American fascist movement coming spinning out of Reagan republicanism, Simi Valley republicanism, or even a broader Irving Crystal kind of neoconservatism. But what I loved about returning to this book is kind of unsettling all of that against the rise of American fascism itself, because Francis Bukiyama is definitely not a neoliberal. He's definitely not a neoconservative in the same kind of Crystallian tradition in which he's placed. He's offering an alternative, which is you can say whatever you want about it, but it's actually far more capacious and productive than maybe what you would call the closing of the American mind kind of orientation or a crystal orientation, even if it were, if even if it was published in the in national interest. It shows us that we can really displace these genealogies in the service of undermining um different kinds of extremist conservatism that that are no longer our taste or not are certainly too many, not our tastes, but uh growing in in popularity. So I that's why I think it's refreshing to come um back to this book to 37 years later.

Terry Tang 1:24:50

Um yeah, I didn't read this book as a polemic. I thought it was interesting in sort of his um traversing history. And I I think he's a you know, he is a broad thinking person. Whereas the closing of the American Mind, the um the bell curve, those are polemics, and you can take them as you will. You know, they were they collected evidence to make a point, and that point, you know, to many people was you know, irreprehensible or very, very um just wrong. In any case, I did not see this book as a polemic. And and that's why I think it's interesting. That's why I think he he says that here are threats that I see. And I think some of those threats he talked about, which back then um about income inequality and that disparity of income and um economic benefits, even within powerful, wealthy societies, is a real threat to um liberty and equality. And I was, you know, I think that that's a point that we can all sort of say is true.

Natasha Piano 1:26:03

Also, he wants he he wants us, you know, Fukuyama wants people to, or his call at the end is we need to make value judgments and not and not kind of devolve into a relativistic stance that's so accommodating. Whether whether you like that or not, it's it's still so it's presents a normative position that's kind of that is purposefully distinct from you know other currents.

David Myers 1:26:30

I would say, just to answer the challenge, um he's so much better than the neoconservatives whom you situated, embedded him in the midst of. I mean, he's such a better thinker. He's so much uh better informed historically, he's a sharper philosophical mind. Um, and I have to say, I think we all have this like really um kind of thrilling to go back to this. We don't remember, we we remember the Fukuyama of the guy who got it completely wrong in this kind of laughable way. That's we're and to go back to him was really quite compelling. I mean he's no Carl Schmidt. You want to talk about a fascist tax? Go to political theology in 1922. That's a fascist tax. This is not a fascist tax. This is a kind of Burkean version of um, you know, what a liberal order should look like. We can debate that. We can disagree with it without necessarily stigmatizing it as you know, belonging to this very tinny um sort of Americanized fascist tradition. What I find really interesting your question is why I was kind of on the verge of bringing postmodernism into the conversation when I talked about the epistemological basic. I think that's a really interesting conversation. Sort of the epistemological unsettling that postmodernism, to my mind, very productively brought to uh the uh conversation um, you know, stands in quite stark contrast. To Fukayama's kind of sort of you have to sort of admire the sweeping claims about the truth claims that he makes about liberalism and its ascent. I think that makes for a really interesting conversation. I regret we didn't have time to engage it, but I think that's a point I resonate deeply with. Do you want to say something about what we can do about bringing the slinky view of history to uh your public school, your neighborhood public school?

Natasha Piano 1:28:31

I the slinky, um well, no, I'm serious about it. You know, because I do think it accords with how we we feel about history, but not necessarily what we say about history. And I think it is unproductive to get into these kinds of like, well, you're you're talking about pedagogy. And how do okay, you sorry, let me start over because I think if I correct me if I'm wrong, the question was more about how do we implement this kind of historical vision into our pedagogy. And it's a really important question in the face of the what do we do now conversations where we don't know how to teach our kids anymore. We don't even know how to, we don't know what to teach. They're not gonna go to college, right? Who needs to save money for college? It's a lit are the liberal arts, are they just gonna be written out all the way down to kindergarten education that and some similar kinds of conversations I have about my my my the approach taken in my daughter's first grade class. So it's uh it's a really important conversation, but I do think it un underscores that the how important the humanities are. I remember when I was growing up, it was all about no child left behind, and let's just all do STEM and girls who code, and then you know, now the robots are gonna be coding everything. So there's really no point in learning how to code. But there is a point in learning how to be human, and there is a point in learning how to ask a question if we're going to take seriously the fact that we are going to be devolving a lot of that kind of work to artificial intelligence. And I think that's something that needs to be reiterated and could easily be implemented at every stage of education that I'm taught. Kindergarten to professorial mandates, to the ones, the journalistic endeavors that we undertake.

unknown 1:30:16

I think that was not easy to quote.

Natasha Piano 1:30:19

I know.

David Myers 1:30:20

Yeah, apropos AI, I just want to remind people that the next installment of this series will be on June 10th in this very room, where we'll take up AI and the future of history. Um, I will say that um we have kind of um meandered a bit around the question of the end of history, which I under, which I understand as our shared commitment to forestall the end of history, to sort of reject any neat linear or teleological pathway to the end of history by complicating uh that path at every turn. Um and our intention here was really not to answer the in any definitive fashion, have we or have we not, but to raise in our own collective minds the questions that we need to be uh bringing to that question about where are we at in sort of the unfolding of history. Um I have to say it's been a really uh stimulating hour with you all. Thank you so much.