November 8, 2024 - 6:00pm
Donald Trump’s victory this week demonstrates that classical liberalism is on the decline, according to international relations scholar Francis Fukuyama.
The election “represents a decisive rejection by American voters of liberalism and the particular way that the understanding of a ‘free society’ has evolved since the 1980s”, the political scientist wrote in the Financial Times today. “Donald Trump not only wants to roll back neoliberalism and woke liberalism, but is a major threat to classical liberalism itself.”
Fukuyama is best known for his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, which argued that the triumph of liberal democracy over communism marked the end of conflicts over civilisational models, with Western liberalism projected to serve as the final form of government throughout the world. The 9/11 attacks and the ensuing wars in the Middle East inspired new criticism of Fukuyama’s ideas, as has the rise of populism throughout the West in the past decade.
The public intellectual is a longtime Trump critic, and warned in 2016 that the US was in “one of the most severe political crises I have experienced in my lifetime”, citing Trump’s desire to flout institutional rules. Trump’s first election victory in 2016 seemed like an “aberration”, an impression seemingly confirmed by his loss in 2020, according to Fukuyama’s new article. However, that the American people voted for him once again, “with full knowledge of who Trump was and what he represented”, showed the tides of history are once again turning, the author argued.
In the FT piece, Fukuyama suggested that the previous status quo was giving way to a “new era in US politics and perhaps for the world as a whole”. He attributed this largely to the working-class backlash against neoliberal policies.
From the Eighties onward, according to Fukuyama’s piece, free-market economics ushered in prosperity, particularly for the wealthy, while undermining the working class and strengthening industrial powers outside of the West. Meanwhile, the political Left replaced concern for the working class with an emphasis on a “narrower set of marginalised groups: racial minorities, immigrants, sexual minorities and the like”.
The shift away from liberalism is already making an impact on both major parties. Trump’s strong performance among the working class, including non-white male voters who historically favoured the Democrats, has prompted reflection within the Left-of-centre party, as internal critics argue it needs to lean into economic populism and distance itself from social progressivism. Even in the final months of the campaign, both Kamala Harris and Joe Biden distanced themselves from transgender issues and identity politics, as did down-ballot Democrats in competitive races. Both parties have also come to reject liberal immigration policies as American voters warm up to closed borders and mass deportations.
Trump himself has leant into the public’s growing distrust in free markets and Government institutions, promising extensive, across-the-board tariffs and an overhaul of the executive branch. “The breadth of the Republican victory,” Fukuyama argued today, “will be interpreted as a strong political mandate confirming these ideas and allowing Trump to act as he pleases.”
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SubscribeLiberalism failed. Liberalism’s successes were based on a bedrock of strong nations, Western civilization, and Judeo-Christian values.
Of course our elites ignored that completely and did everything they could to erode those things, wanted to replace nation, community, local culture, family and faith with atomized secular individuals living in a globalized, bureaucratized, homogenized world. The Right and the Left elites were both complicit.
Once the transformation went too far, liberalism can’t work, and we’re descending into tribalism.
Yoram Hazony is good on the bitter fruits of Enlightenment over-reach.
Is his argument a secular or a theological one?
What do you mean by “homogenized world”?
Same global elites, same corporations, multi-national institutions quashing local gov’t into a common policy set, same restaurants, mass migration lowering wages for the laboring classes, diluting population differences, etc.
I think the world is a richer place when Austria contains Austrian people, eating Austrian food, patronizing Austrian business, under laws that Austrians prefer, while Japan contains Japanese people eating Japanese food, patronizing Japanese businesses, under the laws that Japanese prefer.
Your comment (and response below) summed up exactly what I feel, but haven’t been able to articulate, probably from lack of reading exactly how this process (that you pointed out) happened/is happening.
Can you recommend any good reading?
Thanks
I’d start with Christopher Lasch and “The Revolt of the Elites”.
Can you define “Western Civilization”? Is Japan and South Korea part of it? What about Russia? What are its foundations and principles?
Judeo-Christian values? For most of recorded history the Christians slaughtered the Jews. Which values do they share?
I’m old enough to remember when Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman declared in his New York Times column (immediately after Trump’s win in November 2016) that we were about to enter a worldwide economic apocalypse from which we might never recover. I also recall that the Asian Markets were tanking on election night and that a number of progressive economists declared in their coverage that the world economy was moving toward a crash. Because of their emotional predictions, they declared that Trump “owned” the outcome of the economy from that night forward. We were all headed for the End of Times …
… then the United States experienced the longest economic expansion in American history under Trump’s presidency.
Later, some of those economists wanted to take their economic predictions back (including Krugman). They wanted a mulligan as we all witnessed the economic good times extend into the future … it was really Obama who should get the credit for Trump’s economic leadership, they said.
It seemed (seems?) that those progressive economists’ complex economic models started with:
IF President IS ‘Trump’
THEN
‘Apocalyptic End of World, run for your very lives !!!’
ELSE
RUN ‘REAL ECONOMIC MODEL’
Most of this is nonsense. The west abandoned liberalism long ago, probably right around the time of his first book. If liberalism is defined in the narrow terms of free trade and tariffs, I suppose there’s a case to be made that Trump will set that back.
But Trump has maybe saved free speech by teaming up with Musk. If Harris was elected, the EU would have crushed Twitter by either imposing crushing fines or forcing Musk to bend the knee to censorship. Only a pro free speech govt in America has the political power to force the EU to reconsider.
Trump’s election has basically killed net zero, which is the most illiberal economic policy in decades. Gone are govt mandates on energy production and manufacturing, which is state control of the economy.
I’ll give Biden credit for one thing. He has supported strong anti-trust action that is a threat to global oligarchies and monopolies. I hope Trump continues down this path, but this was dead in the water with Harris anyway, because mega donor Reed Hoffman is strongly opposed to this agenda.
I support free trade, but you can’t have free trade with a country like China because it uses slave labour. China isn’t a communist state. It’s a fasc!st state because it has merged the interests of corporations and business.
Sooner or later it all comes down to semantics, and one of the favorite techniques of defenders of globalism has been to subtly alter the meaning of words over time. Liberalism doesn’t mean in 2020 what it meant in 1990, let alone what it meant in 1890. Some of that is the natural evolution of language, but the greater and more sinister part is because intellectuals like Fukuyama keep moving the goalposts, redefining what is ‘liberalism’ and thus ‘good’ with an eye towards their ideological endpoint, which is a global society under a government of unaccountable bureaucrats and ‘experts’ who, if they answer to anyone, answer only to those with enough money, influence, and education to gain access. It’s interesting that he’s suddenly differentiating between ‘classical liberalism’ and ‘neoliberalism’ and is even using the term ‘woke liberalism’ as the nonsense it is. Where was this three weeks ago I wonder? This is pure damage control. I think this time they may have finally figured out how badly they’re actually losing and how deep the resentment really goes. They called him a felon, a threat to democracy, an insurrectionist, and the people still picked him. If they prefer that, what must they think of us? This is a revelation long overdue, and quite late is the hour when they finally show some level of introspection, but better late than never I suppose.
The Financial Times is a major mouthpiece for globalists. I read another such doom and gloom article on there yesterday and the theme was basically the same. We lost. We can’t deny it anymore. They hate us, we aren’t going to win, so it’s time to circle the wagons, play defense, and save what we can, hence the sudden interest in differentiating between ‘classical’ liberalism and it’s newer, more politically toxic, meaning. It’s like when a nation loses a war, surrenders, and then begs for whatever clemency they can get.
I agree with you about the change in meaning of words being partly deliberate and partly natural drift. However, neoliberalism and liberalism to me always had a separate meaning, and I’m aware that these meanings are different in other parts of the world.
Neoliberalism to me is the wild descendent of Thatcherism / Reaganomics, and is genuinely different to classical liberalism, though I don’t really use the latter word as it’s not relevant in the modern world. But Americans often seem to use the word liberal to mean approximately the same as I would use left-winger.
A word that you’ve used, globalist, is in some circles taken to be anti-semitic. This can be quite insidious as someone like Nigel Farage might use the word in the economic/social sense, only for a left-winger/liberal to attack him for being ‘racist’. However, I think such people genuinely believe this to be the case because they assume that some people are constantly trying to covertly attack other groups, and a single use of the word globalist in an anti-semitic sense means that all use of the word is anti-semitic.
It would never even occur to me that globalist could be antisemitic. My initial reaction would be…uh what? I don’t see why anyone would associate a belief in unchecked exploitative trade, open borders, and a lack of any accountability or democratic self determination with Jewish heritage. One has nothing to do with the other, but then this is the same people that think traditional values like respect for the police and the nuclear family are white oppression. Can’t fix stupid.
Steve – it’s possible that Dennis means “cosmopolitan.”
It would help the article if a definition of classical liberalism was included. According to Wikipedia:
While not a perfect fit I consider Trump’s outlook to be rather closer to Classic Liberalism than that of Harris.
Of course if you are talking about ‘liberalism’ of the eighties then that was not the ‘Classical’ sort.
I agree, a modern liberal(a progressive) is the complete opposite of a classic liberal and very illiberal, they just don’t see themselves that way though.
I’m a former progressive and now just a liberal and also a classical liberal (you can be both). I no longer call myself a progressive, because they no longer represent the values of progressives I remember, like income inequality, which is the issue behind Trump’s win. Progressive s today are bat guano crazy. Gender, gender, gender. Identity, identity, identity. Did I mention trans women are women? This leaked into the fabric of the Democratic Party and scared moderates away. Democrats had turned its back on the working class years ago. The Republicans, the party of corporate America, are also to blame. They were the original free trade party and responsible in part for the hollowing out of manufacturing in America. (Bill Clinton, we are also looking at you for taking Daddy Bush’s NAFTA and signing it into law.) Anyway, I’m just tired. I’m almost 65-years-old, and I really miss my country. I can remember when Republicans and Democrats were friends.
‘Make America Great Again’ is not a desire to recreate the racist 1950’s as the Democrats have ‘fearmongered’. It’s a longing for a semblance of normalcy, a rejection of the very illiberal, woke ideology of today’s Democrat Party.
They are like little fascists wielding their little red books and killing millions with starvation.
Classic liberalism also includes what Peter Boghossian refers to as cognitive liberty – something once taken for granted but which progressive liberalism clearly seeks to deny. Progressive liberalism demands cognitive conformity, excommunication, and perhaps worse, awaits all who don’t.
Anyone who stands alongside those betrayed and left dismayed and powerless by the crushing tide of neoliberalism is a hero in my eyes.
Oh screw off Francis. All the American people have done is reject this modern “liberalism” that wears Classical Liberal values as a skinsuit. Your movement does not believe in anything other than government itself and resists all limits on its power. Funny how that sounds like the complete opposite of what you claim to support when you break it down huh? No, what is really happening is Classical Liberalism is back with a vengeance and you, your associates, and your ideology is its greatest enemy.
Don’t get carried away, lads! The pendulum will swing back in 2 years after America is reminded of what a comically awful president Trump is.
Things were going great in the USA until the Chinese lab security failed.
Hey Chumpagne, how’s your neoliberal knee-jerk tonight? Suffering from tendonitis?
Awww….
Don’t try to get creative, our kid – doesn’t work for you.
Leave the witty comments to me.
Can’t do that, we’re still waiting for one.
He wouldn’t recognise a witty comment if it hit him over the head! Besides, I have yet to meet a Socialist with a sense of humour let alone proper behaviour.
A rejection of neoliberalism at home and neoconservatism abroad, with a partial rejection of the transhumanism favoured by the Berkeley/Butler school and certain generations of feminists.
Which feminists are transhumanists? I don’t see many. (Of course, it depends what you mean by “feminist”. I assume you are using it in the current sense.)
If this man was so wrong about the End of History why should anyone take him seriously now? We would have noticed if human nature had changed since his book was published. It didn’t so history moves along its familar grooves. The UN is as worthless as the League of Nations ever was and look how the EU is going tits up.
Well, the EU is going tits up for its peoples but not for the ruling elite and the bureaucracy. It will totter along for some time before it falls over.
The problem with Hegelian dialectics – whether of the Marxist or Liberal/Fukuyamist varieties – is that history just doesn’t end. There will always be a struggle between synthesis and antithesis (that part of the theory is sound) but there aren’t any end-states – the new ideology will only stay in place so long before it runs into problems it can’t manage, and then the struggle gets going again. The 1980s-style liberalism that Fukuyana & co. thought was the end of history (or at least of White history; China and the Muslim world are notably absent from the picture) has now been mortally wounded by Trumpistry… and the story goes on. Like it always does.
All of the end-of-history myths are ultimately just secular retellings of the Jewish/Christian religious narrative about how a certain group of people are the Chosen Ones destined to see their beliefs become everybody’s beliefs and usher in an era of universal peace and brotherhood… I’ve written about this before:
https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/second-hand-mythology-part-ii-the
The outwe coat of paint may be different, but the essentials of the myth are the same in Fukuyama’s day as in Isaiah’s, some 28 centuries ago.
I am not sure you are right.
The problem is that Judaeo-Christian values include the fundamental values of humanity as a species – family and morality. All these secular fevers, the Münster Rebellion, yesterday’s Marxism and today’s Wokism, begin with the denial of these values and the search for oppressed groups who should be motivated to destroy these values. As before, so now, it is human garbage of all sorts.
Liberalism inevitably leads to such fevers, but society cannot exist without the values named above and which “educated” people call “outdated/terrible/conservative”. By use the title of a famous book, I think that liberalism is all the same road to serfdom.
If anyone here has read the FT piece quoted in this article, did Fukuyama give any indication he considered the abandonment of the working class, in favor of globalism, a bad thing? Did he give any indication that an obsessive focus on certain minorities, such as the trans community, to the detriment of everyone else was a bad thing?
The voters weren’t rejecting classical liberalism. They were rejecting Kamala Harris. It was increasingly apparent that she was massively out of her depth for the world’s most powerful job. Better the devil you know. Trump might be a gangster, but he’s our gangster.
I hope he cancels major pieces of the federal government and depopulates the swamp.
Exactly. What exactly is this “classical liberalism” Kemosabe?
Showing your age, Mr. Chantrill! It’s only wrinklies like me that catch your cultural reference.
Developments that have been patently obvious for some years have lately found a place in Professor Fukuyama’s consciousness. Are we supposed to be impressed by someone so slow on the uptake?
How his status as a go-to for sagacious analysis remains intact, despite the unravelling of his defining idea, is mystifying.
Francis Fukuyama has made a fortune out of being completely wrong in the tradition of the favoured class never being wrong even when they are. Like the covid stats and the catastrophic predictions about climate change; which never quite come true, but present just enough factors to keep them going; he trots on his merry way, wrecking society for his own gratification.
What on earth kind of none job is an international relations scholar when it’s at home?
Is Fukuyama a political scientist or a liberal scholar activist?
I would have thought that a political scientist would be able to see the dynamic balance between liberalism and conservatism as the constituent parts of a whole human system with both liberalism and conservatism having various expressions from hard to soft with hard being ideological rigidity such as woke liberalism.
One way of mapping this is
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Chart
Arguably the Democrats became increasingly authoritarian and ideologically rigid in terms of their rigid identity politics and their rigid analytical frameworks such as critical race theory and critical gender theory which is probably the basis of Fukuyama’s critique.
From this point of view, Trump is clearly an economic conservative in response to the economic liberalism of the global system whilst at the same time more libertarian in his approach to social-cultural issues in response to the more authoritarian approach of the Democrats.
Clearly America has a more liberal outlook regarding national identity and there didn’t seem much discussion of that except in economic terms.
The dynamic between liberalism and conservativism seems fairly different in the UK with a generally more liberal outlook economically with Labour wanting to be more liberal in terms of a closer relationship with the EU. Culturally, the dynamic seems to be more centrist with Labour pulling towards liberal and the Tories under Kemi pulling towards conservative.
The point being that these different positions are roughly equal in terms of their function to protect national sustainability, resilience and sufficiency to the extent they can be protected within the context of technological innovation and growing resource scarcity.
If humans were largely rational rather than emotive, then we would simply be discussing and debating the merits and dismerits of each position but because we are largely emotive, we just end up bickering and arguing instead which tends towards rigidity.
So it would be interesting if Fukuyama actually makes a rational case for his classical liberal position within the context of growing resource scarcity or simply joins in with the emotive denouncement of all things conservative.
What “liberalism” is that?
The liberalism upon which that sand castle that was “Our Democracy” was not liberalism. It was old school Fascism, replete with its cadre of self-anointed, best-and-brightest technocrats.
Your Chiliastic vision failed. Thank God, the gods, the kami, for that.
The bible tells us (I think) that we should celebrate sinners who repent and see the error of their ways.
halleluiah!
not that his redemption will matter more than a useful piece of pink fish and chip paper!
Fukuyama’s piece sounds a little overwrought, doesn’t it? Consider the primary facts of the election: Trump got 74m votes, Harris 70m, and other candidates received 2m between them. This can hardly be described as ‘decisive’. It’s only the mechanism of the electoral system that handed the Republicans a clean sweep, just as the mechanism of the British electoral system handed Labour a vast and undeserved majority last July.
The FT, where Fukuyama’s piece appeared, has form for publishing overwrought pieces in the aftermath of elections. Who can forget the unintentionally hilarious pieces, that were written by the drama queens after the Brexit referendum in Britain?
Labour’s massive majority in the UK is a travesty of democracy for sure. However I feel Trump’s victory was more significant than 74 v 70 given how small the actual floating vote is in the US. If you confine the analysis to the floating voters Trump probably won by something like 70/30.
Liberalism is not dead because what we’ve had recently is not liberalism but a top-down imposed anti-liberal ideology.
For example, people should be judged based upon their character and merit only but what we’ve had recently is being judged according to the group you belong to (e.g. race, gender etc.).
Free trade is great but it must be fair free trade.
China does not follow rules, regulations and laws that it does not like.
It’s like trying to play a game against someone else who does not follow the rules.
Absolutely not. Trump represents a resurgence of classical liberalism, given that these other creatures, “neoliberalism” and “woke liberalism,” are not liberal at all. The rules he wants to “flout” are those keeping these cuckoo-in-the-liberal-nest abominations in power while covering up their fundamentally illiberal hegemony over all elements of society.
Trump wants to flout ALL the rules (which is why he did business with the Mob in his Manhattan developments).
«Even in the final months of the campaign, both Kamala Harris and Joe Biden distanced themselves from transgender issues and identity politics, as did down-ballot Democrats in competitive races» – I will try to translate this into more understandable language: «At the last moment they tried to deceive the voters even more brazenly. The attempt failed»
Nonsense. The Democrats are easily the bigger threat to liberalism. They push to replace individual choice with mandates, collectivize the economy, control speech, and weaken the Constitution. Trump is no classical liberal but his economic policies are, on the whole, a heck of a lot more liberal (in the classical sense) than the Dems.
Why should we care what a guy who was so magnificently wrong about “The End of History” thinks?
It goes back farther than the 1980s. Trump’s (apparent) clean sweep should be seen as the US formally reversing the Swinging Sixties and the (valueless) values it ushered in.
Fukuyama Thesis (as told in his interview in the NYTimes after the new book):
The universe bends toward justice –> liberal democracy is that justice –> liberal democracy is inevitable