CULTURE CURRENT-Francis Fukuyama on changing your mind

Francis Fukuyama isn’t afraid to admit when he’s changed his mind. The political theorist and Stanford University professor has reversed himself several times throughout his career: on his defense of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, on his belief that free markets inevitably produce good outcomes, and more ​recently on identifying as a conservative.

But on perhaps his biggest contribution — his 1989 essay — turned-book, “The End of History,” which popularized the idea that the triumph of liberal democracy would open a new era of global peace and ​prosperity after the Cold War — he says his critics are the ones who are misguided. Speaking with Reuters from his office in Palo Alto, California, Fukuyama ‌discusses his new ​memoir, “In the Realm of the Last Man,” and what he thinks he's gotten right — and wrong — about "The End of History."

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. After a career spent writing about political science and institutions, what made you want to turn the lens on yourself?

Well, there was a couple of things. I’ve had to listen to complaints about "The End of History" and probably several times a week somebody saying, "When are you going to recant that thesis?" And it's all based on a complete misunderstanding of what I was arguing. I don't know how many interviews I've done over the years to try to explain that, but I thought I would just get the argument out straightforwardly. The other thing is ‌that the last 20 years or so of my career have had a very different focus. I've gotten very interested in the state itself: bureaucracy, the way governments deliver basic services. In American politics, it's front and center because Donald Trump wants to destroy what he calls “the deep state." My argument is that the deep state is absolutely necessary to any form of modern government and I wanted to explain exactly how I came to this set of conclusions.

The title of your memoir nods to your "End of History” essay, which became shorthand for a kind of triumphalism you say you never meant. What did you mean? "The End of History" is not my phrase. It was a phrase of the German philosopher Georg Hegel, the first historicist philosopher who believed that there was an overall progressive story to human history.

The end of history was not the cessation of events; it was really the goal or the direction of history. We've been experiencing a kind of progressive history over the last 40,000 years and we've seen ‌this rise of different forms of social organization. And the question is: where does that lead to? The Marxists also use the phrase "the end of history," but their end of history was communism. The reason I wrote the original article back in 1989 was (because) it was becoming glaringly obvious that the Soviet Union would never get there — and, if there was an end of history, it would be the stage before that, which was a combination of democracy and market ‌economy. That was my argument right from the start.

The part that I think people missed was that the title of the book was "The End of History and the Last Man." The last man, again, is not my phrase. It was one of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who basically said that at the end of history, you're going to get this creature that he derisively labeled the last man who had no aspirations because the historical struggle had been completed. The argument that I was making in that book was that people don't want to be last men or last women; that they're not going to be content just with peace and prosperity, which is what our current liberal order has brought us. They want to struggle for a struggle's sake. If people can't struggle for democracy and human rights because that victory has been won in a previous generation, then they're going to struggle against democracy because what they want to do is struggle. And I think that explains a lot of the populism and discontent that you see both on the extreme left and the extreme right today.

You write candidly about being wrong in public and breaking with your fellow neoconservatives over Iraq. What is it like ⁠to repudiate those who helped form ​you? I broke with several of my longtime friends over this. They stopped speaking to me for a period of 15-20 years after ⁠that happened. But it's something I could live with pretty easily because I had other friends; I had other social circles I could inhabit. It did indicate to me how hard it is actually to really admit that you're wrong. Politicians hate doing that. I wish they would be honest about that.

You write about how the Iraq reversal forced you to rethink other topics. What's the most recent thing you've changed your mind about? I really don't regard myself as much of a conservative anymore — and I think that was not just in response to the Iraq war, but also to the ⁠financial crisis in 2008, because American conservatism in the early 2000s was built around a muscular foreign policy and a belief that free markets would be self-correcting and self-sustaining. And it turned out that neither of those was true. They both led to enormous disasters for American foreign policy and for the American and global economy, and it really seemed to me by around the year 2010 that these two fundamental conservative ideas were just wrong.

I was running an international development program when I was teaching at Johns Hopkins at that time, and it was ​pretty clear to me that a lot of the traditional social democratic agenda was really what had underpinned the stability of a lot of modern democracies at a time when a lot of conservatives were arguing for this very strict, neoliberal policy: not giving anybody handouts, not doing redistribution because that would undermine property rights and so forth, so there are other ideas that fell in that period. Do you think it's harder to change your ⁠mind today than in the past? Is society forgiving enough when people do?

Certainly, in the United States, the degree of polarization is so deep that it's really hard to change your minds. American elections now are centered around these very small populations of swing voters that could be persuaded to vote for the other party, but with every passing year, the number of such voters decreases. Our polarization is now what social scientists call "affective polarization," where you're not just disagreeing on policies — you really actively mistrust the other side. It takes on this very personal element, and I think that is a big barrier to discourse, to being ⁠able ​to rationally discuss contentious issues. That has to be the basis for changing your mind, and I think that's become much harder in the U.S. today.

Your whole account of history runs on this desire for recognition, which in a way is a very human one. As we hand more work and power to AI agents, does that framework survive? What most concerns you? I think AI is likely to be very bad for democracy for a whole bunch of reasons. The economic impact of it is going to hit a lot of middle-class people that have perfectly respectable jobs right now, but those are going to be automated away. It's going to concentrate wealth in the people that create these machines, and we're seeing this already.

It is going to raise these interesting and troubling questions about what it means to be human because you're going to have machines that are going to be able to, from the outside, replicate a lot of the behavior of an actual ⁠human being. Whether that undermines our own sense of our own dignity, well, that's also a possibility and a danger. I really think that this is going to be the big challenge of the next generation. The book closes on the future of liberal democracy. Is there a question you're still chasing, or one you haven't answered to your own satisfaction?

One of them has to do with proceduralism, because a liberal regime is built on a rule of law. ⁠And it seems like every liberal regime just piles up rules without end, to the point where it becomes very hard for them ⁠to actually accomplish things like build infrastructure (or) make important decisions. It's not clear to me that that process can be moderated or reversed, and I think it needs to be reversed if you're actually going to pursue certain kinds of collective ends. The final one is something that I raised first in the book I published in 2000, "Our Posthuman Future,” that was focused on biotech. Now you've had this fusion of information technology and biotechnology where you can begin to manipulate some very deep things in human nature and you can use AI to help you do that. And the question is: How much of that freedom do we really want to exercise? Do we really want to be able to change some important deep ‌things about what we regard as our natures? If so, that's going to have ‌important consequences for things like human rights because I believe that our understanding of human rights is rooted in assumptions that we make about what's important to human beings as a species. Those are some of the things I worry about.

The perspectives expressed ​in Culture Current are the subject’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Reuters News. (Editing by Aurora Ellis)