Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background to show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. This week we're in the middle of a Deep Background mini series on international power and the people who shape it. In this episode, we're fortunate to have one of the world's best known public intellectuals to help us explore important aspects of these questions. Francis Fukuiyama is a scholar based at Stanford University, where he's a professor of political science and a Senior Fellow at the Spoli Institute for International Studies. For thirty years now, he's been writing fascinating, influential books about democracy, political order, how it devel ellops, how it changes, and how it can decay. He first came to global attention with an essay and book, The End of History and the Last Man, published just at the point that the Cold War was beginning to come to an end. Since then, he's published, among other things, two massive six hundred and fifty page books on the nature of political order from pre human times to the French Revolution, and then on political order and political decay from the Industrial Revolution to the globalization of democracy. Most recently he published a fascinating book on identity and contemporary politics. Today, we're going to delve deep into the question of what decay is, whether the United States is entering a period of decay that is going to effect its global standing, its relationship with other countries in the world, and particularly China. Sometimes controversial, always provocative, and frequently extraordinarily deep, Frank Fukuyama is the perfect person with whom to discuss the trajectory of democracy in the world and in the United States today. Frank, thank you so much for being here. Frank, even before Donald Trump was elected, in fact, a good deal before, you published one of your big books called Political Order and Political Decay, in which you introduced the idea of a form of democratic decay and suggested that in a range of ways, the United States was starting to enter a period of such democratic decay, although not perhaps in every way. I wonder if we could begin with the concept of decay, and if we start with some definitions, we might be able to jump start a deeper conversation about what is and is not happening with respect to decay in the United States and of democracy in other democratic countries. Sure so, my teacher in graduate school. With Sam Huntington and his famous nineteen sixty eight book Political Order and Changing Societies, talked about the process of political decay where society has developed faster than political institutions. People's expectations rose, the political system didn't meet those expectations, and that led to instability. My concept is based on that. It's similar, but it goes off in a couple of different directions. So I do think that the ability of a political system to meet expectations is critical for stability. But the reason that they don't meet expectations oftentimes has to do with two factors. One of them is just the excessive rigidity of the system. It's too hard to reform, so that even though elites may recognize that the system is not keeping up with the demands placed on it, they can't do anything to fix it. But the other one, which wasn't really similar Sam's framework, was this idea of political capture by elites use their wealth and power to basically grab hold of parts of the state and to brend those parts to their own self interest. Both of these things were things I saw happening in the United States. We had obvious problems with our democracy that made it less responsive to popular demands, but we couldn't change it because we have a very rigid constitutional system that is extremely hard to change. But we also had this process by which very powerful organized interest groups were ensconcing themselves in different parts of the state and burnding it to their own wishes. And I think in many ways that was one of the conditions that led to this upsurge of populism represented by Donald Trump, that ordinary people felt the system wasn't serving them. So those are the senses in which I thought the system was. Hey, Frank, building on what you just said about populist authoritarianism, which in the US we had Donald Trump as our version, but we got him out after one term. So in global terms, that's actually a win in response to populist authoritarianism. If you compare that to places like Hungry or Poland, where populist authoritarians have so far been more durable, or certainly Russia. Do you see populist authoritarianism then as just a symptom of decay that's actually caused by capture by elites, that is, the public. A lot of members of the public feel like they can't get access and so they give you, in turn trump or a victor orbon or. Is it also, that is to say, not just a symptom of the other causes of decay, but also a contributor to the decay, because at least in ordinary terms of the word decay, you know, you have someone who's an authoritarian, they will undercut democratic institutions even further and make them seem illegitimate and even less responsive to popular demand. Well, yeah, it's all of those things. So, first of all, the particular form that decay took after twenty sixteen, with the rise of populist nationalists, was not simply the result of rigid political systems. I mean, Japan has a very rigid political system, but I don't think it's really suffering from the kind of decay that we're experiencing. So there was something else going on in society, which, when combined with the rigidities of the system, I think produced this populist upsurge. You know, those changes in society I think had to do with economics and society. The society was splintering into at least two very distinct cultural groups, one of which was very well educated, open to a cosmopolitan, globalized world doing quite well, and the other part tended to live in smaller towns and cities or in the countryside, felt disconnected from all of the big socioeconomic and technological changes that had been happening. And that explains the particular resentments that emerged. That meant that the populace backlash when it came, wasn't just about economics. It was also about culture. It was about people feeling that the elites in the country had stolen the national identity, transformed it into something that they weren't comfortable with. That involved the downplaying of patriotism, of religion, of a lot of traditional social values. And so I think it required those sorts of social transformations mixed together with the rigidities of the system and the elite capture that led to our current situation. As your question about which way the causality moves, I think, you know, as in many phenomena, it moves in both directions. So I think the external changes in the economy and technology promoted this kind of social fracturing. But once the society fractured, it fed back into the decay because you know, people felt that they were trapped in this unreformable system. I want to go deeper into the polarization component of what you're describing. Before we do, let me just ask a further follow up question about this broader picture of decay. The causes of decay that you're describing are pretty country specific. Rigidity in a system could vary from country to country, Capture by elites could vary from country to country. Even polarization might be different depending on where you are. Yet, the decay of democracies constitutional democracies broadly speaking, is a phenomenon we're seeing in lots of different countries with pretty different circumstances over the last decade or so. Why this convergence among countries that are pretty different from each other if the core causes of decay are basically specific to the country, Well, first of all, just a kind of social scientific caution. I don't think we should overgeneralize, because you know, what's going on in Russia is very different from India, is different from Hungary, is different from the United States, and so there are very specific characteristics. But I would say that what's common is that sociological cleavage that I just described that almost everywhere you look, people that vote for liberal politicians tend to live in big cities or urban agglomerations that are well connected to the global economy. The people that vote for populous politicians tend to live in second and third tier cities, towns, villages, or in the countryside. And that's very true almost universally. That's true in Hungary, it's true in Turkey, it's true in Russia's true in the United States, it's true in Britain. And so I do think that there is a common sociology that connects all of the new forms of populism with one another. And probably the single biggest, you know cleavage there really has to do with education, because education has pushed people. First of all, it's affected very much their economic prospects, but it's also pushed them in very cultural directions. And so that's constant. But I think then you get into country specific differences. So in India, the populism has taken the form of religion rather than nationalism. I mean, the two overlap, you know, considerably, but there's a very specific desire to return India to its religious, you know, Hindu religious roots. There are other countries that, you know, in a way I've been able to mitigate the populism like Italy, that you don't have this red blue cleavage that we have in the United States, because you know, our winner take all, first past the post electoral system really rewards that kind of biarification into a two party system, whereas Italy's system is always rewarded much greater splintering, and in a way that's been a good thing because that's protected them from a populous takeover. So I guess one further thing to say is that we in the United States, I think, have a particularly unhappy historical legacy, which is a legacy of race. I do think that in the United States that racial history is particularly important in explaining a lot of the depth of the effective polarization, you know, the emotional part of the polarization that we're experiencing, which I think is much weaker in most European countries. That's a fascinating point. I tend to agree with you that there are very few powers in Europe to the kind of systemic racism in the United States that emerged from the history of slavery and then segregation in law, and then subsequently segregation to some degree in practice. That said, I do think if you look at a place like France with a colonial legacy, at a large population of people who are descendants of people who lived in colonies, specifically in North Africa. There are certainly tendencies towards, let's say, differential policing of different communities based on race, different economic opportunities based on race. It's just that the French pretend they can make that disappear by saying we don't see race. So I hear the point. I think it's a very interesting one. Let me ask about the identity issue that you're pointing two now, and you address that in another book on identity that was published a couple of years ago. I want to begin by asking about the right left politics around identity. You know, there was a long period of time in which the left in the US was gradually embracing the idea of identity politics, and the right was pretty skeptical of it and was arguing against identity politics. And yet, as you note in the book, one consequence of the rise of Trump has been the emergence of identity politics on the right. So how does it change things that everyone, as it were, on the political spectrum thinks that identity is crucial to human self expression. Well, for for someone like me, who's basically an old fashioned liberal, it makes liberal democracy extremely difficult. Let me just get a couple of definitional things. Clear, identity is a very broad concept, and it can be used for good purposes and bad purposes. And you know, I argued in that book Identity, that we actually need national identity. I mean, we need a common set of historical references narratives that bind us together as Americans. And each one of us is carrying around multiple identities in our professional lives, in our families, and our religion, you know, and so forth. The kind of identity that's really toxic for a democracy are those that are related to fixed characteristics. But even that is not so terrible, because you know, if you're female, if you're African American, if you're gay, you know, you have specific experiences that bind you to other people in that category that make you different from others. But I think that where identity politics becomes dangerous for democracy is when people begin to regard those kinds of fixed identities as essential to the way that they define themselves, such that they trump you know, other economic interests or opinions or things of that sort. And I think that's the situation that unfortunately the country has slid into, you know, the in the Halcyon nineteen eighties, we would argue over policy issues like should taxes be higher or lower, or should we have more or less you know, social welfare spending, and those, you know, are ultimately issues that can be compromised. But when you get into some of the extremes of the identity debate today, you have people saying, well, you know, on the extreme right, this is essentially a white, you know, European country, and you have people on the left saying, you know, this is a racist country of white patriarchy that's also never going to change. And those kinds of positions are really not negotiable, you know, in any meaningful way. And that also prevents people experiencing kind of a common sense of identity, which then allows them to compromise, wise, to deliberate, to argue about things, but ultimately to believe that they're part of a common political system in which they don't get everything they want. But you know, because it's basically a liberal democratic one, they also are represented and their voices are heard in a perverse way, though there's some overlap between the views of people who intensely disagree with each other. There, I mean to the extent that a kind of Afro pessimist view would say that racism is baked into the structure of the United States and cannot change, and to the extent that some white supremacists who embrace white supremacy, they would say the same. And so presumably, and you don't say this in the book, but presumably a middle ground position which would give us common cause, would give some acknowledgement to historical practices of racism, while simultaneously talking about the capacity for change that the United States needs to have, even if it were true that it never done so in a meaningful way in the past, and I think that's debatable. It needs to change in order to in order to go forward. Well, that's exactly right. You know. One of the ironies of the present moment is that the left and the right have in a way joined hands. On the left, you know, a certain type of essentialist identity politics in the end becomes indistinguishable from that kind of right wing nationalism that we're all blown into. These groups. We have these lived experiences that are shared only among those groups, and that there's really no common experience that can bind us together. I actually think that this is a wrong but also very destructive, and it should be perfectly possible to come up with a narrative that actually bridges the left and right in this country where you say, yes, there was an original sin of slavery that was continued shamefully well into the twenty a century. But on the other hand, the situation of African America as women, gays, and lesbians, you know, all of these marginalized groups is better than it was, and in many ways, I think we are living in the kind of most equal and open society that America has ever had. It's just that we have problems at the extremes, and many people don't don't believe that particular centrist narrative. But it is also true that in January sixth, twenty twenty one mob of people actually invaded the Capitol in what was, to my mind an extraordinary symbol of democratic decay. The people who were doing that were devoted to the idea that democracy hadn't functioned the way it ought to have, and that they could do something about it, and they could do something about it by force, and they had encouragement that we can argue about where there was incitement, but they had encouragement from the person who had been president of the United States. I want to use all of what you've been saying, and it's extremely helpful and clarifying to shift to the question of what this means for the power of democracies in the world, especially the US, relative to the emerging alternate models, and particularly the model of China. And to frame that question, I just want to begin by saying, it does seem really clear, at a distance of nearly thirty years since the end of the Cold War, that while liberal democracy did not definitively win a victory overall alternative systems, some form of market capitalism did. So, you know, the Chinese model is one that it's a state directed capitalism, but it's clearly market driven, and it's clearly capitalist. And at the same time as we're seeing decay and democracy, we're seeing innovation and variation on the Chinese side. I don't think that means that China's government has solved all of the problems that a government that wants to be legitimate has to be solved by a long shot. But they are offering a model that has brought a lot of people out of poverty, that seems stable, that seems functional, and that seems to be legitimate to a very large number of its citizens. So I wonder whether you think that the US's decay is really going to contribute to the process of its decline in global power and influence relative to China, because it's coming at just a moment when the Chinese system seems to be doing fairly well. Well, yes, I think that that's already happened. I think that our ability to respond to China has been very much weakened by our internal divisions, not to speak of Russia, where many Republicans have openly said that they dislike the Democrats more than they dislike you know, Vladimir Putin's Russia. So if there is ever a case of, you know, a great power being weakened by internal dissension, this is it. You know, I would say that we need to be a little bit cautious about projecting China's current status forward in history. It's true that they have done extraordinarily well over the last forty years in bringing their country up out of poverty, but you know, there are big problems in that system that have to do with what they themselves call the bad emperor problem. That is to say, any system with checks and balances on executive power, like our system is going to do worse than an authoritarian system in many circumstances, because an authoritarian system can turn on a diamond. If you've got a competent, wise leader at the top of the hierarchy, they can make a very very rapid shift. But you know what's happened in Chinese tree is you get a bad leader without saying, kind of unchecked power, and that becomes very dangerous and it was hugely destructive during a cultural revolution when Mao is really the last bad emperor that they had. Whether Shijimping goes down that path, I don't know, but he looks like he wants to. But you know, at this point you have to admit that they're doing relatively a lot better than we are, because they do seem to be quite purposeful and we do not. We'll be right back, Frank, may I push back just ever so gently on the bad emperor problem formulation. I mean from roughly nineteen ninety two when Dung Shoping stepped down till say twenty and twelve when it became clear that Shijinping was when he took over, going to do things differently. So for a twenty year period in between, the Chinese had a couple of rounds where there was no real emperor, where power was shared collectively among a group of pretty senior Communist party leaders, and they actually agreed amongst themselves to do ten year terms and then rotate and step down, and they actually did it. Now, I myself was I think inappropriately optimistic that that would be institutionalized, that that would continue over time. And it also had a big flaw, which was once you were only going to serve ten years, you had a lot of incentive to be as corrupt as possible, so you would still have money and influence for your family once your ten years was up. So they hadn't solved the transitions problem, but they had made progress towards solving it, and in that period they seemed to have to some degree come to terms with the bad emperor problem by a kind of balanced collective government. Then came Shi Jinping, who on the one hand, has made real strides against the corruption problem thereby legitimating the power of a communist party, but Obviously, when you're that much of a dictator, you do run into the bad emperor problem, right, what if someone in his position didn't didn't do well. It seems at least possible to me that they could rotate between these models that, you know, following Shijinping, they might go back to something more collective again. And while that doesn't have the clear predictability of the rule of a monarchy where you know that the eldest will inherit or a democracy where at least in principle you're supposed to have an election and the person with the most votes is supposed to win, it might actually be a way of maintaining a degree of stability for them. Well, that's looks that's all possible. I think that, however, the temptation to hold on to power, whether it's Hijinping or a successor, is going to be very, very great. The only reason that party secretaries gave up power after nineteen seventy nine was that they were all so traumatized by what had happened during the Cultural Revolution that they said, never again are we going to allow one guide to be able to hold that kind of power over us. They had to be really scared, you know, by that. But I do think that it's not clear that you can just alternate between these different unconstrained power periods and then constrained power periods, and that that could happen according to some nice, you know, peaceful institutional schedule. I do think that, you know, what drives the distribution of power is the experience of the abuse of power. And if you don't have that abuse, you know, firmly in your mind, you're probably not going to be willing to distribute power in the manner that they did, you know, in the nineteen nineties. But I you know, the two big questions are whether the United States can regain its mojo, you know, whether it can overcome the current I think really crippling of partizanship and polarization, restore something of a kind of national identity and national vision that would allow it to be effective in projecting a model out into the world. And conversely, you know, what's going to happen to the Chinese model, because I think if we continue to bump along the way we have, being as divided as we are for the next twenty years, and the Chinese keep growing, then yeah, it's going to be a world that's really dominated by China, or would be China's that want to share in some of that authoritarian glory. Are you saying, though, in that sense, that some decline on the part of us is probably inevitable and it maybe that's not such a terrible thing, or do you see that as actually pretty devastating thing, especially if the decline comes relative to undemocratic governments. I mean, I suppose I'm asking you to balance two different hats that you wear. One is the theorist who explains political development at a broad level. The other is as some who's committed, as I take it to the values of liberal democracy as actually the right values, the best values to have. You know, I preferred living in a world where the United States set the standard for global political institutions, and I don't look forward to going into a world dominated by a competent but overbearing and tyrannical China. But I do think that a world that was more genuinely multipolar, in which there were different approaches to doing things, and in which the United States didn't have that same degree of arrogance about itself and its own institutions, would probably be a better world. And it would probably lead to a kind of American foreign policy. So it's very equivocal answer to your question. So on the one hand, yeah, I don't look forward to a Chinese dominated world. But on the other hand, when we had the power, we didn't use it all that wisely. And I think that, you know, a little bit more modesty is probably befitting in a way that's almost in the deep sense of the word an ironic stance, you know, not irony in the cheap sense of the term, but in the deep sense of the term, that you're taking on board that alongside your commitment to the values that you believe in that I believe into the values of constitutional liberal democracy, we have to admit that in global affairs we made a lot of serious errors, and they weren't just random errors. They were errors associated with our faith in the constitutional liberal democracy that we're still committed to. I think there's something kind of profound about that position that you're taking. Well, you know, during the debate on the Iraq War, I remember this very well. The Bush administration was basically saying, just trust us, we're the dominant power and we're going to do the right thing. And I just remember arguing with someone my conservative pro Iraq war friends. You know, when I said, we don't believe that in our domestic politics, in American politics, we've never said, oh, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, they're good guys. Just trust them to do the right thing. We don't need all this structure of constitutional checks and balances because they'll make the right decisions. You know. In the end, we just don't believe that. We believe that power is dangerous no matter who wields it, and just because you like the person that happens to be wielding power doesn't mean that that's a good long term solution. And that's why we build institutions to constrain power, because when the powerholder changes, maybe the next guy isn't going to be so great. And it seemed to me that at that time we should have been applying some of our principles of constitutional government to international affairs and not just said, yeah, well we're the United States. We're good guys, so just trust us to do the right thing. That's a potentially in conclusion. Then the conclusion there would be that we should have done a better job of understanding our own constitutional values and practices and if we had done, we wouldn't have been so naive about the possibility of exporting them and exporting them in a very superficial way. I mean, that's that view says more like we should be doubling down, but in the correct way on our own values and our commitment to it, and that would have led us to recognize that invading a country and deciding we're going to put in place of conscertutional democracy is rather absurd aspiration to hold. Well, you know, if you really want to go down the road of this kind of debate, it's a complicated one. It goes back to Machia Valerie and Carl Schmidt and a lot of other people who have made an argument over the years that actually constitutional law based government is sometimes problematic because sometimes executive power is actually necessary and sometimes you actually do have to just trust the executive to do the right thing because you know, the constitutional rules don't allow you to act appropriately. And you know, that's an argument that I think is probably not taken seriously enough by many Americans that are so imbued with this idea that we have to constrain power, that they don't see cases where the use of powers is also necessary. You know, it leads to a political system that is I think actually fairly risk averse. You can see it right now with Joe Bowden right that we're all glad we had all these checks and balances on the presidency that kept Donald Trump from building his border wall and doing all these terrible things that he wanted to do. But those same checks and balances now prevent Joe Bowden from building the kind of welfare state and social protections that he wants to create. And so we've you know, we've settled for a relatively risk averse political system that puts a floor under bad stuff, but it also kind of puts a ceiling on top of good stuff. Whether it would be better to shift the floor and ceiling maybe worries both of them a little bit. That's an interesting question. Well, I look forward to discussing that with you in the future. I just want to thank you so much, Frank for your characteristically thoughtful and balanced insight, and for your extraordinary and still growing a body of work exploring the nature of political development and the nature of political order, which is so good to think with. Thank you. Sure, it's been fun talking with you. Noah, Thanks very much for having me on the podcast. Listening to Francis Fukuyama talk about his extraordinary body of work accrued over years and years made me realize that the problems that American democracy faces today are not entirely new. They go back before the election of Donald Trump, and even into the period when Barack Obama was president, when many liberals like me were a bit too self congratulatory about the trajectory of democracy in the United States. They can be seen clearly in the administration of George W. Bush, when the United States invaded Iraq and tried to create democracy there and in Afghanistan to little avail, and indeed, they can even be traced back further to the presidencies of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, in which many political elites suffered from an over enthusiasm about the prospect of democracy and how it seemed to have won the Cold War, when in fact it was market capitalism that had won the battle, and democracy was rising and spreading, at least in part as a piggyback on the successes of capitalism. In Frank's view, the sources of decay include excessive rigidity in our democratic system as well as capture by political elites, which in turn has led to a rise of populist authoritarianism. He sees these problems not only in the United States, but in a range of places in the democratic world, and he recognizes that they are leading to a genuine decline in the nature of democracy. From this, Frank notices arise in identity politics not merely on the left, but equally on the right, that in turn makes it extremely difficult, in his view, for our democracy to achieve the kinds of political consensus that are necessary to make change. Although Frank is rightfully cautious about assuming that the Chinese system of government has solved the problems that democracy is good at solving, he nevertheless acknowledges that the Chinese model has become a powerful one, and a significant one, and centrally the model with which democracy now has to grapple. The upshot, for Frank, is a reality of decay and decline, which he says, we don't necessarily need to treat as the end of the world. On the one hand, we should continue to believe in constitutional liberal democracy and try to make it better and to update it and make it work in the world that we have. On the other hand, we should admit that part of the reason we've gotten here is because of internal difficulties and conflicts within liberal democracy that need to be updated and that have resulted in serious mistakes that the United States has made in the world. In that sense, and only in that sense, he offers modesty as a model for thinking about what democracy is capable of accomplishing. The problems we discussed this week are enormous, structural, and complicated. My primary takeaway is that there are no clear or correct answers when discussing such important issues. What is needed is thoughtfulness, comparison, a little bit of irony, and a lot of realism about the world in which we live. Until the next time I speak to you, Bewell, think deep thoughts and have a little fun. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Mola Board, our engineer is ben Toalliday, and our showrunner is Sophie Crane mckibbon. Editorial support from noahm Osband. Theme music by Luis Gara at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Lydia Jeancott, Heather Faine, Carlie Migliori, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at bloomberg dot com slash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's original Slater podcasts, go to Bloomberg dot com Slash podcasts, and if you like what you heard today, please write a review or tell a friend. This is deep background

Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background to show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. This week we're in the middle of a Deep Background mini series on international power and the people who shape it. In this episode, we're fortunate to have one of the world's best known public intellectuals to help us explore important aspects of these questions. Francis Fukuiyama is a scholar based at Stanford University, where he's a professor of political science and a Senior Fellow at the Spoli Institute for International Studies. For thirty years now, he's been writing fascinating, influential books about democracy, political order, how it devel ellops, how it changes, and how it can decay. He first came to global attention with an essay and book, The End of History and the Last Man, published just at the point that the Cold War was beginning to come to an end. Since then, he's published, among other things, two massive six hundred and fifty page books on the nature of political order from pre human times to the French Revolution, and then on political order and political decay from the Industrial Revolution to the globalization of democracy. Most recently he published a fascinating book on identity and contemporary politics. Today, we're going to delve deep into the question of what decay is, whether the United States is entering a period of decay that is going to effect its global standing, its relationship with other countries in the world, and particularly China. Sometimes controversial, always provocative, and frequently extraordinarily deep, Frank Fukuyama is the perfect person with whom to discuss the trajectory of democracy in the world and in the United States today. Frank, thank you so much for being here. Frank, even before Donald Trump was elected, in fact, a good deal before, you published one of your big books called Political Order and Political Decay, in which you introduced the idea of a form of democratic decay and suggested that in a range of ways, the United States was starting to enter a period of such democratic decay, although not perhaps in every way. I wonder if we could begin with the concept of decay, and if we start with some definitions, we might be able to jump start a deeper conversation about what is and is not happening with respect to decay in the United States and of democracy in other democratic countries. Sure so, my teacher in graduate school. With Sam Huntington and his famous nineteen sixty eight book Political Order and Changing Societies, talked about the process of political decay where society has developed faster than political institutions. People's expectations rose, the political system didn't meet those expectations, and that led to instability. My concept is based on that. It's similar, but it goes off in a couple of different directions. So I do think that the ability of a political system to meet expectations is critical for stability. But the reason that they don't meet expectations oftentimes has to do with two factors. One of them is just the excessive rigidity of the system. It's too hard to reform, so that even though elites may recognize that the system is not keeping up with the demands placed on it, they can't do anything to fix it. But the other one, which wasn't really similar Sam's framework, was this idea of political capture by elites use their wealth and power to basically grab hold of parts of the state and to brend those parts to their own self interest. Both of these things were things I saw happening in the United States. We had obvious problems with our democracy that made it less responsive to popular demands, but we couldn't change it because we have a very rigid constitutional system that is extremely hard to change. But we also had this process by which very powerful organized interest groups were ensconcing themselves in different parts of the state and burnding it to their own wishes. And I think in many ways that was one of the conditions that led to this upsurge of populism represented by Donald Trump, that ordinary people felt the system wasn't serving them. So those are the senses in which I thought the system was. Hey, Frank, building on what you just said about populist authoritarianism, which in the US we had Donald Trump as our version, but we got him out after one term. So in global terms, that's actually a win in response to populist authoritarianism. If you compare that to places like Hungry or Poland, where populist authoritarians have so far been more durable, or certainly Russia. Do you see populist authoritarianism then as just a symptom of decay that's actually caused by capture by elites, that is, the public. A lot of members of the public feel like they can't get access and so they give you, in turn trump or a victor orbon or. Is it also, that is to say, not just a symptom of the other causes of decay, but also a contributor to the decay, because at least in ordinary terms of the word decay, you know, you have someone who's an authoritarian, they will undercut democratic institutions even further and make them seem illegitimate and even less responsive to popular demand. Well, yeah, it's all of those things. So, first of all, the particular form that decay took after twenty sixteen, with the rise of populist nationalists, was not simply the result of rigid political systems. I mean, Japan has a very rigid political system, but I don't think it's really suffering from the kind of decay that we're experiencing. So there was something else going on in society, which, when combined with the rigidities of the system, I think produced this populist upsurge. You know, those changes in society I think had to do with economics and society. The society was splintering into at least two very distinct cultural groups, one of which was very well educated, open to a cosmopolitan, globalized world doing quite well, and the other part tended to live in smaller towns and cities or in the countryside, felt disconnected from all of the big socioeconomic and technological changes that had been happening. And that explains the particular resentments that emerged. That meant that the populace backlash when it came, wasn't just about economics. It was also about culture. It was about people feeling that the elites in the country had stolen the national identity, transformed it into something that they weren't comfortable with. That involved the downplaying of patriotism, of religion, of a lot of traditional social values. And so I think it required those sorts of social transformations mixed together with the rigidities of the system and the elite capture that led to our current situation. As your question about which way the causality moves, I think, you know, as in many phenomena, it moves in both directions. So I think the external changes in the economy and technology promoted this kind of social fracturing. But once the society fractured, it fed back into the decay because you know, people felt that they were trapped in this unreformable system. I want to go deeper into the polarization component of what you're describing. Before we do, let me just ask a further follow up question about this broader picture of decay. The causes of decay that you're describing are pretty country specific. Rigidity in a system could vary from country to country, Capture by elites could vary from country to country. Even polarization might be different depending on where you are. Yet, the decay of democracies constitutional democracies broadly speaking, is a phenomenon we're seeing in lots of different countries with pretty different circumstances over the last decade or so. Why this convergence among countries that are pretty different from each other if the core causes of decay are basically specific to the country, Well, first of all, just a kind of social scientific caution. I don't think we should overgeneralize, because you know, what's going on in Russia is very different from India, is different from Hungary, is different from the United States, and so there are very specific characteristics. But I would say that what's common is that sociological cleavage that I just described that almost everywhere you look, people that vote for liberal politicians tend to live in big cities or urban agglomerations that are well connected to the global economy. The people that vote for populous politicians tend to live in second and third tier cities, towns, villages, or in the countryside. And that's very true almost universally. That's true in Hungary, it's true in Turkey, it's true in Russia's true in the United States, it's true in Britain. And so I do think that there is a common sociology that connects all of the new forms of populism with one another. And probably the single biggest, you know cleavage there really has to do with education, because education has pushed people. First of all, it's affected very much their economic prospects, but it's also pushed them in very cultural directions. And so that's constant. But I think then you get into country specific differences. So in India, the populism has taken the form of religion rather than nationalism. I mean, the two overlap, you know, considerably, but there's a very specific desire to return India to its religious, you know, Hindu religious roots. There are other countries that, you know, in a way I've been able to mitigate the populism like Italy, that you don't have this red blue cleavage that we have in the United States, because you know, our winner take all, first past the post electoral system really rewards that kind of biarification into a two party system, whereas Italy's system is always rewarded much greater splintering, and in a way that's been a good thing because that's protected them from a populous takeover. So I guess one further thing to say is that we in the United States, I think, have a particularly unhappy historical legacy, which is a legacy of race. I do think that in the United States that racial history is particularly important in explaining a lot of the depth of the effective polarization, you know, the emotional part of the polarization that we're experiencing, which I think is much weaker in most European countries. That's a fascinating point. I tend to agree with you that there are very few powers in Europe to the kind of systemic racism in the United States that emerged from the history of slavery and then segregation in law, and then subsequently segregation to some degree in practice. That said, I do think if you look at a place like France with a colonial legacy, at a large population of people who are descendants of people who lived in colonies, specifically in North Africa. There are certainly tendencies towards, let's say, differential policing of different communities based on race, different economic opportunities based on race. It's just that the French pretend they can make that disappear by saying we don't see race. So I hear the point. I think it's a very interesting one. Let me ask about the identity issue that you're pointing two now, and you address that in another book on identity that was published a couple of years ago. I want to begin by asking about the right left politics around identity. You know, there was a long period of time in which the left in the US was gradually embracing the idea of identity politics, and the right was pretty skeptical of it and was arguing against identity politics. And yet, as you note in the book, one consequence of the rise of Trump has been the emergence of identity politics on the right. So how does it change things that everyone, as it were, on the political spectrum thinks that identity is crucial to human self expression. Well, for for someone like me, who's basically an old fashioned liberal, it makes liberal democracy extremely difficult. Let me just get a couple of definitional things. Clear, identity is a very broad concept, and it can be used for good purposes and bad purposes. And you know, I argued in that book Identity, that we actually need national identity. I mean, we need a common set of historical references narratives that bind us together as Americans. And each one of us is carrying around multiple identities in our professional lives, in our families, and our religion, you know, and so forth. The kind of identity that's really toxic for a democracy are those that are related to fixed characteristics. But even that is not so terrible, because you know, if you're female, if you're African American, if you're gay, you know, you have specific experiences that bind you to other people in that category that make you different from others. But I think that where identity politics becomes dangerous for democracy is when people begin to regard those kinds of fixed identities as essential to the way that they define themselves, such that they trump you know, other economic interests or opinions or things of that sort. And I think that's the situation that unfortunately the country has slid into, you know, the in the Halcyon nineteen eighties, we would argue over policy issues like should taxes be higher or lower, or should we have more or less you know, social welfare spending, and those, you know, are ultimately issues that can be compromised. But when you get into some of the extremes of the identity debate today, you have people saying, well, you know, on the extreme right, this is essentially a white, you know, European country, and you have people on the left saying, you know, this is a racist country of white patriarchy that's also never going to change. And those kinds of positions are really not negotiable, you know, in any meaningful way. And that also prevents people experiencing kind of a common sense of identity, which then allows them to compromise, wise, to deliberate, to argue about things, but ultimately to believe that they're part of a common political system in which they don't get everything they want. But you know, because it's basically a liberal democratic one, they also are represented and their voices are heard in a perverse way, though there's some overlap between the views of people who intensely disagree with each other. There, I mean to the extent that a kind of Afro pessimist view would say that racism is baked into the structure of the United States and cannot change, and to the extent that some white supremacists who embrace white supremacy, they would say the same. And so presumably, and you don't say this in the book, but presumably a middle ground position which would give us common cause, would give some acknowledgement to historical practices of racism, while simultaneously talking about the capacity for change that the United States needs to have, even if it were true that it never done so in a meaningful way in the past, and I think that's debatable. It needs to change in order to in order to go forward. Well, that's exactly right. You know. One of the ironies of the present moment is that the left and the right have in a way joined hands. On the left, you know, a certain type of essentialist identity politics in the end becomes indistinguishable from that kind of right wing nationalism that we're all blown into. These groups. We have these lived experiences that are shared only among those groups, and that there's really no common experience that can bind us together. I actually think that this is a wrong but also very destructive, and it should be perfectly possible to come up with a narrative that actually bridges the left and right in this country where you say, yes, there was an original sin of slavery that was continued shamefully well into the twenty a century. But on the other hand, the situation of African America as women, gays, and lesbians, you know, all of these marginalized groups is better than it was, and in many ways, I think we are living in the kind of most equal and open society that America has ever had. It's just that we have problems at the extremes, and many people don't don't believe that particular centrist narrative. But it is also true that in January sixth, twenty twenty one mob of people actually invaded the Capitol in what was, to my mind an extraordinary symbol of democratic decay. The people who were doing that were devoted to the idea that democracy hadn't functioned the way it ought to have, and that they could do something about it, and they could do something about it by force, and they had encouragement that we can argue about where there was incitement, but they had encouragement from the person who had been president of the United States. I want to use all of what you've been saying, and it's extremely helpful and clarifying to shift to the question of what this means for the power of democracies in the world, especially the US, relative to the emerging alternate models, and particularly the model of China. And to frame that question, I just want to begin by saying, it does seem really clear, at a distance of nearly thirty years since the end of the Cold War, that while liberal democracy did not definitively win a victory overall alternative systems, some form of market capitalism did. So, you know, the Chinese model is one that it's a state directed capitalism, but it's clearly market driven, and it's clearly capitalist. And at the same time as we're seeing decay and democracy, we're seeing innovation and variation on the Chinese side. I don't think that means that China's government has solved all of the problems that a government that wants to be legitimate has to be solved by a long shot. But they are offering a model that has brought a lot of people out of poverty, that seems stable, that seems functional, and that seems to be legitimate to a very large number of its citizens. So I wonder whether you think that the US's decay is really going to contribute to the process of its decline in global power and influence relative to China, because it's coming at just a moment when the Chinese system seems to be doing fairly well. Well, yes, I think that that's already happened. I think that our ability to respond to China has been very much weakened by our internal divisions, not to speak of Russia, where many Republicans have openly said that they dislike the Democrats more than they dislike you know, Vladimir Putin's Russia. So if there is ever a case of, you know, a great power being weakened by internal dissension, this is it. You know, I would say that we need to be a little bit cautious about projecting China's current status forward in history. It's true that they have done extraordinarily well over the last forty years in bringing their country up out of poverty, but you know, there are big problems in that system that have to do with what they themselves call the bad emperor problem. That is to say, any system with checks and balances on executive power, like our system is going to do worse than an authoritarian system in many circumstances, because an authoritarian system can turn on a diamond. If you've got a competent, wise leader at the top of the hierarchy, they can make a very very rapid shift. But you know what's happened in Chinese tree is you get a bad leader without saying, kind of unchecked power, and that becomes very dangerous and it was hugely destructive during a cultural revolution when Mao is really the last bad emperor that they had. Whether Shijimping goes down that path, I don't know, but he looks like he wants to. But you know, at this point you have to admit that they're doing relatively a lot better than we are, because they do seem to be quite purposeful and we do not. We'll be right back, Frank, may I push back just ever so gently on the bad emperor problem formulation. I mean from roughly nineteen ninety two when Dung Shoping stepped down till say twenty and twelve when it became clear that Shijinping was when he took over, going to do things differently. So for a twenty year period in between, the Chinese had a couple of rounds where there was no real emperor, where power was shared collectively among a group of pretty senior Communist party leaders, and they actually agreed amongst themselves to do ten year terms and then rotate and step down, and they actually did it. Now, I myself was I think inappropriately optimistic that that would be institutionalized, that that would continue over time. And it also had a big flaw, which was once you were only going to serve ten years, you had a lot of incentive to be as corrupt as possible, so you would still have money and influence for your family once your ten years was up. So they hadn't solved the transitions problem, but they had made progress towards solving it, and in that period they seemed to have to some degree come to terms with the bad emperor problem by a kind of balanced collective government. Then came Shi Jinping, who on the one hand, has made real strides against the corruption problem thereby legitimating the power of a communist party, but Obviously, when you're that much of a dictator, you do run into the bad emperor problem, right, what if someone in his position didn't didn't do well. It seems at least possible to me that they could rotate between these models that, you know, following Shijinping, they might go back to something more collective again. And while that doesn't have the clear predictability of the rule of a monarchy where you know that the eldest will inherit or a democracy where at least in principle you're supposed to have an election and the person with the most votes is supposed to win, it might actually be a way of maintaining a degree of stability for them. Well, that's looks that's all possible. I think that, however, the temptation to hold on to power, whether it's Hijinping or a successor, is going to be very, very great. The only reason that party secretaries gave up power after nineteen seventy nine was that they were all so traumatized by what had happened during the Cultural Revolution that they said, never again are we going to allow one guide to be able to hold that kind of power over us. They had to be really scared, you know, by that. But I do think that it's not clear that you can just alternate between these different unconstrained power periods and then constrained power periods, and that that could happen according to some nice, you know, peaceful institutional schedule. I do think that, you know, what drives the distribution of power is the experience of the abuse of power. And if you don't have that abuse, you know, firmly in your mind, you're probably not going to be willing to distribute power in the manner that they did, you know, in the nineteen nineties. But I you know, the two big questions are whether the United States can regain its mojo, you know, whether it can overcome the current I think really crippling of partizanship and polarization, restore something of a kind of national identity and national vision that would allow it to be effective in projecting a model out into the world. And conversely, you know, what's going to happen to the Chinese model, because I think if we continue to bump along the way we have, being as divided as we are for the next twenty years, and the Chinese keep growing, then yeah, it's going to be a world that's really dominated by China, or would be China's that want to share in some of that authoritarian glory. Are you saying, though, in that sense, that some decline on the part of us is probably inevitable and it maybe that's not such a terrible thing, or do you see that as actually pretty devastating thing, especially if the decline comes relative to undemocratic governments. I mean, I suppose I'm asking you to balance two different hats that you wear. One is the theorist who explains political development at a broad level. The other is as some who's committed, as I take it to the values of liberal democracy as actually the right values, the best values to have. You know, I preferred living in a world where the United States set the standard for global political institutions, and I don't look forward to going into a world dominated by a competent but overbearing and tyrannical China. But I do think that a world that was more genuinely multipolar, in which there were different approaches to doing things, and in which the United States didn't have that same degree of arrogance about itself and its own institutions, would probably be a better world. And it would probably lead to a kind of American foreign policy. So it's very equivocal answer to your question. So on the one hand, yeah, I don't look forward to a Chinese dominated world. But on the other hand, when we had the power, we didn't use it all that wisely. And I think that, you know, a little bit more modesty is probably befitting in a way that's almost in the deep sense of the word an ironic stance, you know, not irony in the cheap sense of the term, but in the deep sense of the term, that you're taking on board that alongside your commitment to the values that you believe in that I believe into the values of constitutional liberal democracy, we have to admit that in global affairs we made a lot of serious errors, and they weren't just random errors. They were errors associated with our faith in the constitutional liberal democracy that we're still committed to. I think there's something kind of profound about that position that you're taking. Well, you know, during the debate on the Iraq War, I remember this very well. The Bush administration was basically saying, just trust us, we're the dominant power and we're going to do the right thing. And I just remember arguing with someone my conservative pro Iraq war friends. You know, when I said, we don't believe that in our domestic politics, in American politics, we've never said, oh, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, they're good guys. Just trust them to do the right thing. We don't need all this structure of constitutional checks and balances because they'll make the right decisions. You know. In the end, we just don't believe that. We believe that power is dangerous no matter who wields it, and just because you like the person that happens to be wielding power doesn't mean that that's a good long term solution. And that's why we build institutions to constrain power, because when the powerholder changes, maybe the next guy isn't going to be so great. And it seemed to me that at that time we should have been applying some of our principles of constitutional government to international affairs and not just said, yeah, well we're the United States. We're good guys, so just trust us to do the right thing. That's a potentially in conclusion. Then the conclusion there would be that we should have done a better job of understanding our own constitutional values and practices and if we had done, we wouldn't have been so naive about the possibility of exporting them and exporting them in a very superficial way. I mean, that's that view says more like we should be doubling down, but in the correct way on our own values and our commitment to it, and that would have led us to recognize that invading a country and deciding we're going to put in place of conscertutional democracy is rather absurd aspiration to hold. Well, you know, if you really want to go down the road of this kind of debate, it's a complicated one. It goes back to Machia Valerie and Carl Schmidt and a lot of other people who have made an argument over the years that actually constitutional law based government is sometimes problematic because sometimes executive power is actually necessary and sometimes you actually do have to just trust the executive to do the right thing because you know, the constitutional rules don't allow you to act appropriately. And you know, that's an argument that I think is probably not taken seriously enough by many Americans that are so imbued with this idea that we have to constrain power, that they don't see cases where the use of powers is also necessary. You know, it leads to a political system that is I think actually fairly risk averse. You can see it right now with Joe Bowden right that we're all glad we had all these checks and balances on the presidency that kept Donald Trump from building his border wall and doing all these terrible things that he wanted to do. But those same checks and balances now prevent Joe Bowden from building the kind of welfare state and social protections that he wants to create. And so we've you know, we've settled for a relatively risk averse political system that puts a floor under bad stuff, but it also kind of puts a ceiling on top of good stuff. Whether it would be better to shift the floor and ceiling maybe worries both of them a little bit. That's an interesting question. Well, I look forward to discussing that with you in the future. I just want to thank you so much, Frank for your characteristically thoughtful and balanced insight, and for your extraordinary and still growing a body of work exploring the nature of political development and the nature of political order, which is so good to think with. Thank you. Sure, it's been fun talking with you. Noah, Thanks very much for having me on the podcast. Listening to Francis Fukuyama talk about his extraordinary body of work accrued over years and years made me realize that the problems that American democracy faces today are not entirely new. They go back before the election of Donald Trump, and even into the period when Barack Obama was president, when many liberals like me were a bit too self congratulatory about the trajectory of democracy in the United States. They can be seen clearly in the administration of George W. Bush, when the United States invaded Iraq and tried to create democracy there and in Afghanistan to little avail, and indeed, they can even be traced back further to the presidencies of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, in which many political elites suffered from an over enthusiasm about the prospect of democracy and how it seemed to have won the Cold War, when in fact it was market capitalism that had won the battle, and democracy was rising and spreading, at least in part as a piggyback on the successes of capitalism. In Frank's view, the sources of decay include excessive rigidity in our democratic system as well as capture by political elites, which in turn has led to a rise of populist authoritarianism. He sees these problems not only in the United States, but in a range of places in the democratic world, and he recognizes that they are leading to a genuine decline in the nature of democracy. From this, Frank notices arise in identity politics not merely on the left, but equally on the right, that in turn makes it extremely difficult, in his view, for our democracy to achieve the kinds of political consensus that are necessary to make change. Although Frank is rightfully cautious about assuming that the Chinese system of government has solved the problems that democracy is good at solving, he nevertheless acknowledges that the Chinese model has become a powerful one, and a significant one, and centrally the model with which democracy now has to grapple. The upshot, for Frank, is a reality of decay and decline, which he says, we don't necessarily need to treat as the end of the world. On the one hand, we should continue to believe in constitutional liberal democracy and try to make it better and to update it and make it work in the world that we have. On the other hand, we should admit that part of the reason we've gotten here is because of internal difficulties and conflicts within liberal democracy that need to be updated and that have resulted in serious mistakes that the United States has made in the world. In that sense, and only in that sense, he offers modesty as a model for thinking about what democracy is capable of accomplishing. The problems we discussed this week are enormous, structural, and complicated. My primary takeaway is that there are no clear or correct answers when discussing such important issues. What is needed is thoughtfulness, comparison, a little bit of irony, and a lot of realism about the world in which we live. Until the next time I speak to you, Bewell, think deep thoughts and have a little fun. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Mola Board, our engineer is ben Toalliday, and our showrunner is Sophie Crane mckibbon. Editorial support from noahm Osband. Theme music by Luis Gara at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Lydia Jeancott, Heather Faine, Carlie Migliori, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at bloomberg dot com slash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's original Slater podcasts, go to Bloomberg dot com Slash podcasts, and if you like what you heard today, please write a review or tell a friend. This is deep background