“In the 1990s and early 2000s, it looked like I was ahead, but after September 11, people started arguing that he was right,” he said. “But I don’t think it can be concluded that I will lose.”
He believes that liberal democracy is not just a random, culturally random byproduct of a particular historical moment, as some of his critics have argued. “I believe there is an arc of history, and it bend towards some form of justice,” he said.
In his new book, released Tuesday by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Fukuyama argues that liberalism is threatened not by a rival ideology, but by “absolutized” versions. of its own principles. On the right, proponents of neoliberal economics have turned the ideals of individual autonomy and free markets into a religion, warping the economy and leading to dangerous systemic instability. And on the left, he argues, progressives have given up personal autonomy and free speech in favor of group rights claims that threaten national cohesion.
“The answer to these discontents,” he wrote, “is not to give up liberalism, but to moderate it.”
Fukuyama says that Eric Chinski, his editor at Farrar, Straus, pushed him to engage with the most thoughtful critics of race-blind liberal individualism, such as the Black philosopher. Charles W. Millsrather than the latest media outrage fueled by activists against race theory.
He may not agree with them, but many critical racial theorists in academia, Fukuyama says, “are making serious arguments” in response to the history of liberalism, and continue practices, fail to fully extend equal rights to all.
He is more disgusting about the “post-liberal” American intellectuals, with their admiration for Viktor Orban of Hungary, like the legal scholar Adrian Vermeule (who he describes as having “courtized the idea of an openly authoritarian government”) and political scientist Patrick Deneen.
