Fukuyama writes with crystal-clear rationality – indeed, he has underestimated the power of irrationality in the past. He is working to rectify that in Liberalism and Its Discontents. He identifies “neoliberalism” on the right and “critical theory” on the left as the main threats to the American Republic. Those terms need to be unpacked, too: “Neoliberalism” refers to the economic schools in Chicago and Austria, which “sharply denigrated the role of the state in the economy.” This was the philosophy popularized in the 1980s by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Fukuyama believes neoliberalism was a legitimate response to the “excessive state control” of the late industrial era, “a valid understanding of the superior efficiency of markets” that “evolved into something of a religion” and led to “grotesque inequalities”. There was an inappropriate libertarian emphasis on “personal responsibility.” However, Fukuyama believes that individuals should be protected from “adverse circumstances beyond their control”. Markets must be regulated by the state. Economic efficiency is not the sole purpose of human life; there is also a social component. People crave respect, not just as individuals, but as members of groups of different “religious beliefs, social rules and traditions.”
And so there is a backlash from the left, an attack on the libertarian and capitalist excesses, the “primordial” individualist tendencies of neoliberalism. The ‘critical’ theory holds that individual and economic freedoms were only a smokescreen for the basic power arrangements underlying capitalist society. The system had been manipulated. Power lay in groups, in identity—in whiteness, in patriarchy, in a plutocratic corporate system. There was some truth to this: “Real societies are organized in involuntary groups,” Fukuyama writes. Critical theorists believed that liberalism “tried to impose a society based on European values on diverse populations with different traditions.” There was also a kernel of truth in it, but also a gross folly. Critical theory – as practiced by French deconstructionists such as Jacques Derrida – became an attack on the objective reality that was the ballast for liberal democracy. “The search for human universals fundamental to liberalism was simply an exercise of power,” the critical theorists argued. Fukuyama believes they adhere to “a radical subjectivism that rooted knowledge in lived experience and emotion.” It also led to theoretical academic exercises such as “critical race theory,” in which society was defined by immutable racial groups, the whites “privileged” and “colored people” oppressed.
Enter Donald Trump, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Britain’s Brexiteers – the right-wing populists of the past decade. If academics could trade radical subjectivity, so could demagogues. The idea that a divorced white woman with two children, who had three jobs, was “privileged” was gross folly. The idea that American society was divided between whites and “colored people” was simplistic. Large segments of the recent immigrant population, Latinos and Asians, did not want to be a part of it. Who spoke for these groups anyway? The loudest voices. Where was the legitimacy? If the truth was purely subjective, where was the reality? “Liberal societies,” Fukuyama concludes, “cannot survive if they are unable to establish a hierarchy of factual truths.”
Yascha Mounk’s analysis of the difficulties facing the “Great Experiment” of liberal democracy is very similar to Fukuyama’s, but he is a different kind of writer – more passionate and personal. He is Jewish, born and raised in Germany, now a proud American citizen. He is accessible in ways Fukuyama is not: “My political values are left of center. The American politician of the past 50 years that I most admire is Barack Obama.” It’s no surprise, then, that he agrees with Fukuyama about the economic inequalities imposed by the neoliberal regime over the past 40 years; and it’s no surprise, either, that he fears right-wing populism. His latest book, ‘The People vs. Democracy,” explored that threat. But he is equally shocked by the “challenge ideology” – his term for critical theorists. He believes that “rights programs that explicitly target members of certain ethnic groups, for example, provide strong incentives for members of all ethnic groups, including whites, to identify with their racial groups and organize themselves along sectarian lines.” And further: “Different democracies should never abandon a vision of the future in which ascriptive identities play a smaller, not a larger role.”
Mounk is a meliorist, not a radical. He understands that racial slavery is an enduring American taint and burden. He is not directly proposing the abolition of race-based programs such as affirmative action — and his argument is universal, encompassing and criticizing the anti-immigrant policies of his native Europe. Fukuyama agrees: “Social policy should aim for equal outcomes across society, but it should focus on fluid categories like class rather than fixed categories like race or ethnicity.” So both Mounk and Fukuyama pose a practical challenge to looming battles over identity politics in the Democratic Party and economic elitism among Republicans. An effective liberal democracy, Mounk writes, “must oppose monopolies that allow inefficient firms to destroy potential competitors.”