Jewish Americans have historically been among the most principled defenders of free speech. When a group of neo-Nazis planned to march through the town of Skokie, Illinois, home to many Holocaust survivors, it was a Jewish attorney who stood up for their right of assembly. David Goldberger, then the legal director of the ACLU of Illinois, was no self-hating Jew, and he certainly harbored no sympathy for the National Socialist Party of America. But he realized that “the constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and press would be meaningless if the government could pick and choose the persons to whom they apply.”

Goldberger’s position might read as the credo of a universalist Jew who prioritizes abstract principles over the interests of his group. But there was a deeper and less self-abnegating logic to his position. Like me, Goldberger was convinced that these universal principles are in the long-term interest of all ethnic and religious minorities, including Jews.

Minorities often have good reasons to feel threatened. One understandable response to this feeling is to look to the powerful for protection. But whenever you look to the powerful for protection, you become dependent on their whims.

This is a story that the Jews of the old world knew all too well. For a few decades, they would thrive under some tolerant monarch who gave them relative freedom to go about their lives with relatively little harassment. But when that monarch changed his mind, or was succeeded by a less tolerant heir, all those precious liberties would evaporate just as quickly. In fact, that pattern is literally as old as the Old Testament: As Exodus 1:8 notes, “a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph,” setting off the chain of events that led to the enslavement (and eventual liberation) of the Israelites. American Jews have historically put their trust in a less precarious promise: that of constitutional principles which deprive the powerful of their ability to play favorites—even if the price consisted of neo-Nazis giving speeches in a community of Holocaust survivors.

This preference for free speech has been sorely tested over the past years. Social media has brought the poison of antisemitism, largely relegated to the fringes of public debate in the second half of the twentieth century, into much wider circulation. From Tucker Carlson to Candace Owens, Hasan Piker to Jackson Hinkle, some of the people with the largest followings on social media now delight their audiences with a litany of antisemitic tropes. From coy insinuations that the Jews have once again grown too powerful to outright conspiracy theories painting Jews as the dark forces behind just about every tragedy or social failure, hateful ideas are now being streamed to millions on TikTok, YouTube, and other platforms.

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Tragically, the rise and dissemination of detestable speech has coincided with a steep increase in physical violence against Jews, from the deadly shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 to the vehicular attack on a synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan, earlier this year. I have come to consider the rise of physical violence against Jewish communities around the country, and its psychological impact, as the Europeanization of American Jewry. When, as a teenager growing up in Germany, I first visited America, I was struck by how little protection Jewish institutions needed in the new world; now, it is nearly as easy to spot a Jewish kindergarten in New York as it long has been in Paris or Berlin: both are marked by the presence of security guards. Back then, I marveled at how much less beleaguered Jews in America seemed to feel; now, the same unceasing sense of fear and vigilance is taking hold of Jewish life in the United States.

It is little wonder that a growing number of Jews are desperate for any form of protection, and even that a growing share are willing to discard their long-held commitment to free speech in exchange for promises that things might somehow go back to normal. And as it happens, Jews are hardly alone in responding to the rise of social media with a desire to censor its contents: many Gentiles are similarly growing tempted to drain the poison out of our politics by embracing new forms of censorship. As many politicians and political commentators are quick to claim, the principal reason for the scary times we are now living through is the omnipresence of “misinformation.” If only we could find the right way to “regulate” social media, they say, things would finally go back to normal.

I understand the temptation. If it were possible to preserve all the advantages of new communication technologies, which make access to information so much more ample and painless, while banishing from the public sphere all the narcissistic influencers and psychopathic politicians using these tools to advance their own interests, the offer would be compelling. But I worry that the world they imagine simply doesn’t exist.

Let us imagine, for the sake of argument, that we grow sufficiently convinced of the unsustainability of the current situation that we become willing to “creatively reinterpret” the First Amendment. One question to ask about this is whether the trade-off would prove to be worthwhile: Would we want a manicured public sphere that hands the powerful the ability to enforce their own views even if it did drain some of the poison of antisemitism? But thinking of this choice as a trade-off presumes that the promised recompense, the establishment of a more sane and rational public sphere, would actually materialize. And I very much doubt that it would.

The case for believing that such regulations of social media would help to bring about a better public sphere rests on three tacit premises:

• The people who make decisions about what speech is allowed and what speech is verboten will be reasonable and rational.

• The reasonable and rational people who make such decisions will be able to enforce their preferences without making the censored content more popular than it was before.

• The underlying reasons that bad ideas have flourished in recent years are rooted in a lack of appropriate regulation, and increasing regulation can therefore eradicate such ideas.

The first assumption is simply that the people who are in some way empowered to make decisions about what should or should not be censored will in fact make good decisions. At a time when mainstream institutions were deeply shaped by a stable political consensus centered around a number of broadly shared ideals, such an idealized view of the world might have been tempting. But America today is more polarized than it has been at any point in recent memory. Those who advocate for points of view that, until a few years ago, would have been considered disqualifyingly extreme are no longer on the margins; they hold the reins of formal political power and enjoy some of the biggest platforms anybody could wish for. Under these circumstances, it is deeply naive to think that “letting the government pick and choose” who enjoys the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution would be a good idea.

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The smartest case for free speech has never turned on denying that some utterances are so vile that all of us would be better off if they somehow disappeared from the public sphere. Rather, it was always based on skepticism that any institution, private or public, would consistently make these determinations in a reasonable and selfless manner. The growing influence of extreme views and the immense power that extreme political movements now hold should be a reason to double down on, not to discard, that insight.

The second assumption is that attempts to censor speech are likely to succeed in reducing the salience of terrible ideas. There is some superficial plausibility to this. While it is always important to pay attention to the ways in which political actions can backfire, the presumption should be that, most of the time, political actors aren’t so ignorant or incompetent as to harm their own cause with their efforts.

But in the case of free speech, we have plenty of evidence to suggest that—unless repression is, as in some dictatorships, extremely severe and wide-ranging—attempts at censorship usually fail. The appeal of the forbidden fruit is so strong that many of the most successful idea entrepreneurs are forever drawn towards portraying themselves as censored even when, by any objective standard, they are not. Indeed, it is sometimes hard to know what accounts for the success of some of today’s most vile media personalities if not for this appeal; a substantial portion of the audience for people such as Nick Fuentes is as attracted to the frisson they derive from breaking the biggest possible taboos as they are to the actual claims that they make.

Both the idea that we can trust the would-be censors and the idea that their efforts would be effective are in a sense downstream from the third key assumption: the belief that institutional changes, rather than technological realities, stand at the root of the problem.

There may have been a time when the structure of mass communication made it possible to exclude certain ideas from broad circulation. Back in an era when reaching a mass audience took both enormous financial investment and required the cooperation of a large number of highly-trained professionals, an ethos widely shared between journalists and the owners of big television networks could, porously and imperfectly, restrict the scope of public debate.

But those days are long gone. Nowadays, the costs of production and dissemination are negligible. Anybody can put together a near-professional studio in their own home for a few hundred dollars. The ability to reach a mass audience has been radically democratized. Established media outlets, while still influential, have lost their capacity to gatekeep. Today, a single episode of the Joe Rogan Experience draws a vastly larger number of viewers than the nightly audiences of CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News combined.

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These technological changes are the real cause of our transformed public sphere. Attempts to turn back the clock by introducing strict regulations are unlikely to rein in the conspiracy theories that have so quickly proliferated on social media. Indeed, many countries in Europe have all along had in place the kinds of guardrails for which Americans wishing to curtail the First Amendment so fervently wish. They criminalize all kinds of political speech, from denial of the Holocaust to anything that might be thought liable to incite racial hatred. They routinely compel social media platforms to delete any posts that could even remotely be considered illegal. Countries such as the United Kingdom even arrest thousands of people for violating these rules every year.

And yet, none of these practices have marginalized the extremists or restored the placid discourse of an earlier era. Jews are no safer in Europe than they are in America. And while extremists still remain in the opposition in most countries in Western Europe, polls suggest that they may be only one election away from storming the gates of power. The reason should, by now, be obvious: the problem is not political but structural. The nature of communication in the age of social media has allowed previously fringe ideas to flood the mainstream. Short of the extreme censorship practiced by some of the world’s most repressive dictatorships, regulation can’t bring back the past.

None of this is to say that all forms of regulation are in principle inadmissible. There are some strong reasons for (as well as some real reasons against) banning the use of social media for children, for example. And I have long believed that those social media companies that effectively do act like publishers, by favoring some content on the basis of the views expressed, should also be treated as such—which would make them much more liable for the content they amplify. But any attempt to regulate social media must conform with the letter and the spirit of the First Amendment.

It isn’t hard to see why many Jewish leaders and organizations have lately grown less supportive of free speech. But anyone who gives in to these understandable temptations neglects a crucial historical lesson: Any power that can arbitrarily grant us rights (such as being protected from the offensive chants of antisemites) can just as arbitrarily deprive us of those same rights (such as decreeing that advocacy in support of our own causes and concerns constitutes offensive speech that must be silenced).

Jews have historically thrived in free societies that grant rights to all of their members without regard to the groups into which they happen to be born. Free speech is among the most fundamental of these rights. Jews must remain among its most ardent defenders.

This article was originally published in SAPIR journal.

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This article is brought to you by American Purpose, the magazine and community founded by Francis Fukuyama in 2020, which is proudly part of the Persuasion family.

Vladimir Putin has a big problem: He needs more bodies to throw into the Russian war machine in Ukraine. Current estimates indicate that the Russian military is losing 30,000-35,000 fighters per month on the 2,000 km frontline. A July 2026 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies calculated that the Russian military has taken over 1.4 million casualties (of which about 450,000-500,000 are thought to be deaths, with the remainder being soldiers so severely injured that they cannot return to duty). This unprecedented loss of blood and lives has evidently been mostly in vain—Russian forces have gained only about 5,000 square km since the autumn of 2023, and reportedly lost about 400 square km in April and May 2026 alone. Despite the high casualty rate of the Russian armed forces, the frontline has been in a virtual stalemate for most of the last three years.

Considering these grim statistics, it is unsurprising that Russian military recruitment efforts have started to lag. Western popular imagination still does not fully understand that Russia’s military is no longer the conscript forces of Soviet times. Beginning in 2008, the armed forces underwent a comprehensive military reform, transitioning from the Soviet legacy conscription system to a professional service supposed to be staffed by well-trained recruits who were paid a monthly salary to serve. As a result, Russia’s military was by 2022 better trained and better equipped than it had ever been. Yet most of the most elite forces were lost in the early months of the war in what was clearly an unexpectedly strong showing by the also reformed Ukrainian military and a very supportive society and government led by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. By the autumn of 2022, the Russian military was not only recruiting convicts from prisons (who were offered freedom and exoneration for their crimes if they could survive on the front line for a year) but also activating its reserve system under a “partial mobilization” order through which the military added 300,000 reservists to replenish its losses, eventually expanding its forces in Ukraine to over 700,000 personnel.

Even though the reserve force had been established in 2007 precisely to resolve crisis situations by having military trained personnel in waiting, the call up proved remarkably unpopular with the Russian public. In part this was because they were encouraged to think of the war in Ukraine as a temporary operation (in Russia the invasion of Ukraine is called the “Special Military Operation” or “SVO,” instead of a war), implying little to no disruption of regular life for those who were not full-time soldiers. The other reason why the 2022 partial mobilization of reservists proved so unpopular is that the system requires regional governments to manage the call up. There were reports of men in Russia’s far-flung regions being randomly plucked off the streets and sent directly to training camps, or even to the front itself, so that regional leaders could make their “target” mobilization numbers to please their masters in Moscow. Thousands of men fled Russia in the autumn of 2022 to avoid being swept up in what became a frantic and haphazard effort to produce bodies regardless of whether they were actually in the reserve forces to begin with. Even Putin admitted mistakes were made.

Nonetheless, support for Putin and the SVO dropped in opinion polls. Beginning in 2023, the Russian government opted instead to replace and build its forces by offering new recruits attractive signing bonuses for contract service of one year or more and monthly salaries that are higher than the national average. There are also relatively generous death benefits for the families of the fallen so that, whether living or dead, recruits and their families could benefit materially from their service. Sometimes colorfully described as the “death-onomics” behind Russian military recruitment, this program attracted a reported 420,000 new recruits, many (initially at least) from the poorer regions of the Russian south and far east. The prospect of fighting for their country for a high salary (not to mention the promised future glory) was appealing when the alternative was to remain unemployed in a remote backwater with few opportunities. In 2024, the growth in forces continued, with the Russian Defense Ministry announcing the planned recruitment of another 430,000 soldiers, and in 2025, another 400,000 were added—an average of 35,000 per month.

But by early this year, this pipeline of the poor has faltered in keeping pace with the high death rate on the battlefield. Putin needs more men to go to war. But given the body bags and bad news trickling from the front, it is understandable that few Russians want to serve these days. So far, the Kremlin has been able to avoid relying on conscription or too heavily on the reserve mobilization forces. Can this continue?

A New Mobilization?

On Russian social media, in the opposition press abroad, and on countless Telegram channels, rumors abound that a “full mobilization” with a goal of 700,000-1,000,000 new recruits is in the works. In July 2026, Zelenskyy cited Ukrainian intelligence services in claiming the number called up through mobilization would be 300,000-500,000. Those who think another mobilization call is in the works think it will be in October, following the Duma elections in late September. Naturally, elections in Russia are largely meaningless in terms of allowing citizens to decide who governs them, but they are symbolically important to the regime and provide at least a gloss of legitimacy to Putin and his preferred party, United Russia. Announcing a mobilization that could sweep up hundreds of thousands of Russians across the country would undermine a calm electoral cycle and overall social stability.

But can Russia’s president pull off any sort of call to service this autumn or in the future to staff his losing battle?

Vladimir Putin is the most powerful leader in Eurasia since Joseph Stalin, and after 26 years in office, he has ruled almost as long. One would think that by resorting to the tools of dictatorship—fear, the threat and reality of violent suppression, and aggressive propaganda through full control of the media—the Russian dictator could easily overcome any resistance in Russian society to bring up force numbers. He could, but there are risks in doing so.

The need for more—and better trained—recruits is clear if Russia intends to continue fighting the war as it has been since 2022. But a repeat of the mobilization drive four years ago endangers the social stability at home that Putin needs to continue his fight in Ukraine and remain the undisputed ruler of Russia. Mobilization will test the patriotism of Russians who have been exposed to anti-Ukrainian propaganda through state-controlled media. It could be that many Russians have concluded that joining the fight is the best way to end the war and recruitment through contract will increase, obviating the need for a wider mobilization. However, this would be a marked departure from the reaction to the partial mobilization in 2022, when there were open protests and defiance of mobilization efforts.

It remains illegal in Russia to call the war in Ukraine anything but the “Special Military Operation.” Yet it is increasingly difficult to maintain this polite fiction since clearly David, in the form of the Ukrainian military, is using the 21^st century equivalent of a slingshot to fight off the Russian Goliath. And Putin is having an ever more difficult time keeping the war from interfering with the accustomed relative comforts of average Russians. In the past several months, Ukraine has brought the war deep into the Russian heartland for the first time in four and a half years. Ukrainian forces have used deep strike attacks with drones and missiles in unprecedented numbers to destroy and disable key Russian oil refineries and export terminals from St. Petersburg in the north to Rostov in the south, as well as Omsk in Western Siberia, about 1,550 miles from the Ukrainian border. Average Russians far beyond the line of military contact are feeling the war now in the form of high gas prices, rationing, and shortages.

Even more recently, Ukrainian drones have targeted almost a dozen huge warehouses belonging to the online retailer “Wildberries” (the Russian version of Amazon), destroying billions of dollars in merchandise. Much of the damage was to stock being stored for small mom-and-pop entrepreneurs selling their goods through the platform. Many of those small businesses are now financially ruined, while their customers are increasingly aware of the widening costs of the war. The question is whether they will blame the Ukrainian government or their own leader.

Putin’s long-time spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, has slipped into the practice of referring to the SVO as “a real war.” Given how close he is to Putin, and how carefully he is known to choose his words, Peskov could be foreshadowing something—wars are long and difficult and require citizen patriotism, sacrifice, and service to the motherland. Would Russians answer the call to serve the motherland, or would they defy their dictator despite the threat of more repression?

The answer to this question will determine the fate of future Russian military recruitment efforts—whether volunteer or through another mobilization of reservists—and therefore Russia’s ability to continue its war in Ukraine. With the economy sagging, endemic labor shortages, high prices for food and other consumer goods, and increased internet restrictions, there is every reason to believe that Russians want the conflict to end. Surveys indicate growing support for negotiations, although a third of Russian respondents to a recent poll indicated they support continuing military action. Are they, however, willing to sacrifice themselves and their children? Not even Putin knows for sure—and he does not seem to be willing to force the question just yet.

Kathryn Stoner is the Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, the Satre Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution (by Courtesy) at Stanford University.

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A version of this article originally appeared in The Next Move, the publication of the Renew Democracy Initiative.

Whenever I write about the far left, the comments pile on quickly. And, look, I mostly talk about Donald Trump and how bad he is, because the president is the most powerful and potent threat to American democracy. Unlike the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which regarded Kamala Harris and Trump as two sides of the same evil coin, I don’t play the false equivalence game. I do, however, care about strategy, and as Americans approach the midterms and the 2028 presidential election, the DSA is in position to exert a growing influence on the Democratic Party and reshape the electoral playing field.

To have an intelligent conversation about this, it’s important to establish some basic facts about the DSA and the American far left generally. You can agree or disagree with my conclusions, but we need to be operating off of the same set of facts.

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Here are five things you should know about the DSA:

1. We can’t ignore the DSA and its influential boosters. I get that the DSA has only 100,000 members and may be in the domain of a “sideshow.” With ICE agents continuing on their unrestrained rampage and a new Watergate breaking practically every day, self-reflection feels difficult for many in the anti-Trump camp. But blindness is a recipe for disaster.

Simple statistics like the number of card-carrying members belie the DSA’s growing sway in the Democratic Party. Who is involved matters much more than how many formally pay dues to the organization.

That “who” includes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is likely to be a viable candidate in the 2028 Democratic presidential primaries, and Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of America’s largest city. This is no fringe leftist book club.

Hasan Piker, the man who addressed a College Democrats National Convention (not some classroom meeting for a no-name campus chapter) dressed up as murderous dictator Mao Zedong, is a real problem. (He has also praised Mao as a “great leader.”) Closing your eyes, clamping your hands over your ears, and repeating “he’s not real, he’s not real” won’t make him go away. Piker boasts millions of followers, has hosted interviews with multiple current and aspiring members of Congress, has intervened in Democratic primaries for DSA candidates, and, now, addressed a national gathering of young Democratic Party leaders.

2. The DSA’s founder, Michael Harrington, was a relative moderate compared with today’s American socialists. Harrington started the DSA after breaking with other socialists who withheld support for Democrat George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election. Harrington favored backing a major party nominee to challenge the incumbent Republican president, Richard Nixon. In other words: Harrington embraced a pragmatic approach to participating in American democracy.

3. Conversely, the modern DSA refused to support Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in 2024. It’s a morbid historical irony that during the 2024 presidential election, the DSA, the organization Harrington founded in the spirit of political pragmatism, refused to support Kamala Harris. On the eve of the most consequential presidential election since the Civil War, the DSA released a shameful statement casting a false equivalence between Harris and Donald Trump. As the specter of a second Trump term loomed, Zohran Mamdani, one of the most prominent DSA officeholders, encouraged voters to reject Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Despite a long list of disagreements with Harris and the Biden administration, I endorsed the vice president in my personal capacity because I recognized the threat posed by a vengeful Trump. The events of the past year and a half leave me feeling sadly vindicated in my decision. As someone who comes from a country lacking free and fair elections, I’m deeply angry with self-indulgent factions like the DSA that fell back on the luxury of being uncommitted.

4. The DSA has moved from a principled pro-democracy stand on world affairs to tankie turpitude. Today’s DSA includes explicitly communist factions. Yet Harrington rejected the brutality of Soviet and Chinese communism and his icons were real social democrats. In 1980, the DSA founder organized a conference attended by West Germany’s Social Democratic Chancellor Willy Brandt, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, and future French President François Mitterrand.

In 1990, Mayor David Dinkins (the first DSA-member to serve as mayor of New York—not Zohran Mamdani) hosted Brandt, who was by then president of the Socialist International (an alliance of mainstream social democratic parties), at City Hall.

Today’s DSA would regard those men as insufficiently socialist; in 2017 the group derided European social democrats who “sound the retreat and accommodate capitalist forces.” Instead, the group’s sympathies lie with regimes like China that Harrington rightly rejected. The DSA rejects aid to democracies like Taiwan and Japan in the face of aggression from Beijing, while engaging in shameless victim-blaming on Ukraine.

As the DSA shifted, its international allegiances changed too. Most major social democratic parties—think of the factions that have governed countries like Germany, France, Sweden, the UK, and Israel—were once members of the Socialist International. In the past decade, the organization has split, with the German Social Democratic Party leading an exodus of other social democratic parties to a new Progressive Alliance to stave off the ascent of the far left.

The DSA went in the other direction. The DSA was a member of the Socialist International until 2017. In 2023, it joined up with another new coalition—the Progressive International, launched by Bernie Sanders and Yanis Varoufakis. It’s an explicitly anti-Western organization whose answer to the war in Ukraine was a call to dismantle NATO. As they say, tell me who your friends are.

5. I’m not the only one raising the alarm. Ten Democratic members of Congress and a number of candidates have signed a pledge, the Promise to America, declaring “we are capitalist, not socialist.”

Meanwhile, prominent former members of the DSA have deserted the organization over its extremism. Several founding members quit in an open letter published in The New Republic after the DSA issued a mealy-mouthed statement that largely justified the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre in Israel.

Maurice Isserman, biographer of DSA founder Michael Harrington, also left the organization after October 7. “An organization that can’t take a stand condemning a right-wing terrorist group that set out to murder as many Jewish civilians, including children and infants, as it can lay its hands on,” he wrote, “has forfeited the right to call itself democratic socialist.”

In his resignation from the DSA, Maurice Isserman warned of “tightly organized groups who, without sharing the beliefs of larger and more loosely organized bodies, join and proceed to either wreck or, where possible, capture them for ends at odds with the spirit and purpose of the original members.”

Isserman was speaking about the internal politics of the DSA, but he could just as well have been speaking about what the DSA is doing to the Democratic Party. What we are witnessing is an aggressive attempt at a hostile takeover of an American institution. There is still time to stop it.

Garry Kasparov, the former World Chess Champion, is the founder of the Renew Democracy Initiative and chairperson of the Human Rights Foundation. He is a member of the Persuasion Board of Advisors.

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Daron Acemoglu is an economist at MIT and a recipient of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics. His latest book is What Happened to Liberal Democracy?

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Daron Acemoglu discuss why liberal democracy’s post-war formula for shared prosperity broke down, how the rise of a college-educated professional class produced a cultural backlash against “social engineering,” and how to shape the future of artificial intelligence.

We’re delighted to feature this conversation as part of our series on Liberal Virtues and Values.

This series, made possible with the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation, features content making the case that liberalism has its own distinctive set of virtues and values that are capable not only of responding to the dissatisfaction that drives authoritarianism, but also of restoring faith in liberalism as an ideology worth believing in—and defending—on its own terms.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: We started talking about many things the last time we were on the podcast, but we started talking a little bit about your thoughts on liberalism, which you had already published an article about. Now you have come out with an incredibly ambitious work on the subject that tries to unify approaches to the question from economics, from political theory, from public policy, from history, and I look forward to touching on many different aspects of this question. I promise you that we can geek out about political theory as much as you wish in this conversation. Part of what you have to do when you try to fix liberalism is to come up with a diagnosis. I think that is probably the aspect of this question that has been most debated over the last ten years, and it is probably most difficult to say something new about. In your diagnosis, why is it that after liberalism’s remarkable triumph for half a century, we now seem to be in this genuine moment of crisis for this set of ideas?

Daron Acemoglu: Well, I think that is the heart of it. In fact, despite the fact that there is a lot said about this, I still think we are far from a holistic understanding, which requires both a recognition of the proximate causes of the crisis, but also the ultimate or the fundamental causes that underpin those proximate causes. That is what I try to do. But first, as just a little preface, I think the success of liberalism is truly remarkable. The kind of freedoms, access to public services, political participation, and broadly shared prosperity, despite the very high inequality that we are experiencing today, that all of these things that we enjoy today, in at least the Western world, but also in many parts of the emerging world, would have been unimaginable to somebody who lived three hundred years ago, however enlightened they were. And that is all coming from the aspirations articulated by liberal ideas and their implementation in the context of liberal democratic institutions. That makes it all the more jarring that liberal democracy plunged itself into crisis.

In a nutshell, I think this has two reasons. One is that the world changed, in particular from an industrial era to a post-industrial age, and liberal democracy did not adjust to it. Second, liberal democracy became, to an extent, a victim of its own success. These two are complementary, they are related, but they are also distinct. Let us start with the first. I think shared prosperity is truly axiomatic to liberal democracy. If you are an absolutist king or a dictator, your regime can survive for a long time without true legitimacy, without the support of the people.

Mounk: You need to have certain insiders who are willing to impose the rules, and they need to be doing relatively well, but as long as you pay the courtiers and the soldiers enough, you probably survive.

Acemoglu: That is right. Every regime seeks legitimacy, and every regime obtains some type of legitimacy, at least for certain periods of time. But for liberal democracy, that is really critical. Unless people really support it, unless people participate, liberal democracy cannot survive. Shared prosperity, meaning economic growth from which every social group benefits, is really important for that. The big success of liberal democracy, starting in the twentieth century—in some parts of the world in a sporadic way also in the nineteenth century, but very, very consistently in the three and a half, four decades following World War II—was really very important for liberal democracy’s success.

The formula for that, simplifying it quite a bit, is to say businesses invested and expanded, and in doing so, under the framework created by democratic governments, trade unions, and other labor market institutions, they had to pay higher wages to workers because they needed workers. They could not coerce them, they could not cheat them. That is where the institutional framework was important. But crucially, in order to expand, to produce more cars, more fridges, more T-shirts, they needed more workers.

Mounk: That meant the scarcity of human labor and the competition for those workers, which actually created the middle class.

Acemoglu: One hundred percent. And that generated wage growth, that generated job creation and employment growth. That is, in my assessment, simplifying it again to some extent, but that is the only formula for creating shared prosperity. I know of no society in history that has been able to create shared prosperity for a sustained period of time that is not based on wage growth and employment.

So that was the formula. That formula started coming apart with the digital age, with the digital technologies that induced a transition from industrial economics to post-industrial economics, whereby, first of all, educated, more skilled workers became more valuable because they were needed for management, services dealing with data, dealing with these other functions, as well as using the technologies that were first skill-biased. But even more importantly, with digital automation—meaning that using digital technologies with advanced tools, software systems, robotics, and now AI—we are substituting machines and algorithms for tasks previously performed by humans. That severs the link between business growth, innovation, and profits and wages, because now we can expand production tremendously without employing many workers. Even worse, you can expand while laying off workers because you are automating your production processes.

Mounk: How would you describe, just in descriptive terms, what stage we are at? I am a little torn on how to interpret the current state of affairs. On the one hand, in the United States today, we are close to full employment. There is not a big structural problem of unemployment. In some regions of the country, people are really struggling to find workers. This is not Marrakesh ten years ago, or West Germany thirty years ago. You do have quite a lot of affluence in society. America is one of the richest countries in the history of the world, certainly if you exclude small oil states and other kinds of aberrations. But what does seem to have happened is something where the returns to having a college degree and being a knowledge worker are outsized. Perhaps the real injury, I guess I am unsure whether the real injury is economic or whether it is cultural.

Acemoglu: Well, it is both. It is both, and I am going to come to the cultural one. Things do not work with the nice linear structure of our models. The irony, in some sense, is that the big period in which pre-AI automation had a big impact really came to an end in the mid-2000s. The period that best illustrates my argument is from the late 1970s or 1980 to 2015 or 2014. It is during that period where wage inequality, the gap between college-educated or postgraduate workers and those without a college degree, skyrocketed. It is the period during which, almost consistently, real wages, inflation-adjusted wages of workers with a high school degree or less than a high school degree, especially men with a high school degree, fell consistently almost every year from 1980 to 2014. It is that period during which the non-employment rate of workers without a college degree increased quite tremendously. People essentially dropped out of the labor force. That is why unemployment statistics are not the ones that I am that interested in. I much prefer to look at discouraged workers as well, which means looking at employment-to-population ratios.

Mounk: Just to explain that for people who are not economists, the unemployment rate is the share of people who are looking for work relative to the workforce. But there may be people who drop out of the workforce altogether, and there is a real concern, for example, about so-called NEETs, which is to say, people, often young people, who are not in some form of employment, education, or training for a job. If a twenty-year-old is living in the basement of a parent’s home, is not actively looking for work, is not being trained in any way, that is obviously a very worrying case, but they may not show up in the unemployment statistics.

Acemoglu: Absolutely, one hundred percent. The unemployment rate, strictly speaking, is the number of unemployed people who do not have a job among those who say they are seeking a job. The Current Population Survey, for example, one of the key survey instruments in the United States, and there are similar ones in other countries, asks people, are you actively seeking work? If the answer to that is no, you are out of the labor force. What happened, for example, when people in the auto industry or in steel or other industries, with automation or with imports from China, lost their jobs, many people just dropped out of the labor force. They stopped looking and they stopped answering that question, yes, I am looking for a job.

The other thing is just household income inequality that has skyrocketed. The remarkable thing is that real wages, inflation-adjusted wages, that used to grow faster than productivity, especially for workers without a college degree, because they were critical for industrial employment in the late ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, early ’70s, those wages did not exactly stagnate, but came close to stagnating from 1980 to around 2014. That was the collapse of shared prosperity. The post-industrial age required a different way of managing the economy, a different way of mobilizing and creating jobs for workers without a college degree, using technology differently, and none of that happened. That is the failure of liberal democratic institutions adjusting to their age.

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But the cultural aspect that you mentioned is also very, very important. This coincided with another social change that happened as a consequence of the post-industrial economy, which is that the number of workers with a college degree increased tremendously. They became much more important to the production process, earned more, and gained more social status. In the process, they concentrated in major urban cities. They surrounded themselves with other people like themselves. They created their own subculture. They severed often their links to communities that consisted of people with different levels of skills and different diverse skills. They became more cosmopolitan and more convinced of their values. Together with that, they became politically more influential, but also disinterested first in the plight of the less educated groups. You can see that in the Democratic Party, for example, or in other center-left parties in Europe, where these parties that were essentially working-class parties, as many of their names suggested, became completely dominated by the college-educated, and they changed their programs away from the kinds of policies that working classes favored, more towards policies and priorities that the college-educated favored. The college-educated at that point, becoming more convinced of their values, started what I call a social engineering agenda, which is trying to improve society by imposing values on the rest of society. That is very, very important to the cultural backlash that you were hinting at, Yascha.

Mounk: Your analysis of the social engineering mechanism is really very interesting and distinctive and novel, I think. To stick with the analysis for a moment, and I want to make sure that we get to that in a later stage of the conversation, part of what is interesting about this current political realignment is that, traditionally, if you were relatively affluent, you had a college degree, you were probably a Republican. There are obviously always exceptions, but statistically speaking. And if you were working class and did not have a college degree, you were probably a Democrat. You could say the same thing about the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats in Germany, or Labour and the Conservatives in the United Kingdom, and so on. Today, it is starting to reverse.

Acemoglu: It is not just that it has weakened, it is reversed.

Mounk: Right. But these parties still have not fully understood that in their rhetoric and how they are talking. The strange thing, in particular, about the Democratic Party is that it thinks of itself naturally as a party of the working class, and is definitely searching for working-class candidates. I think often it has so little sense of what is working class that it picks candidates who sound like the working class to highly college-educated people.

Acemoglu: One hundred percent. You got it completely right. First of all, any social change of this sort is often perceived somewhat later than it should be. But moreover, that perception was also delayed because the right still remained opposed to trade unions. Trade unions continued to be strong in many countries, the UK, the United States, Germany especially, and they continued, for a while at least, and they still do to some extent, to give their support to the center-left parties. But take the Labour Party in the UK—now that trade unions are less able to garner that support, they are just coming apart. These parties became parties of postgraduates, but were still able to keep some portion of the working class through the trade union movement.

There are some interesting papers on this, for example, by Nicolas Longuet-Marx, Suresh Naidu, and Ilyana Kuziemko, that illustrate how the preferences over economic policy of working classes in the United States, lower-education workers in the United States, have remained very consistent. And those of the Democratic Party started changing and diverging quite significantly from those of the working classes. In particular, the Democratic Party has always remained somewhat committed to redistribution, but they favored redistribution via fiscal policies without unions, without minimum wages, without trade protection, without job programs, without any kind of intervention in the market system. Whereas workers wanted all of these things. They wanted minimum wages. They wanted active job programs. They wanted unions. That is what the Democratic Party turned its back on. Then, of course, came the cultural policies and cultural stances that you mentioned.

Mounk: That is very interesting. Even on the economic policies now, when you think about some of the most popular economic slogans of the Democratic Party, sometimes it is raising the minimum wage, but a lot of it is free college or cancel student debt, which may or may not be good policies, but which clearly are directed towards what, according to polls, is actually the strongest Democratic electorate at the moment, which is people with high levels of education but lower levels of income. The person who is most likely to vote for Democrats is a person with a postgraduate degree who makes quite little money, whereas the person who is most likely to vote Republican is the person with a high school degree who is making quite a lot of money—the plumber, and so on.

Acemoglu: One hundred percent. The complication there is that the person with a postgraduate degree making little money is often somebody who will make more money in the future, and also comes from a family with greater wealth and access. Democrats have done better lately in mobilizing that group. Mamdani, who is an amazing politician, has articulated some very important themes, but is really speaking to that group. Still, I think Democrats are not appealing to the working classes, who have more culturally conservative values and other concerns. That is a very big problem, because I think liberal democracy needs that broad coalition.

The image I have in my mind of an iconic coalition to support liberal democracy is FDR’s coalition, which consisted of progressive educated people, his brain trust; it consisted of manual workers, the trade union movement; and it included the Southern Democrats, business owners, people with more conservative values but difficult economic conditions, but very conservative values as well. FDR’s genius was to keep them together. But it is not just unique to FDR. Look at Scandinavia. Look at Germany, you had the same things there as well. That kind of coalition looks much harder to form today, and that is what I think is the future of liberal democracy. We need to reform that kind of coalition.

Mounk: How do we reform that kind of coalition? It strikes me that you are saying that one root of this crisis is that we transitioned from an industrial to a post-industrial society, and philosophical liberals, as well as, in their market sense, political liberals on the left, do not seem to have dealt with that transition the appropriate way. When you look back through history and think about other moments when liberalism was truly in crisis, the rise of fascism and communism in the first half of the twentieth century was one such period. But the middle of the nineteenth century, when liberals had to think about how to adapt their ideology to the rise of industrial society, to the factories in Manchester and so on, was another. There is this complicated way in which liberalism has certain ideas about the economy. I think it is basically a political philosophy whose main idea is about the nature of governance and the rule of law and separation of powers, but not directly economic, though it obviously intersects with the economy. As you are saying, it is rooted in certain economic facts about society. When those economic facts in society radically change, liberalism needs to adapt to that, and it has trouble doing that. Should we think of this as an echo of the mid-nineteenth century, or of other moments in which there was this economic kind of transition, and how is it that the ideology can respond to those new economic facts by changing and adapting, but without giving up what is actually at its core?

Acemoglu: I think those are excellent questions, and your instinct is one hundred percent right that we have to learn from history. Indeed, there were historical difficulties. But I would say, despite the fact that if you look back, there are many mistakes and conceited arrogance in some liberal thinkers throughout the ages, the adaptation in the middle of the nineteenth century, I think, was better than what we have done today. I think the iconic case for that would be John Stuart Mill. He was very influenced by his father, James Mill, an economist and also a liberal in some way. But John Stuart Mill’s liberalism is much more adapted to the industrial age, much less arrogant than his father’s, which was very elitist. Essentially, it became the iconic left liberalism that I can identify with many aspects of the later social democratic ideas. John Stuart Mill was a staunch defender of individual freedoms, but also understood that you needed to provide opportunities and means for people to realize those freedoms. He was very open to democratization, including of women, lower classes, in social life and in the political process. That was the adaptation to industrial society.

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Today, I think the adaptation is not necessarily harder, but we are not doing as well. That adaptation, as you have started articulating it, really has two parts. One is economic and technological: how do we use existing technologies and redirect them if necessary, especially in AI, so that we can recreate the foundations of shared prosperity. The other, at the same time, is how do we create the aspirations of liberalism—that is what I call working-class liberalism. It comes with articulating a new governing philosophy with a broad coalition around it. I would say perhaps the latter has to come first, because if we have the right aspirations, redirecting and using technology the right way will become easier as well. Today, it is a failure of governance and institutions that we have the largest and most powerful corporations in the world that are not regulated at all. But it is also part of our governing philosophy. We do not have a governing philosophy today that can stand up to the power of tech. For such a long time, we have given a complete pass to tech companies to do whatever they wanted, because we just did not have that sort of governing philosophy.

Mounk: One question that I ask myself is, assuming that fifty years from now we look back at this period and we think liberalism was really in trouble in the beginning of the twenty-first century, but thankfully we figured it out, and today liberalism is doing great, what is the story that we are going to be telling about that rescue operation? There are three different ways we might be talking about it at that point, two of which are intellectually in competition with each other but somewhat hopeful, and one of which is a much darker timeline, but perhaps the one that is most realistic.

The first is that the ideas of liberalism, the basic political theory behind it, the basic formulation of what liberalism is, had become complacent, had become stuck in one kind of set of assumptions about the world, and we needed some people, like Daron Acemoglu, or more broadly, all the people we are trying to gather in Persuasion, to rethink the liberal tradition. Thankfully, X and Y and Z people managed to do that during that period, and that really allowed us, or gave us, the intellectual tools we needed for liberals to confront this new kind of period.

A second story is: forget about all of that, that is just a distraction and high-falutin word games. Really, what we needed is a set of clever policies, or charismatic political leaders, or election strategists who figured out how to stand up to populists, just engaging in political battle and change. What we need is a really smart idea about how to hold Google accountable, or the people who really figured out how to take the fight to Donald Trump and the MAGA movement in the 2028 elections, or whatever.

The third kind of timeline that we might be thinking about fifty years from now is, things look bad in 2026, but they got worse. There was a ten-year period like the Emergency in India in the 1970s, of real abrogation of democratic rule, or the horrible war between the United States and Canada, whoever, and people saw what the world looks like without liberalism, and then they remembered the liberal virtues, and that is when liberalism reconstituted itself, which is the story of the middle of the twentieth century, of course. That is the story of how liberalism roared back after the horrors of World War II and the Third Reich and the Soviet Union and the Holocaust and all of those kinds of things.

Which story are we going to tell, and in particular, how important do you think that first piece, the most intellectual piece of this, is going to be relative to the other two?

Acemoglu: Well, look, I think there are very good historians who think the only good ever comes out of crises. I am not one of them. Of course, your third scenario is a scary one, and I cannot rule it out. I hope it is not that one. There are instances in the past where we have gotten our act together against challenges, in the face of challenges, but without everything hitting crisis proportions. The progressive era was a challenging time, but it was not a crisis in which people started killing each other. Of course there was poverty, but it was not much worse than it was in the nineteenth century. It was somewhat getting worse. But we got our act together. We formed a broad coalition, or not we, but people there, and they laid foundations for a much better set of institutions, doing things that are unimaginable today: several amendments to the Constitution, introducing the federal income tax, introducing new laws for antitrust, creating new political movements and parties and ideas, and stopping the corrupt election of senators, going to direct election of senators. There were tremendous changes. So we are capable of doing those things.

I, for one, am a big believer in the importance of ideas—not my own. If I can play a tiny role in this, I will be very happy. But ideas matter a lot. That is why I do emphasize in the book the need for a new governing philosophy. In fact, charismatic leaders, of course, are important, but I cannot think of a charismatic leader who has had beneficial effects unless he or she could piggyback on or articulate an inspiring idea. That is why Mamdani is a fantastically charismatic and skilled politician, but I do not think he has the right governing philosophy. That is why I do not think he is going to be transformative for the United States. He may, as yet, develop it. He is a very, very skilled person. But we really need new, aspiring, inspiring ideas, and those that will bring broad coalitions together and that will really energize liberal democratic institutions.

Mounk: Thank you very much for giving this justification for what I want to do in the next part of the conversation, which is to geek out about the political theory in your book. You defend liberalism, you make a philosophical case for liberalism, but as part of that defense, you also attack some of the big traditions that have historically justified liberalism. In particular, you think that we have overindexed on the social contract tradition, starting with Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but it extends all the way through John Rawls and the influence that he has had on our thinking. Describe briefly what the social contract tradition really consists in, for readers who may be less read up on that, and why is it that you think that has in some ways pushed us in the wrong direction? Why, in order to do that work of renewing liberalism, do we need to critically rethink how we are justifying the philosophy?

Acemoglu: The social contract tradition came out of a very necessary point at a time when most of the world was not just governed by kingdoms and sultans, but philosophically believed and legitimized things like the divine right of kings, where certain people were put on this earth to rule over others. Social contract theories instead started articulating ideas related to we the people somehow giving our consent. It is very clear, for example, in John Locke’s work. But a very important part of that, which we can see, for example, in Immanuel Kant’s majestic work, is this effort to find what is right that we can somehow ex ante specify, either procedurally, as in Locke, or substantively, as in Kant, what is ethical action, what is the right organization of society. The extreme version of that, in my mind, is in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, where there is a general will that is always right, and we have no choice but to obey that general will.

Mounk: Where, of course, the famous phrase comes from, that if the individual does not agree with the general will, then the general will should be imposed on them. This is not unusual—there might be a law, and even if you disagree with the law, we are going to force you to obey it—but with a dangerous addition: that this is not restricting your freedom, it is in fact forcing you to be free.

Acemoglu: Exactly. To be free we need to have the general will imposed on us so that we can be free. What is wrong with that, in my opinion, is that what is most positive for us is to agree from the bottom up on what should be done. So what I call a social compact rather than a social contract. What I mean by that is that there is not any formula for the right behavior that we should impose on others. Of course, we have to impose laws on others and ourselves, but we have to agree to them to the extent possible. Liberalism, again, was the one philosophy that cultivated that.

Today I believe we need that more than ever. We need shared moral values, communication, community, so that we can develop ways of reaching those compromises, and that is where bigger coalitions come in. We should move away from this notion that somehow some of us, or some political process, has the solution to all the problems. I think the social engineering agenda that we talked about briefly, Yascha, is very related to that. It comes out of the belief—by the way, when liberals used that, it was trying to solve real problems: problems of ignorance, intolerance, rejection of others in our society, in our midst. Those were real, serious problems. I do sympathize very strongly with the liberal agenda there. But I think the way to deal with that, saying that we know the answer and we have to impose that on diverse communities, is the wrong way to approach it. The moment you do that, first of all, you are betraying, I think, liberal ideas and all the pluralism that is so essential, and all the self-government aspirations that are so essential to liberalism. But also you are bound to create backlash, as we have done, instead of finding the common moral grounds and trying to make gradual progress on these things, which, again, liberalism has done brilliantly for two and a half centuries. Gradually, but brilliantly.

Mounk: Spell out the connection to me. How do you get from Thomas Hobbes to the modern campus bureaucracy for imposing DEI on, say, a department of political science?

Acemoglu: This is actually a fascinating area. I am very interested in that, which is the genealogy of ideas.

Mounk: When you say that there is a connection between the contractualist tradition and the kind of high-modernist project of social engineering, of which you take the DEI bureaucracy to be a part, what is the connection?

Acemoglu: Right, that is where I am going. Is Thomas Hobbes critical for that? I think he is, to some extent, because he introduced the most modern version of social contract ideas, but together with a very firm belief that you also needed the Leviathan, and the iron fist of the Leviathan, to keep order and to impose the right things. From there it is a very protracted evolution to Rousseau. I do not want to say that people from the right criticize Rousseau too much; there are some brilliant things in Rousseau. But I think he is also the epitomization of this kind of thinking, that once we know what is right in the general will, that should be imposed.

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I think the key is that none of these ideas, except for that brief period during the French Revolution, were really applied as liberal ideas. Liberalism was in opposition. It influenced things by changing hearts and minds and convincing conservatives, and later socialists, to come on board with its ideals. It is only in the decades that follow World War II that liberalism becomes the establishment. That is also the period where, throughout Western Europe and the United States, some of the problems that liberalism itself did not have any solutions to—such as how do you deal with the intolerant, how do you deal with ignorance, how do you integrate people into society when they come from very different backgrounds and there is discrimination and rejection—all of these problems came to the fore, because these are very heterogeneous societies, and they were modernizing in some aspects, both economically but also ideologically. That is where you see this urban, educated middle class gaining more and more progressive ideas, very cosmopolitan, very inclusive ideas in some sense. But other parts of it are still culturally very different. So how do you deal with these problems? The solution gradually became more and more, we know the truth, we are going to impose it on others. That is what I think is a problem.

Mounk: So the connection is that in the contractualist tradition, there is a kind of distinction between the right and the good—I am now broadly channeling John Rawls, though there are different formulations of it at different stages of the tradition. Broadly speaking, when it comes to how you want to lead your life, the state is meant to be neutral between different conceptions of the good that people have. I might be very secular and think that the good life is to spend my time chatting to interesting people on my podcast. Other people might be very religious and think that the good life consists in being a nun and spending all of their days in prayer. The state is not going to favor one of those things over the other. But in the realm of the right, in the realm of the basic rules the state is going to enforce, there is a kind of objective truth, and that objective truth has to do with how we can actually live together in a society under diverse circumstances. It means, in particular, that I am not allowed to impose my views on you. I cannot say, I am religious and you should also be religious, and if you are not going to be religious, then I am going to physically attack you, and so on.

Acemoglu: I think that is a little more complicated, in my opinion, because I think that is never fully the case. There are things you have to protect about individual liberties. But also, because I think what you describe, which sometimes goes under the name of pluralism, is accepted, sometimes, at the individual level, but my justification for liberalism and liberal ideas also says we have to accept it at the community level as well. Most of the things that we do are not just at the individual level but at the group level. You need to allow for some amount of community-level experimentation and community-level self-government. That is really difficult, because communities, of course, are cages of norms, as I also called them in my previous work with James Robinson, The Narrow Corridor. They impose their values and they take other people’s freedoms. That is why this is a very grey area. But there is no social contract, there is no formula. We have to work through these edge cases ourselves, as a global community, as a national community, as people who share certain moral values. This is why it is very important that we at the same time enshrine basic individual freedoms—freedom of thought, freedom of religion, association, speech—at the same time as we recognize community-level pluralism. I think that is what social contract theories do not fully do. John Rawls is an exception; it is a complicated case.

Mounk: Let me push you on that a little bit. I find the concept of a cage of norms very generative and helpful, and I draw on it in my book, The Great Experiment. When James Robinson came on the podcast to talk about The Narrow Corridor, which is a fantastic book, we debated that. If you want to go four or five years back in the archive of the podcast, you can find a great conversation about that. It is interesting to me that, on this particular point, I think you echo a post-liberal critique from the right, which I think actually has some real meat to it, some real justification, which is to say: these liberals claim that they are neutral between different conceptions of the good—you can be deeply religious, or you can be secular, you can do this, you can do that—but in practice that is not the case. In theory, the university claims, we are a diverse community and you can have all kinds of political views. But in practice, the deeply conservative religious student is going to feel a lot less comfortable on campus at MIT or at Johns Hopkins than the kind of secular Theater kid. I guess the question is, why is that? It seems to me that you are drawing a line here from the contractual tradition and saying, well, because the contractual tradition has this idea of a right and they want to impose it. I would say it is different, actually. I would say that conception should protect those students. The problem is precisely that we are not acting as philosophical liberals, that we are imposing an idea of the good on people, saying this is how you should live and not this other way. That is precisely a violation of what liberal principles are, whether or not they are cashed out as part of a contractual position or not.

Acemoglu: Let me try to say it this way. First of all, I am definitely not a post-liberal. But you are right, that critique is right. What I would say is that liberalism is the best way of dealing with that critique. That is where we have to recognize these grey areas and say we have to create these basic individual freedoms, but still allow for community-level self-government and pluralism. There is no hard and fast rule. In particular, when a community starts discriminating against a particular group, there often are going to be grey areas. If they take that group’s or that individual’s basic rights very strongly, that is where we have to stop it. But where that line is, I think we have to negotiate as a society, based on moral principles. That is why I do not think there is a social contract—if there was a social contract, we would know where that line is, in some sense. That line becomes much more inspiring to draw if we agree around it.

For example, on gay marriage, there are two very different paths to allowing gay marriage, and we have pursued both of them in the United States. In one of them, the process of debate, information sharing, campaigns, and referendums convinced people from very different walks of life, with very different values, that two people of the same sex wanting to get married was also a good thing. If you could put yourself in their shoes, you would realize why that was so important. Empathy was a very important part of building that tradition. A second path was, we know this is right, your community may be against it, but we are going to impose it on you. I think there is a big difference between these two. I fully support same-sex marriage, but I do not want the second path to be the one, because it is going to backfire, and it is actually not consistent with ultimate liberal values. I want that first path, which actually worked quite well for quite a while, to be the one to achieve that. If you are a social contractarian, I do not think you can reject that second path.

Mounk: Why not? I do not fully understand.

Acemoglu: Because it says that there is a social contract, and that social contract says, regardless of your sexual orientation, you should have the rights that opposite-sex couples have. If that is not the case, we are going to impose that. That is the social contract.

Mounk: I think there are many steps from going from something like Rawls’s original position to, say, whether, in a deeply conservative society, some form of protection for same-sex couples that falls short of marriage is acceptable. Or you could take a libertarian point of view, which I think is perfectly compatible with the social contract tradition in this specific circumstance, which is to say, well, the state should get out of the business of marriage. Marriage is something that has deep religious significance; different traditions are going to interpret it very differently. Why should the state be in the business of drawing the lines about what is an acceptable marriage and what is not?

Acemoglu: But the state needs to be there. I do not agree with the libertarian tradition either. If you did that, then it would also be okay for a community to say, well, we do not believe in the secular education system, so we are going to not send our children to school, we are going to drop them out of school at the age of seven, and I think that is wrong as well.

Mounk: But I think the liberal tradition has many more resources for answering some of those questions. The answer for children is that children cannot make decisions for themselves. Liberals think that you need to be able to make decisions for yourself, as long as you are not harming other people. But that presumes that you are capable of making decisions for yourself. A seven-year-old is not capable of making decisions for himself, so who should make decisions for the seven-year-old? The answer is a cooperative project between the parents and the state.

Acemoglu: Just a little tangent: yes, but it is not just the seven-year-olds. I gave that example, but let me give you another. If you are a libertarian and you are against the state, what do you do if a local, self-governing community forces people who are homosexual to go through conversion therapy because they think homosexuality is wrong? That is where the state needs to step in and say, no, that the local community cannot do that. So we do need the state.

Mounk: Sure. But that goes back to the discussion about community and how distinctive the level of a community is. I am not sure whether we disagree about what should govern those communities within liberalism.

Acemoglu: One thing that might help—and this might be a bit too much of a tangent—John Rawls is actually super interesting, because there are two very distinct ways of reading him, and I think he is not clear on which one should be the right way. One is the veil of ignorance, which I think is just very classic social contractarian: behind a veil of ignorance, we agree on the right thing, and then when we come out, when we are no longer behind the veil, we should still follow it. But there is another way, which is that this is an argumentation method. I can try to say to you, Yascha, put yourself in my shoes. You could have, in an alternative life, been me, and you would have seen things differently. That is a way of convincing you. It is the latter Rawls that is completely consistent with what I am saying, and it is the former Rawls that is very opposed to it, because I do not believe we can reach just and fair rules, rules that are going to form a broad coalition, behind a veil of ignorance, and then impose them.

Mounk : I agree with that. I also find A Theory of Justice not all that fruitful for debates today, but Political Liberalism much more helpful, and that is a similar distinction. But I actually want to get to the substantive question about what role the community should have. Here is roughly the position that, in part by engaging with the idea of the cage of norms and so on, I develop in The Great Experiment: the first misunderstanding about liberalism is that liberals do not value community. I think that is wrong. Historically it is wrong, because the very origin of liberalism was, how can we have Catholics and Protestants in the same state? It is not that we did not think those religious communities were important, but it is precisely because they were so important that they led to 150 years of war. We are trying to figure out how we can honor them without continually having war and civil war. When you think about what the basic liberal freedoms are—the freedom of worship, the freedom of assembly, the freedom of speech, freedom of conscience—they precisely come from an understanding that community and religion are incredibly important to most human beings.

Acemoglu: One hundred percent, and that is very important. You are one of those who has emphasized that. Helena Rosenblatt is another person who has emphasized that. I think that is a very important thing, and many important works of the liberal tradition, like, for example, Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, come out of that—trying to say, how can we create communities in which people care for each other and understand each other?

Mounk: If you are saying that communities do not have enough pride of place in liberal theory at the moment, and perhaps not in our societies, because we impose upon them too much when we feel that they have run afoul of this social engineering project, what role should they have? To me, the liberal stance would be: communities have deep value, we want to have many communities in our society, and we have to respect the fact that they may hold views which I, as a secular liberal, may find offensive, and that is acceptable. But they have value derivatively from the choice of individuals to be part of them. This choice is not an idealized thing where I am imagining that at eighteen, I sit down and think, which community do I want to join. Most members of a community are going to be born into it and continue to be a part of it. But what we do have to leave is the possibility of exit. If you are raised within a community that you do not like, you need to be able to leave it. That is a fundamental feature of a community. The reason why we respect communities is that they have members who are free to leave but have not left. That is why they are worthy of our respect.

Acemoglu: One hundred percent, you got it exactly right. But let me push you on the next one. Should there be a right to entry?

Mounk: Not necessarily. I do not have to invite you for dinner. That is part of freedom of association.

Acemoglu: That is it. But that is exactly where we are now seeing the grey areas. Should a community today in the United States that is conservative say, immigrants are not welcome in our community? We cannot prevent them, but they are not welcome in our community.

Mounk: It depends on what you mean by a community here. If it is a residential area, then the answer is no. But if it is a social club for people who all have to be native-born citizens, that is not something I would like, it is not something I would join, but I think we should absolutely allow that.

Acemoglu: Exactly. When it is a residential area, for them to do so by any coercive means, or by any means that is inconsistent with the market system, is not allowed. But they may say, we, as a community, want to practice our religion, and we do not want your religion, and you can come and live here but we are not going to adapt to you. I think we have to allow that too, again subject to basic liberal principles, which is that they cannot restrict the freedom of association, speech, or mobility of those people. But they can have stances, they can have policies, they can have collective arrangements that are not as welcoming to immigrants, and other communities can have more. Those are the kind of grey areas, and I do not know the answer to where that line should be. I am proud of not knowing where that line should be, because I think that line should be something we decide together, based on shared communication and moral understanding.

Mounk: This also gets to a thought I have about the nature of hard cases. I think sometimes people want to point to the fact that there are hard cases as a way to suggest that therefore the underlying theory must be wrong, and I think that is a mistake.

Acemoglu: Absolutely. I think liberalism always has to be a work in progress.

Mounk: Any moral system is always going to have multiple normative commitments, and there are going to be some cases where those commitments butt up against each other.

Acemoglu: Yeah, absolutely. But any good moral system has to have that. There are many bad systems: theocracy does not have that, the divine right of kings does not have that, Sharia law does not have that. That is why they are bad systems.

Mounk: Right. But then I think the question is, in those hard cases, can you explain in a coherent way what the different considerations are and why this is a hard case? As long as each of those considerations has real normative pull, I do not think it is a problem. I want to get to your analysis of social engineering, because you draw both on history and on economics in order to help us understand it. You compare, for example, the DEI bureaucracy today to the clergy of the medieval church. What on earth do those two have in common?

Acemoglu: Any analogy there is dangerous and provocative, and I do not want to overstate it. But I think whenever you form a system where some people have the means to impose their practices or values on others, it has several elements. One is ideological power. That is very important to human beings, because it gives them power over others, and individuals, to some extent, seek power. It does that in a way that is consistent with their values. It also creates employment. It also further unites you with the people who share your values. Those are the dynamics that we saw with the clergy, and those are the dynamics that we see when you look at—and it is not just the DEI bureaucracy, it is the whole post-industrial system. Look at high schools. There is great diversity, so any generalization is going to be false, but there are certain currents in high school teaching that are very common across places, and they do impose a lot of values in some ways. Now, I sympathize with many of those values, but I still think we should encourage people into critical thinking rather than imposing those values. That is the sense in which this sort of thing starts spreading in concentric circles. That is what is problematic, and it does not leave enough room for consensus to emerge through shared moral understanding and communication, and it creates the possibility of backlash.

Mounk: One of the structural similarities you see across many historical examples is that, originally, people are recruited into the bureaucracy to serve a purpose that the principal—the president of a university, the pope, the king—has, but over time it is actually the bureaucracy that is assembled. Tell us about that mechanism, and how it helps illustrate both those historical cases and the challenge we face today.

Acemoglu: I think you summarize it quite well. I would say it is really remarkable that the dynamics of indoctrination in medieval Europe were very much a local matter. The Inquisition and all of these things are the apex of that, but they were very much local zeal—people who had other positions and other jobs really jumping in, surpassing each other in terms of how zealous they were going to be. If you look at where the head of the spear is in the progressive imposition of values in the recent past, it is again people who are there for other positions—human resource departments, or people who are in teaching positions, not everybody obviously—playing this role of, well, it is our job to impose what we think or what we believe are the correct values on others, if necessary, by not allowing them to speak counter thoughts.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Daron discuss the meaning of working-class liberalism, the potential economic impact of artificial intelligence, and how to shape a better way forward for AI. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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This is a nasty story.

In 2023, Jason Arday made international news for becoming, at age 37, the youngest black professor in the history of Cambridge University. It wasn’t just that, though. Arday had a really remarkable background. Raised on a council estate in south London, Arday was, in his account, diagnosed at age three with autism and global development delay and didn’t speak until he was 11. At that point, something “clicked,” as he has put it, but he wouldn’t read or write until he was 18.

Then, Arday really applied himself. By age 30, he obtained a Ph.D. in Educational Studies from Liverpool John Moores University, and, according to his official biography, worked at Roehampton, Durham, and Glasgow before being appointed to a highly prestigious professorship at Cambridge. In his spare time, Arday was an ultra long-distance runner, in 2010 completing 30 marathons in 35 days and over two decades raising £5.5 million for charity.

It’s a beautiful story—Arday himself for the documentary “Great Big Story” said of his life, “Wouldn’t it be the most ridiculous story ever told?”—and it’s about to be commemorated in a memoir that Simon & Schuster UK is releasing later this month.

The only problem is that large portions of it may not be true.

In 2023, only months after his appointment at Cambridge, a pair of academics, Dave Harris and Martyn Hammersley, raised concerns to Cambridge, to Liverpool John Moores, and to different journals Arday had published in about the academic integrity of Arday’s work. Two of the journals issued corrections. Cambridge replied that the issues preceded Arday’s hiring and therefore were not within Cambridge’s “remit” to investigate. Liverpool John Moores, for its part, has issued a statement that the university in 2025 conducted a “confidential procedure” in response to the allegations and that “Professor Arday’s PhD still stands.”

In 2025, the Times Higher Education spiked an article about the allegations against Arday after Arday enlisted the defamation law firm Carter-Ruck to send a letter to the publication. But last month, Nathan Cofnas, a former Fellow at Cambridge, published a post on Substack that blew the Arday story wide open. Using the plagiarism detector Copyleaks, Cofnas found over 30 cases of “substantial overlap” in Arday’s Ph.D. dissertation with the previously-published dissertation of Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, many of them long chunks of verbatim copying, as well as verbatim copying from other sources. Cofnas went through ten other papers of Arday’s, taken from Arday’s own list of “principal and recent publications,” and found significant issues, including plagiarism, in at least four of them. Additional malfeasance included virtually identical quotes attributed to different sources in different papers, which strongly implies that at least some of the quotes from supposed participants in his studies were confabulated.

Meanwhile, Cofnas raised difficult questions about aspects of Arday’s personal story. He noted that running 30 marathons in 35 days would place Arday in the ultra-marathon elite—this without having left any ostensible mark in the running community. “If Arday [did that], I’ll eat my yarmulke,” said Cofnas by telephone. The claim to have raised £5.5 million for charity has already been walked back by Arday, who in a recent interview said the fundraising was done in conjunction with collectives. And Cofnas found that Arday’s two GCSE qualifications—in physical education and textiles—were unobtainable without passing written tests, a detail that challenges the timeline given by Arday that he could not read or write until he was 18. Cofnas also suggests that Arday’s account of his speech development is “medically improbable.”

Cofnas is far from a neutral party in this case. He was fired by Cambridge’s Emmanuel College in 2024 on the back of student protests against him for a Substack post in which he wrote that in a color-blind meritocracy “blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.” Harris, the academic who first raised questions about Arday’s scholarship, was embroiled in a controversy of his own in which he had his emeritus title at Plymouth Marjon University stripped for a time after he critiqued critical race theory.

The fact that his accusers are controversial in their own right may help to explain why so many academics have reflexively defended Arday. In an interview with The Times of London, Arday this week said, “There has been, since I arrived at Cambridge, a very well orchestrated and co-ordinated campaign to unseat me from my position. The motive is racially motivated. I think there’s a reason why it’s me, and I do think that reason is aligned to ableism and racism.” In 2025, when the allegations against Arday were beginning to surface, the Cambridge professors Simon Baron-Cohen and Ricardo Sabates circulated an open letter under the heading “URGENT PLEASE SIGN ANTI-RACISM LETTER FOR JASON ARDAY.” The Good Law Project, an activist organization, orchestrated a solidarity letter last week that has been signed by 14,000 people decrying the “sustained and malicious attacks on the academic integrity of Dr. Jason Arday,” which the letter attributed to “an attempt to undermine Black people who hold positions of influence.” And Cambridge University has wholeheartedly taken Arday’s side. A university spokesperson said, “Professor Arday has been the victim of a vile campaign to undermine his credibility, which must stop.”

So—as you can see—it’s an uncomfortable story landing right on the faultlines of the culture wars. On one side is institutional procedure alongside an institutional culture hyper-sensitive to accusations against what the Good Law Project calls “a working class Black man.” On the other side is the argument that standards must be maintained—and maintained by academic and journalistic vigilantes if the institutions are unwilling to uphold their own meritocratic principles.

And of course the real issue isn’t exactly Arday. It’s the presumption that the politically progressive culture ascendant at Cambridge and in higher education in general has long ago deviated from real meritocracy. By phone, Cofnas was clear on that point. He said, “This is a story about DEI and the corruption that is required to sustain the system of DEI—of elevating people based on identity characteristics rather than merit.”

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So what do we do in a case like this, where everybody pretty much sees what they are already predisposed to see? Well, first of all, we look at the source material—and in this case it’s pretty unequivocal. For instance, Arday’s line on page 17 of his 2015 dissertation—“Student teachers are unique individuals and differ in their personal biographies and prior experiences, disposition to enquiry, cognitive and perceptive abilities, communication, interpersonal skills, adaptability, values, and belief systems”—is a perfect match to page 1 of Zwozdiak-Myers’ 2009 dissertation. According to Cofnas, the pattern is repeated dozens of times, while The Telegraph for its part found “more than 100 passages that are identical or nearly identical” to Zwozdiak-Myers’ thesis. There is, as Harris put it, “no other plausible explanation” than plagiarism for the overlaps.

Then, in the week following Cofnas’ Substack post, subsequent reporting found additional patterns of fabulism by Arday. In an open letter to a government minister last year, Arday said he was the victim of innumerable threats and attacks since he took up his Cambridge position. In an interview with The Guardian this week, Arday clarified that he was referring to, among other incidents, a “severed pig’s head” that had been sent to his parents’ London home. That assertion triggered a macabre scavenger hunt, with Guardian journalists visiting the butcher shop that Arday claimed had sold the pig to the assailant. But the butcher said that there had been no police investigation into the incident, as Arday had asserted. For their part, London’s Metropolitan Police said that the details Arday gave of a police investigation into the incident were “categorically” inaccurate.

Arday further claimed that a masked man had accosted him twice at his Cambridge faculty building and threatened him with a knife the second time. But as The Guardian noted, no intruder appeared on CCTV on either occasion, and Arday did not inform colleagues or interrupt his working day after the alleged knife incident.

Meanwhile, a recently-surfaced video interview with Arday appears to show him claiming that he starred in the acclaimed documentary “Seven Up”—a mathematical impossibility unless Arday was actually born in 1956. And just today Glasgow University has denied Arday’s claim that he held a visiting professorship there.

Given all that—the all-but-indisputable evidence of plagiarism, in addition to the patterns of fanciful statements by Arday—the case for his defense collapses. “I think it’s plagiarism and it’s obvious,” one academic told The Guardian under condition of anonymity. “There is no question that there is extensive plagiarism,” David Sanders, an independent researcher who reviewed Arday’s case last year for Times Higher Education, said to Retraction Watch.

Arday, for his part, did not, in a wide-ranging interview he gave to The Times of London last week, directly challenge the primary allegation of plagiarism and academic misconduct. He said, “I am accountable for the mistakes I’ve made. I hold myself accountable and other people should hold me accountable.” Instead, he took another line of defense, contending, “We’re talking about academia here. I didn’t murder somebody. I think the cruelty that I’ve experienced and the positioning of me as this kind of liar and fantasist is totally unacceptable.”

If it’s fair to say that the preponderance of evidence at this point speaks to serious academic misconduct on Arday’s part, the next question—picking up on Arday’s lead—is to ask ourselves what the stakes are here and what the story is really about. Arday is right of course that one academic with a shaky relationship to the truth is not, by itself, a huge deal. But, unfortunately for Arday’s defense, it is a story with more reach than he admits and it really does indict the institutions backing him.

For one thing, there is the issue of how Arday and his supporters have tried to defend him. There has been very little of the accountability Arday has called for—and there has been no willingness to look at the very obvious evidence of academic misconduct. The overriding tendency has been to shoot the messenger and to go after the academics, particularly Harris and Cofnas, who called attention to the issues in Arday’s work. According to The Guardian, Arday attempted to lodge a police complaint against Harris. Earlier this year, he dedicated a talk at the British Sociological Association to the “playbook” employed by conservative activists to target black professors. “There isn’t any room to sit there and watch your fellows suffer for no reason. It’s abhorrent, it’s a disgrace and, quite frankly, evil,” Arday said.

Apart from the often vitriolic counter-attack against Arday’s accusers, there has been a tendency to dodge the issue and shield Arday through arguments related to his neurodivergence. “1 in 4 autistic people have planned or attempted suicide. That’s why I’m very concerned about the impact of the media coverage on Professor Jason Arday who is autistic,” Baron-Cohen, the director of Cambridge’s autism research center, wrote on X last week. In his Times interview, Arday seemed to pass the buck on the plagiarism in his dissertation, contending that, in The Times’ paraphrase, he had “received inadequate supervision and support” particularly given his autism and learning disabilities.

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That was the general approach taken as well by Cambridge in its communication with Martyn Hammersley in 2023 in which the university affirmed its “full support” for Arday. Hilary Cremin, the head of the Faculty of Education, wrote to Hammersley, “During our meeting Prof Arday spoke movingly about his ongoing experiences of direct and indirect racism, and the conditions that he was living in whilst the 2018 article was being prepared (in 2016). At this time he was early career and living away from home whilst dealing with significant health issues.”

If Arday’s defense is not sustainable on the grounds of academic integrity, this plea for the court’s mercy is hard to credit as well. Arday is not an obscure academic. His hiring at Cambridge was reported on by CBS, ABC, the BBC, The Guardian, and The Times of London. He appeared in a documentary that has had 500,000 views on YouTube. He has received four honorary doctorates and for his fundraising achievements was selected as an Olympic torchbearer in 2012. The notion that Arday would be screened from repercussions for academic misconduct given his neurodivergence or medical history directly challenges notions of meritocracy that are at the core of the academic system.

The defense of Arday on grounds of institutional procedure is weak as well. This is the crux, for instance, of the Good Law Project’s Letter of Solidarity. It argues that “Investigations have found no evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing.” But a closer inspection reveals obvious lapses in the investigations of the academic entities. Cremin, speaking for Cambridge, seemed to admit errors in Arday’s work, writing that Arday “wanted to take the [2018] article down from the journal online platform in order to address concerns and re-upload it.” But in the same breath she absolved Arday of misconduct on the dubious grounds that he “spoke movingly” of personal challenges. Social Sciences, one of the two publications that issued corrections to Arday’s papers, wrote benignly that Arday “inadvertently omitted overlap between the two publications in prior sections” and then noted, as if in passing, that Arday had “clarified citation sources” in eleven different sections. As Cofnas more cuttingly observed, “The note appears to acknowledge that Arday’s entire paper is a work of plagiarism.”

The strongest remaining defense of Arday is that he was singled out. The sense is that plagiarism may be widely prevalent in academia—whole generations of still-employed academics wrote their dissertations and papers in eras before plagiarism-detecting software was available. As New York University’s Ivan Oransky told Inside Higher Ed, plagiarism is “clearly more common than anyone would like to think.” Think that way and the argument can be made that plagiarism-detection is a bit like setting up a speed trap in a zone where speeding used to be commonplace—and that activists’ focus on black academics is a form of discrimination.

But that argument has obvious limitations. Academia is either meritocratic or it isn’t. It either takes its rules seriously or it doesn’t. While the 2023 plagiarism hit led by right-wing activist Christopher Rufo against Harvard University president Claudine Gay could be construed as a borderline case, Arday’s situation is very different. The dozens of clear plagiarism cases in his dissertation are far over the line and make it more than evident not only that Arday never should have been allowed to pass into academia on the basis of his submitted work, but that there are serious flaws with a system that didn’t catch Arday until now and likely never would have if not for the outside vigilantes. That systemic failure is actually one of the many prongs of Arday’s ever-shifting defense, with Arday telling The Times of London that he received “only one formal supervision” through the entirety of his Ph.D. studies.

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Some defenses damn more than they exculpate. Cofnas’ target was always the system rather than a single academic, and it’s inarguable at this stage that—whatever Cofnas’ other flaws may be—he hit a bullseye here. If the Cambridge administration continues to defend Arday or to wish away the very clear evidence of academic malfeasance, then their embarrassment at the hands of academic vigilantes will be well-deserved. Unfortunately for the institution, that seems to be the direction that Cambridge is continuing to move in—choosing to view the whole episode as a culture war issue as opposed to applying common-sense academic standards.

Alternatively, the academy can treat an event like this as a wake-up call—a moment to realize that they have strayed too far from their core mission and that there really is no substitute for meritocracy. But to do that requires a degree of self-awareness and humility that higher education seems to have entirely lost.

Sam Kahn is staff editor at Persuasion, writes the Substack Castalia, and is editor-in-chief of The Republic of Letters.

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This article is brought to you by American Purpose, the magazine and community founded by Francis Fukuyama in 2020, which is proudly part of the Persuasion family.

The second Trump administration has undermined American democracy at a speed “unprecedented in modern history.” While many proposed remedies focus on the federal government, as the Republican-controlled Congress continues to abdicate its constitutional powers and the Supreme Court continues to help Trump concentrate executive authority, effective solutions may need to come from outside of Washington, D.C.

As a federal republic, many Americans hope that states and localities will serve as counterweights to Trump’s agenda. During the Minnesota protests against ICE earlier this year, some of the most notable resistance came not only from progressive activists and immigrant rights organizations, but also from conservatives and Republicans who felt a strong obligation to their state and its residents. Elizabeth Kautz, longtime Republican mayor of Burnsville, decried “the people of Minnesota [being] cruelly treated” by ICE. After witnessing a 70% decline in attendance at his church—largely driven by congregants’ fears of detention—Minneapolis pastor and former MAGA supporter Sergio Amezcua concluded that “what Trump had in mind was ethnic cleansing.” Outside of Minnesota, governors and state attorneys general have resisted the administration—particularly its ICE and DHS deployments—in both rhetorical and legal ways.

Subnational governments are powerful arenas for resisting democratic backsliding, but not only because of their institutions and elected leaders. Equally important are the shared loyalties and identities that states and localities inspire, such as being a Minnesotan, Chicagoan, or Californian. Few developments have galvanized Americans to defend their constitutional rights more than federal attacks on their states, cities, and fellow residents—regardless of partisanship or immigration status.

In Minnesota, ICE was successfully repelled because of large-scale, collective action by ordinary people, united by a shared sense of being Minnesotan and working through existing civic, religious, and labor networks. The protesters bore significant costs—time, resources, legal risks, and even the possibility of death. Yet they also imposed significant political and operational costs on ICE and DHS. Checking the Trump administration requires taking seriously the attachments that make resistance seem worth the costs.

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States and localities are powerful focal points for resistance: if two Mainers asked each other “why should we protect those people from being unlawfully detained?” a likely answer would be “because they’re Mainers.” States and localities generate many focal points: shared histories, foods, weather, industries, manners, landscapes, and, of course, sports. These identities do not emerge spontaneously but rather are developed and reinforced by a host of groups and institutions—unions, churches, civic organizations, schools, and local media—as well as by a shared sense of history and cultural reference points.

Subnational identities have played an important role in other countries—both federal and non-federal—confronting democratic backsliding and autocratization. In India, states with strong regional and linguistic identities have acted as important counterweights to the centralizing, illiberal vision espoused by Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party. Similarly, Brazilian states became important centers of opposition to Jair Bolsonaro’s COVID-19 denialism and executive overreach. In Hungary, Poland, and Turkey, ruling parties have faced significant public resistance in opposition-controlled cities and municipalities. In each case, subnational identities have helped citizens and elected officials mobilize voters, resist interference from central governments, and articulate alternative political visions.

This is echoed in acts of domestic resistance outside Minnesota. In Chicago, civic, religious, and neighborhood groups alike understood ICE operations as an attack on a city defined for over a century by its immigrant communities. Organizers in Washington, D.C., meanwhile, tied the federal government’s efforts to broader claims about self-government and home rule. Resistance even emerged in rural, conservative communities—for example, in Appalachia—which saw those targeted by ICE not as outsiders but as coworkers, congregants, and neighbors.

Subnational identities do more than mobilize citizens; they can also shift the loyalties of local officials aligned with authoritarian leaders. Indeed, state police, bureaucrats, and elected leaders are themselves local residents, who are caught in the middle between their federal superiors and local communities. As federal abuses mount, these individuals may feel more in tune with local solidarity, making noncompliance and “defection” appear rational and morally justified. This dynamic may help explain why Chris Madel, a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Minnesota, ended his campaign after condemning the “federal retribution on the citizens of our state.”

That states in particular can motivate costly political action is not a new insight. The Founding Fathers understood states not merely as administrative subdivisions but as sources of loyalty in a large republic, essential for checking federal overreach. The iconic system of checks and balances would thus be grounded not only in institutions but in social and psychological ties.

Yet modern American politics has decisively nationalized: people increasingly vote for the same party in federal, state, and local elections, local news media report on national political issues, and policy views cluster into mutually exclusive, national party bundles. As a consequence, some observers argue that the political significance of state and local identities has declined. Academics have tended to view states mainly as arenas for the implementation of national priorities, with subnational attachments too limited to serve as focal points for meaningful political action.

At the same time, states are increasingly legislating in opposition to federal policy, whether on guns, healthcare, or COVID‑19. Several amendments to the U.S. Constitution were first advanced through state-level reform movements, including women’s suffrage and the direct election of senators. Americans continue to sort themselves in a partisan, geographic manner. Surveys demonstrate that even as partisan national identities harden, state attachments remain strong—albeit varying in intensity.

Subnational identities facilitate resistance to authoritarianism because they transcend zero-sum partisan politics. Indeed, the resistance to ICE in Minnesota was not a victory for Democrats but for Minnesotans. At a time of growing political apathy and disillusionment with the two-party system, appeals to state and local identity invoke more durable and disarming ties to one’s neighbors and communities. These messages resonate with those who would otherwise sit on the sidelines in a partisan fight, broadening participation and thus increasing the political costs of state violence.

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Subnational identities also make sacrifice feel meaningful and reciprocal: activists in Chicago, D.C., and in rural conservative communities acted in part because they believed their neighbors would do the same. This matters because protesting or striking against anti-democratic leaders often presents serious risks, from surveillance to detention or worse. Finally, strong subnational identities can embolden local officials to place their careers on the line, as they come to proudly see themselves as protectors of residents, rather than mere arms of a national political machine. In turn, visible public action reassures local officials that their unwillingness to go along with authoritarian pressures will be rewarded.

To be sure, subnational identities should not be romanticized as inherently progressive. In conditions of ethnic and racial conflict—under Jim Crow, or today in places with high immigration rates—subnational identities can reinforce insider-outsider divisions and exclude newcomers. These risks should not be minimized.

Yet in moments of anti-constitutional behavior and unchecked executive power, drawing on imperfect identities may be better than drawing on none at all. This is critical because authoritarian leaders skilfully mobilize identities of their own—those “left behind,” the native-born, or those cast as fighting against a greedy and condescending elite.

Democratic resilience depends not only on political institutions and elected leaders, but on the identities and civic organizations that enable people to engage in costly, collective action. As American politics continues to nationalize and polarize, subnational identities—along with the civic networks that sustain them—may provide valuable tools for mobilization across partisan and ideological lines. They ought to be taken as seriously now as the Founding Fathers took them over two hundred years ago.

Adam Fefer is Senior Researcher with the Horizons Project and Researcher with the Stanford Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. His research focuses on democratic backsliding, civil resistance, subnational and federal politics, and ethnic conflict.

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Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University. His latest book is In the Realm of the Last Man. He is also the author of the “Frankly Fukuyama” column at Persuasion.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Francis Fukuyama discuss the true meaning of “the end of history,” why the struggle for recognition—rather than material interest—is the engine of historical progress, and how his thesis holds up 35 years on.

Enjoying this discussion? In an event exclusively for readers of American Purpose and Persuasion, Yascha Mounk will be interviewing Francis Fukuyama about his life and thought at 5pm on Sunday, September 6 at The Abbey Centre, London. Find out more and get tickets here. Paying subscribers of Persuasion and American Purpose can access a code for a free ticket here.

We’re delighted to feature this conversation as part of our series on Liberal Virtues and Values.

This series, made possible with the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation, features content making the case that liberalism has its own distinctive set of virtues and values that are capable not only of responding to the dissatisfaction that drives authoritarianism, but also of restoring faith in liberalism as an ideology worth believing in—and defending—on its own terms.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: This is the first substantive episode in our series on the eras of Francis Fukuyama. We started with a wonderful biographical conversation about your life and your family, but this is the first episode in which we really grapple with one of your major works, which is of course your most famous work, We’ll get to “the last man,” which is very important, but I want to start with the first substantive word in that title, which is “the end.” I think the first misunderstanding that people often have is that they understandably think about the end in terms of a closing, in terms of something being over, but of course the end is a kind of pun because it also means something like the purpose of history. So help us understand those four words: the end of history.

Francis Fukuyama: Sure. It’s not just the word “end” that’s problematic, it’s the word “history.” So let me explain both of them. The end of history really does refer to end in the sense of objective or target or direction. And the word history, I think today you would use words like modernization or development, because that’s the underlying concept: that there’s a broader pattern to history, that it unfolds over hundreds, if not thousands, of years, and that it has a certain coherence and direction. So the question of the end of history really has to do with that arrow. Where is that arrow pointing as we progress through historical time, and where does it look like it’s going to end up?

Mounk: To understand what you mean by end and what you mean by history, you need to go back to the thought of two philosophers, Hegel, the nineteenth-century German philosopher, and Kojève, the twentieth-century French philosopher. Let’s start with Hegel. There’s an old joke that a German scholar calls up his English colleague, and he’s well into his eighties at this point. He asks, Stephen, can you tell me a good English teacher? And Stephen says, well, why at your age do you now decide that you really want to improve your English? And he says, because I finally want to understand Hegel, because it’s often easier to read in translation than the original. Give us the one on Hegel.

Fukuyama: Sure. This may be a little bit more detailed than our listeners really want, but the idea of a progressive history has a lot of precedents. One of them actually is in Christianity, because history has a beginning in the Garden of Eden when God creates the world, and it has an end: the final revelation and the calling back of humanity to Christ and to God.

But in more recent times, I think it’s actually Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French philosopher, who talked about perfectibility. In the late eighteenth century, when he was writing, the Europeans had discovered that there were all these primitive peoples living in North America and other parts of the world, and it made Europeans aware—they were aware that there was China and India and all these other foreign civilizations, but the idea that there’s actually a big difference between the indigenous tribes inhabiting North America and where they stood as Frenchmen was really quite enormous. Rousseau was really the first philosopher, in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, to provide a kind of long-term account of how early human beings evolved into modern human beings. He really kicks this idea off, and Hegel systematizes it as only a German can.

He’s the first historicist philosopher who argues that you can’t really understand any particular line of thought, ideology, or social condition except historically, because things evolve, things change over time. Just to take one obvious example: there is a time when virtually everybody in the world accepted the legitimacy of monarchy, because all states were ruled by kings or queens. There’s a time when many cultures took slavery as a kind of natural institution and they practiced it and didn’t see that there was anything wrong with it. Today we hold no king’s rallies, because we don’t believe that any monarch—except for constitutional ones—actually holds their position legitimately, and we certainly don’t believe in the legitimacy of slavery. This is an example of how, after Hegel, people began to say, well, that was right for their time, but we’ve moved on since then, and human thought has developed, and we no longer believe in those sorts of things. That’s what historicism means: there’s a general progress of human civilization that unfolds over time, and you can’t understand it without understanding that time dimension.

Mounk: That obviously raises the question of what it is that drives that historical process. Part of what drives it for Hegel, and part of what particularly drives it in Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel, is the struggle for recognition. You have the master-slave dialectic that Hegel talks about, but that Kojève then interprets in a way that is even more central to that philosophy of history. Why is it that the struggle for recognition is such an important driver of this historical process?

Fukuyama: Perhaps before we get to that definition of recognition, we need to talk a little bit about Alexandre Kojève, because there was a time when everybody knew who he was in France. He was extremely influential in the middle of the twentieth century. He was a Russian émigré who settled in Paris and taught a very influential seminar on Hegel. They codified the notes of that seminar in a book, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, which is now available in English.

Mounk: Since France is a tiny country and everybody goes to the same one and a half schools, every great luminary—who may be a bigger household name today than Kojève himself—took that seminar, from Jean-Paul Sartre to Raymond Aron and many others.

Fukuyama: That’s right. Yes, he was extremely central to French intellectual life in the 1940s, ’50s, and onwards, and his particular take on Hegel really made central the problem of recognition. Karl Marx was another Hegelian. Marx took Hegel’s idea that history is progressive, but he said it’s really driven by human material interests, the means of production, what technologies produce wealth, and in the current era it was being produced by the bourgeoisie, and it was up to the proletariat to rise up in a proletarian revolution and take control of the means of production. That was a completely materialistic understanding of what drove history.

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Kojève, following, I think, legitimately on Hegel, but with much greater emphasis, said, no, actually it’s not material desire that is the driver, it’s really the struggle for recognition. That had to do with his understanding of human beings: unlike every other natural creature in the world driven by material interests, only human beings could struggle for dignity. He says only a human being will die for a flag or for glory, and that’s what made human beings different. For Kojève, history begins in a postulated bloody battle in which two early human beings struggle not over women or territory or resources—they struggle over recognition. Who is going to be recognized as dominant?

This is the central issue that he said lay behind, for example, the French Revolution. It wasn’t simply over the poverty of peasants in France. It really had to do with the fact that the monarchy did not recognize non-aristocrats as human beings. An aristocrat could treat a peasant in a purely material way, like he would treat a horse or a farm implement. Hegel, through the voice of Kojève, argued, no, in fact, this is a struggle over recognition, the recognition of dignity. The problem, according to Kojève, was that in these bloody battles for dominance, nobody ended up satisfied in the end, because the master won the victory over the slave, but he was only being recognized by a slave who was somehow less than human, and therefore his recognition wasn’t sufficient—and of course the slave wasn’t getting recognized at all.

What Kojève argued the French Revolution did was, for the first time, enshrine the principle of equal and reciprocal recognition of all human beings as the central principle underlying the new political order. To translate that into more understandable modern language, it meant universal human rights. A doctrine of universal human rights was articulated in the French Revolution. It was not implemented in most places around the world, but the idea was finally spoken in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. You could say the American Revolution did something very similar, in proclaiming a Bill of Rights that governments had to respect. That was the central innovation—this mutual respect and mutual recognition of dignity that, for Kojève, was really the culmination of this long historical struggle for recognition.

Mounk: Some people think that you were premature in declaring the end of history in 1989, when the article version came out. Kojève located the end of history in 1806, when Napoleon beats the Prussians, therefore universalizing, in a certain way, the principles of the French Revolution in 1806 at Auerstedt. That’s an even more ambitious dating.

Fukuyama: Yes, that’s true. I think it kind of gives you a hint about how to interpret Kojève, because Kojève did say history ended at the Battle of Jena. He was doing his seminar in the late 1930s, as Hitler was gaining steam, Stalin was still ruling Russia, and you were on the verge of the Holocaust, the Second World War. After the Second World War—decolonization, the rise of the United States, the Cold War—all of these things were still in the future, and yet Kojève calmly said, no, actually history ended in 1806. I think anybody reading that would have to realize that he was being playful. He was saying that the principles of the French Revolution—and you might say the French and American Revolution—were articulated then, and the defeat of the old Prussian monarchy at the Battle of Jena signified the spread of these liberal, modern ideas to the rest of old Europe.

There’s a passage that I quote in my memoir where he says it starts in the metropolis and spreads to the periphery. Many parts of the world hadn’t woken up to the news of the equality of rights, the equality of recognition, but it was only a matter of time before the provinces caught up with the metropole and this idea spread. I have to say that it’s not a crazy idea. If you go around the world and ask how many societies do not accept the idea of the essential equality of human beings, it’s very hard to find any. They don’t practice it, but the People’s Republic of China—the name of the country is the People’s Republic—they understand that somehow legitimacy comes from the people and their interests. That’s the sense in which I think you could say Kojève had a certain point: that this idea of universal human equality was an extremely powerful one, and it’s one that has spread relentlessly since then.

Mounk: So the struggle for recognition gets formulated in the vocabulary of Hegel and then Kojève. But as you point out, that distinctive feature of the human soul is both something you believe in, something that you take to be part of human nature, and something that writers and philosophers have recognized much earlier. Often when you talk about it, you use the vocabulary introduced by Plato, of thymos. Why is it that liberal democracy is somehow better able to honor that demand for recognition, or to allow people to live in accordance with that thymos—for that thymos to have a place in their lives and in the way in which they’re treated in society—in liberal democracy? Because that, I think, is really at the heart of your claim that the end of history is liberal democracy.

Fukuyama: Sure. Again, we have to go back a little bit in time and explicate some of these terms. In the Republic, which is Plato’s book about justice, he asks the question—Socrates, the philosopher, through his mouth Plato raises the question of what justice is. Socrates asks his two young Athenian interlocutors: what are the different parts of the soul? The soul is psyche in Greek, from which our word “psychology” comes. I would say that when you ask what are the parts of the soul, he’s basically asking the same question about human psychology: what constitutes a human mind? They say, well, there’s desire for food and drink, there’s reason—these are two distinct parts of the soul. And Socrates says, isn’t there a third part, that he labels thymos, a Greek word that still exists in modern Greek? It often means anger or spiritedness, that is also something independent of either reason or desire. That is this desire for respect or for recognition—that in addition to their material needs, human beings want to be recognized as human.

Now, I argued in the book that there’s actually two different versions of thymos. The first is isothymia. This is a Greek word that I made up myself, meaning equal recognition. All people really hate it when they are disrespected, when they’re treated differently from other people, and they want to be treated equally. They say, I’m a person too—why did you ignore me and go to this person? Isothymia is really the Hegelian idea, or the Kojèvian idea, of universal recognition. We actually enshrine that in modern law. We have a Bill of Rights in the United States, we have a Declaration of Independence—whose two hundred fiftieth anniversary we just celebrated—that begins the second paragraph with “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” This doesn’t make them materially equal, but it states that all—well, at least all Americans—are entitled to the same kind of respect and rights, and we enshrine that in a Bill of Rights where we say that Americans have the right to speech, to association, to belief, to a whole set of things that we believe make us essentially human, and the state recognizes that humanity by protecting and enshrining those rights.

I would say virtually every modern country now has a similar kind of construct, where you have a legal structure that seeks to protect the equal rights of human beings. This is not in fulfillment of any kind of material demand—you could call it a spiritual demand, that we want the state to say, yes, you are a human being the same way as other human beings, and we’re not going to treat you as a second-class citizen.

Now the problem in modern societies is that there’s other demands for recognition—what I call megalothymia, meaning the demand for superior recognition—that many people, not everybody, but a certain group of people, want to be recognized as being superior. This obviously causes trouble in a democratic society that is committed to the equal rights of citizens, because certain people want dominance—they don’t want to be just treated like everyone else. This is a kind of essential tension that exists in every modern democratic society that, following Kojève and Hegel, grants universal and equal recognition to its citizens: you somehow have to deal with those that aren’t satisfied with simply equal recognition but want something more than that.

Mounk: That’s a little preview of a trouble we get to in The Last Man, and why it is that not everybody is satisfied with that. But to stick with isothymia for a moment, do you take that just to be an essential part of human nature, and perhaps even primate nature? I’m thinking here of the famous examples of giving two apes a reward for some kind of behavior—they’re very happy to get a grape for that behavior. But then when they see that you suddenly start giving the other ape a banana for that behavior, and they continue to just get a grape, some kind of inferior reward, they get incredibly angry. Should we—is that just a basic demand for fairness? It’s clearly not just that they think they need to get this amount of food for the behavior, so it’s something beyond that. But have we violated the isothymia of that ape? Is that what’s going on there?

Fukuyama: No, I think that’s absolutely right. There’s a lot of evidence from the primate world that other primates worry about recognition and this kind of equal recognition. Economists don’t think about thymos naturally—they think just about reason and desire. But there’s actually a lot of experimental evidence like the dictator game where you give both players a material reward, but you give more to one person than the other, and the difference starts increasing, and what economists have found is that if the difference is relatively small, people will say, I want the reward, I’m interested in the material outcome. But when it falls below a certain point, people will just say, I don’t want it. You’re disrespecting me by giving the other player so much instead of me.

Mounk: So the idea is: somebody gives me a hundred dollars to distribute. Now, in principle, I get to split the money however I want between the two of us. In principle, I could say, I give one cent to Frank and I keep $99.99, and you should be able to accept that, because one cent is more than zero cents. Why would you reject it? But what we find empirically is that in many cases, when what I’m giving you falls too low, when the split becomes too unfair, people say, I’d rather forgo ten dollars than accept a humiliation of you keeping ninety dollars for yourself and only giving ten dollars to me.

Fukuyama: That’s right. If you want another, more concrete contemporary example, look at the question of gay marriage. The demand for gay marriage appeared—you could have solved that issue in other ways. You have gay couples that have adopted children, and you have these questions of survivorship and inheritance and so forth. One argument for gay marriage is that you want a legal structure by which you can transmit property to descendants. But you could do that through a civil union. There are other legal forms, other than marriage, that would permit that, if you’re only interested in the material consequences of a gay or lesbian union. But the demand from gays and lesbians was not for civil unions. They wanted marriage. I think it’s a completely recognition-based demand: they wanted their unions, their love for each other, to be recognized as having the same dignity as that between a man and a woman. That was the essential issue. They didn’t want to be told, no, your union, your love for each other, is on a lower plane than it is between a heterosexual couple.

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You can see manifestations of this demand for recognition all over the place. I forget whether this book was written in the 1950s or ’60s, but there was an African American author, Ralph Ellison, who wrote a very popular book at the time called Invisible Man. It was really about African Americans moving from the South up to northern cities, where you didn’t have legal segregation, back in the mid-twentieth century. His point was that there were indignities that were equally demeaning in the North, because people simply—even if you didn’t have legal segregation—you had a prejudice that made a Black man invisible to his white counterparts. That was the origin of the title, Invisible Man—that the indignity was something different from material prejudice or discrimination. It really had to do with the fact that white people simply didn’t see Black people as their equals.

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Mounk: So being rende2red invisible in this way was a violation of isothymia. Let us get into the heart of the argument. We’re in 1989. We’ve seen a century in which there was a genuine fight between different kinds of ideologies. You go back to the 1920s, 1930s—there are people who are convinced that communism is the best way to rule the world, there are people who are convinced that fascism is the best way to rule the world. Those are genuine ideological competitors to liberal democracy. By 1989, you argue that that is no longer the case—that it is now evident that those ideological competitors have been discredited, even though at the time the Soviet Union was very much still a going concern.

Liberal democracy is the last ideology standing, in part because it is better able to offer isothymia than those other competitors, because it is able to accommodate the demand for recognition in a way that those other ideologies were not. Why is that? We’ve assembled the ingredients—now it’s time for you to cook.

Fukuyama: Well, I think it really does have to do with the question of rights—that communist regimes were dictatorships. They worked very, very hard to provide the material basis for their societies, and they did not do as well as their capitalist competitors in high technology and other areas, but they were developed societies. They were relatively rich societies where you could actually have a job, a guaranteed income, health care—a lot of things that satisfied the material side of your personality. But what they didn’t allow people to do was to be human beings in the deepest sense—to be able to express moral choice, and particularly in the question of their own self-government. Every individual governs himself or herself and their family, maybe, but a full human will also want to have a share of the governance of the broader society. This is something that communist dictatorships simply did not permit. You had a small elite in the Communist Party that made all of the important decisions. Nobody could disagree, nobody could criticize, nobody could complain. I think it was that absence of just a baseline of human ability to express agency in the face of a very powerful state that was really the single thing that people resented the most about dictatorship.

Mounk: That relates to how you define liberal democracy in your work, which is that it really is the combination of individual freedom and collective self-determination. Those obviously are two basic elements of a democratic system. But in the context of what you just said, part of why you define it in that way is that it is those two things in combination that are needed for people to feel like they have recognition.

Fukuyama: Well, I suspect we’re going to get into a discussion later in this podcast series about some of what ails contemporary liberalism, but there is definitely a conception of liberalism that has very old roots, way before the American Revolution, that says that freedom is not purely an individual thing. It’s not simply my ability to choose my occupation, my spouse, where I live—it’s also being able to have a share in collective self-government, and being able to participate politically to make the big decisions for the community as a whole. This is something, obviously, that communism simply never provided. You could make small decisions about yourself and your family quite freely in most communist societies—what you couldn’t do is participate in the larger structure of political self-governance. I think this has always been an important component of what we mean by the liberal part of liberal—well, the democratic part as well. It means exercising agency at all levels.

Mounk: Kojève says in his lectures, decades before you, that the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt is really where history, in a certain sense, ends. He’s obviously aware that there are historical events afterwards. You say, in the 1989 article version of “The End of History?” that history has ended—but you say something, I’m quoting this from memory, but I often teach the text to students, so I have it pretty exactly right—I think that the annual chronicle of events in the back of Foreign Affairs, which no longer exists, I think, will continue to list all kinds of historical events. But at this point, the battle for ideological supremacy has in some ways ended.

I guess there’s two different ways we can evaluate that. One is: what are all of the historical events that happen after? That is the way in which people often use that article as a kind of, I think, rather silly gotcha, or punching back, because they really haven’t understood what the article argues. There’s another challenge that I think is more serious, whether or not it succeeds—which is not that, but what about 9/11, and what about the Iraq War, and what about the current war in Iran? It’s very, very clear, from the first time that you give this lecture and publish the article and then write the book, that you expect those kinds of historical events to continue happening. So that’s not a real rejoinder to any sophisticated understanding of your article.

But there’s another rejoinder, which is: well, it turns out that liberal democracy has all kinds of internal problems, that it’s not able to resolve contradictions within its system as well as we might have thought a few decades ago. Look at all of its ideological competitors—look at Islamic theocracy, that is going strong in Iran, look at whatever exactly you want to describe the system as that has been very successful in China, and is the operating system of a country that is now a genuine geopolitical rival to the United States.

So, addressing that challenge: do you think that in 2026 there is a more serious ideological rival to liberal democracy than there appeared to be in 1989?

Fukuyama: Well, a lot of the answer to that question depends on your definition of “ideological.” I think that there are obviously many societies that continue to be non-liberal and non-democratic, like China, like Saudi Arabia, like Iran, and they’re based on different principles. For me, the question has always been: in the long run, over a period of time, are they likely to be more satisfying to the people that live under them than living in modern Europe or North America? There I think you can still raise a serious question. In many ways you have had a big Islamic revival among almost every majority-Muslim country in the world, but is that actually going to be a model that extends into the future? Can they actually make use of modern technology? The liberal Enlightenment encompassed not just a set of political ideas, it also encompassed an approach to modern natural science, to empirical inquiry, and the like. Although clearly the Iranian regime can adopt technology, it’s not clear that the complete absence of freedom in that kind of society will allow it to sustain itself in terms of pushing that frontier backwards.

Right from the beginning I felt that China was a much more plausible competitor. They clearly have a very different system. They have a certain amount of economic freedom, but they are a dictatorship and they don’t accept the principle of democratic accountability in anything like the way that Western countries do. They’ve been extremely successful, and in fact, in terms of their economic development, they’ve done everything much more quickly than any Western democracy has done in terms of raising living standards and so forth.

As you noted, my original “End of History” article had a question mark at the end, and I take that question mark seriously. I didn’t know in 1989, and I don’t know in 2026, whether any of these alternatives is going to end up superior. I would say, in terms of China, I’m not ready to come to the conclusion that they’ve discovered an alternative formula, because first of all, I don’t think the Chinese system is exportable, except within a kind of pre-existing Confucian cultural area. It requires too many things that are kind of culturally unique to Chinese civilization. Even in material terms, I’m not sure that this Chinese growth model is going to be sustainable, because it’s got a lot of problems right now that I’m not sure it’s able to solve. But I’m completely open to the fact that in another fifty years, or even less than that, another generation—I’m not going to be around anymore—it’ll turn out that the United States will have really decayed into a kind of messy anarchy, and China continues to be a world leader, and at that point I would say, yeah, I was wrong, there’s an alternative model out there.

Mounk: Let’s stay with China for a moment, because I agree with you that it is the most serious ideological competitor, in part because the appeal of Islamic theocracy is by definition limited to the part of the world that is Muslim. I can see two different kinds of challenges to China being a genuine ideological alternative. The first is about its ability to deal with its own internal contradictions. In a dictatorship, it’s very hard to know to what extent people actually are content. Relatedly, you might think that societies tend to do very well at a moment of rapid economic expansion—that when they go through that first flush of people going from being peasants to being industrial laborers to rising into the middle class, a lot of challenges and problems within the system are a little bit hidden. You see the strengths of the system, and the weaknesses are a little bit less visible. The real challenges for every kind of society start when they have economically matured, when they’ve been developed for a generation or so, when people are less content, because they can’t say, well, I may be unhappy about all kinds of things, but my parents had to use an outhouse, and my grandparents were lucky if they ate meat once a week. By comparison to that, I’m doing extremely well. Once that bottom-line-output legitimacy is no longer available to people, because they’ve been raised with higher expectations, the fault lines of the society become much more evident. I don’t think that China has quite reached that point yet.

The second challenge to China being a real ideological alternative speaks to the exportability that you touched on. I sometimes make the quip that China works pretty well in practice, but it’s a mess in theory. What I mean by that is that it is a society that has clearly been phenomenally successful over the last decades compared to other parts of the world, but also just compared to other periods of Chinese history. But it is a supposedly Marxist-Leninist state that is in practice a form of state capitalism with actually quite a limited welfare state. In some ways, it is a more extremely capitalist system than anywhere in the West, built atop a very long history of Confucian values and a meritocratic civil service. If you live in a poor country in other parts of the world—if you live in Zimbabwe or in Nigeria—and somebody asks you, would you want to have Chinese-style governance if we could assure you the same nature and quality of governance, perhaps the answer is yes. But if an elite in your country comes to you and says, I want to build the Chinese model here, are you going to trust me to do that? I think the answer is always going to be no, because how on earth are you going to do that in that very, very different context?

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Do you think there’s a way in which China might overcome those limitations, and as it becomes potentially the most powerful country in the world, other countries are going to start imitating it? Or do you think that those limitations will always constrain the extent to which it can challenge the ideological supremacy of liberal democracy?

Fukuyama: Well, I obviously don’t know the answer to that question. I think it remains open. I would say that there is one argument I made in the 1991 book which I think has simply been disproven, which is some version of modernization theory. In the 1960s, up through the 1960s, there was a belief in American social science that development or modernization was a kind of unified process in which people would get richer, more educated, they would start to earn property, you’d develop a middle class, an urban middle class, their values would start changing, and they would be much more open to liberal democracy. That seemed to be playing itself out in other parts of Asia that were democratic, like South Korea or Japan, where they had hit a certain level of income and in fact established pretty successful modern democracies.

China has really blown that theory apart. I think it passed that level of transition into a middle-class society actually now quite a few years ago, and I don’t see any great demand on the part of middle-class Chinese to open the system up. Maybe it exists and it’s simply being repressed—that’s entirely possible. But it certainly doesn’t look like South Korea, or Japan, or Taiwan.

I do think that there are other aspects that will play out in the future which have to do with individual freedom and, in a certain way, with culture. China is really good in material terms, in providing living standards, employment—I mean, we’re seeing problems in those areas now, but so far it’s been pretty good. What’s not clear is that the other things that make up a modern life, that seem to be more dependent on individual freedom, are kind of missing in China. That has to do with culture. It’s very remarkable—both Japan and South Korea are successful liberal democracies that have very high standards of living, and among the things they’ve been able to create is not just semiconductors and computers and this sort of thing, it’s also culture. Both of those countries have exported cultural products that have been wildly popular all over the world. We just had a BTS concert here at Stanford, and it was unbelievable—the number of young Americans that flock to hear a Korean boy band. China does not export culture. They export almost everything else. The Chinese way of life—I think, if you live in North Korea it looks pretty good, but the Chinese way of life is not something that I think appeals to a lot of people. It certainly doesn’t appeal to people who understand and have enjoyed Western individual freedom.

That’s one respect in which I’m not sure that China is actually, in the long run, going to be satisfactory to its own population. But you’re right, I think the immediate transition to a very rich and successful country is really what explains the support for the regime as it seems to exist right now.

Mounk: That, I do think, is going to be one of the fault lines within China. When you talk to young Chinese people, I think they certainly have an aspiration for a lot of individual freedom, a lot of self-determination in terms of what their life looks like—which doesn’t mean that they want democracy, and doesn’t mean that they’re liberals, and it doesn’t necessarily even mean that they have a negative view of the Communist Party. But it does mean that they have a sense that the life they are being offered is extremely restrictive. This includes a lot of executives in China who are my age complaining about the young employees no longer being ambitious, because they feel that all they’re being offered is incredibly hard work for relatively little reward.

There’s a trend in China towards seeking what people call putong shenghuo. Putonghua is the common man’s language; putong shenghuo is the common man’s life. People who might be able to make a career in Beijing and Shanghai are saying, no, I’m going to go back to my hometown. It’s easier to find an apartment where perhaps my parents speculated with property and have an apartment they can give me. I’m going to take a job running a local post office or something like that, and that’s going to be a more decent life than really being part of the rat race in Beijing or Shanghai. I think there’s something very interesting about that development.

But that gets me back to the end of history. I wrote an article in the Journal of Democracy to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of the article version of “The End of History,” in which I roughly argued that you were right about the ideological competitors to liberal democracy continuing to be absent, for the reasons that we’ve been going through and discussing—Iran and a significant question mark on China—but that the internal contradictions of liberal democracy have turned out to be much more significant than we might have anticipated. Why is it, insofar as you agree with that—and perhaps you completely disagree with that—that liberal democracies are in much more turmoil than we might have predicted a few decades ago? How is that related to the idea not of isothymia, but of megalothymia, as well as the boredom at the end of history?

Fukuyama: Well, this does get into some of the discussion of The Last Man, but you’re right that the internal contradictions of liberalism, if they prove to be very powerful and decisive, that’s the real counterargument to what I was saying back in 1989 or 1991. That argument is much more plausible today, when the American system does not seem to be working terribly well. I think that most people who analyze modern democracy would say that you need basically a social consensus behind certain ideas, and there is a certain liberal culture that needs to take hold if those kinds of systems are going to work. This is probably one of the more serious anti-liberal comments: that liberalism itself depends on a pre-existing culture that was not created by liberalism, and we’re living kind of off of the surviving borrowed capital from that earlier culture—but we’re spending it, and it’s disappearing.

There’s something to be said for that. This is something Samuel Huntington argued: that a lot of the success of democracy actually depends on Protestantism. It was Protestantism that created the idea of the individual—individual choice was sanctified—and the particular form it took in the United States actually turned out to be very productive, because it was not unified under a single state church, it was diverse and permitted a lot of experimentation and competition and so forth. But it is a wasting asset. It’s something that we can’t necessarily take for granted. In many ways, certain interpretations of Protestantism have either just disintegrated—like liberal Protestantism, which was the church that my father was part of—or taken a decidedly authoritarian bent in terms of Christian nationalism. Therefore, that capital really is not something that’s available for us to spend in the current generation.

I think one of the most disappointing things, that I wouldn’t have thought back when I wrote The End of History, was that the United States itself could make the kinds of political choices—I had always thought that one of the good things about the United States was that even in the depths of the Great Depression, you didn’t get a serious authoritarian demagogue arising, as you did in Germany or Italy or other parts of Europe, that would take advantage of that kind of economic distress to argue for an authoritarian regime. Yet what we’re seeing in the United States today is actually—no big crisis. We’re really not in such terrible shape. In fact, you could argue, along with Steven Pinker, that things have never been better materially today, and yet you have a deep unhappiness of people who want to reject the ideas that have created that material comfort. I do think that there is something internal to liberal democracy that is quite problematic. If you open the literature about the crisis of liberalism, there’s seven different competing theories as to why liberalism is in crisis.

Mounk: There’s people who talk about the economic roots of the crisis, there’s people who talk about the cultural and demographic transformations of the last decades, there’s people who give a technological account rooted in the rise of the internet and of social media, there’s people who talk about elite failure—either simply because of a series of shocking events from 9/11 to the Great Recession to the pandemic, or more broadly because they feel that a kind of cadre of highly educated people have gotten to the top of the institutions and are using them to impose their values on society in a way that alienates people. You can have any set of explanations for it. What do we gain by thinking about the origins of these social contradictions through the conceptual machinery that you laid out in your work? I assume you don’t disagree, in particular—certainly not with all of them, perhaps not with any of these competing explanations, they may not even be competing—but how is it that thinking about the struggle for isothymia and the struggle for megalothymia helps us better understand why liberal societies now struggle with keeping their citizens satisfied?

Fukuyama: Well, one distinction I think you need to make is a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic challenges to our current liberal democracy. An extrinsic challenge is something that simply appears on the outside, that’s very threatening—like a pandemic, or a foreign invasion, or global warming—and it’s not really clear that this problem is either solvable by an alternative regime or even by a liberal democracy, but that’s not a problem of liberal democracy itself. An intrinsic problem is the sort of thing that we were just talking about, where the problem arises from the very concept of liberalism itself—it’s an internal contradiction. In Hegel’s theory, that was one of the big motors of human progress: that every prior political system had an internal contradiction that it couldn’t solve, and therefore led to a crisis that produced a synthesis that was an effort to overcome that contradiction, and that’s really what produced progress in the past.

I think it’s very important to try to determine for ourselves which of these explanations for the current turmoil in politics is intrinsic to the very idea of liberalism. If it is, that means that we need to think about alternatives—what’s beyond the end of history, is there an alternative social order that we need to move towards? Or is it just an extrinsic problem—we’re not handling it very well, but through somewhat different policies maybe you could deal with financial crises or pandemics or some other thing. That’s why I think the framework in The End of History is still useful in understanding where we are, but more importantly, how we get out of our current situation.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Francis discuss how the concept of the last man is deeply relevant today, the two possible futures for America—and whether Francis would change the title of The End of History. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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• Our next London pub meet will be TODAY, Friday, July 31 at 6:30pm at Ye Olde Mitre in Holborn. Please email me at london@persuasion.community if you’d like to attend.

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As we move toward the end of the Trump era, we need to reckon with the changes his administration has wrought in the American system of government. The most significant is the enormous concentration of power, not just in the executive branch as a whole, but in the office of the president. Any successor administration, Republican or Democratic, will inherit these powers, and will have to decide how it wants to define the limits of executive authority in the future.

The U.S. Constitution limits presidential power in a number of ways. Article I says that laws and budgets are made by Congress, and Article II says the president’s chief duty is to see that the laws are “faithfully executed.” He can choose his own cabinet officers, but they must be confirmed by the Senate. The president has more discretionary authority with regard to foreign policy and national security, where he is designated commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Yet even in this sphere, the right to declare war and ratify treaties is given to Congress.

Donald Trump has tried to expand executive authority in any number of ways. From Day One of his second administration, he has issued a blizzard of executive orders that have in effect usurped Congress’s legislative powers. In some cases he has acted under obscure legal powers, many of which were later found by the courts to be inappropriate. In other cases he has simply acted illegally or unconstitutionally. Among the many examples are:

• Ending birthright citizenship;

• His failure to spend money appropriated by Congress;

• The closing of entire departments, such as the U.S. Agency for International Development, that had been established by Congress;

• Attempting to assert federal authority over election administration;

• Using emergency powers to impose tariffs in an arbitrary and discretionary manner;

• Firing federal employees protected by statute;

• Launching a major war without seeking authorization from Congress.

The lower courts have blocked many of these initiatives, and the Supreme Court has reversed both the birthright citizenship order and the tariffs imposed last year under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).

However, the Supreme Court has not yet ruled on many of the other cases, and in one case clearly ruled in favor of the administration. That was Trump v. Slaughter, decided last month, which overturned an earlier Supreme Court decision called Humphrey’s Executor. That precedent, set in 1935, upheld the right of Congress to impose limits on the president’s power to change the composition of the boards of supposedly “independent” multi-member regulatory agencies like the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission.

The Slaughter decision may seem technical, and has received relatively little public attention. The one multi-member federal agency that the public (and more importantly the markets) care about is the Federal Reserve Board, where Trump had already tried to fire one member, Lisa Cook. The Supreme Court exempted the Fed from its general evisceration of Humphrey’s Executor, arguing somewhat speciously that the Fed has a different historical status from other agencies and therefore its board could remain protected from political interference.

The Slaughter decision, however, has huge implications for the way America will be governed in the future, and it is only the first shoe to drop in a long-term conservative effort to remake the federal executive. Humphrey’s Executor had been the long-term target of conservatives under a doctrine of the “unitary executive.” They argued on originalist grounds that the Constitution gave executive authority to the president alone, who, as a democratically legitimated official, could not be restricted by Congress in his control over the executive branch.

There is a certain logic to this position, one that has been supported not just by conservatives but by certain progressives as well. Most prominent in the latter camp was President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who in the 1930s sought to remove William Humphrey (who was accused of blocking FDR’s legislative agenda) as a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. Humphrey’s removal was overturned by a conservative Supreme Court.

To this one could add the following argument. No one questions the right of the president to appoint, with the Senate’s approval, Cabinet secretaries and other senior officials, or to unilaterally remove them. The president’s right to appoint or remove the heads of agencies led by a single individual, like the CDC or NASA, is not contested. So why should those with multi-member boards be treated differently?

The argument I would make against the theory of the unitary executive is not based on any originalist reading of the Constitution. It is rather based on a pragmatic observation. Today’s executive branch is so large, sprawling, and powerful that there needs to be a separation of powers within the executive, and not simply between the executive and the other two branches of government. The chief argument in favor of such a separation has to do with the preservation of the expertise that is necessary to run a modern state.

We see this most clearly in the case of the Federal Reserve, which in the Slaughter decision was somehow exempted from political control. Painful experience with inflation has taught the United States and other countries around the world that central banks must be made independent. The incentives of politicians are almost always short-term and aimed at their political self-interest. The independent structure of the Fed and its multi-member board protects it from politicization and enhances its ability to operate according to the judgment of the experienced professionals who run it—i.e. PhD economists and practitioners with deep experience with financial markets.

Quite apart from the illegality and unconstitutionality of many of the Trump administration’s actions, there is also its incompetence.

That incompetence has been on display since the beginning of the second term, when Trump appointed a series of individuals with no expertise in the agencies they were to run: Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, TV commentator Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary, vaccine denier Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, and podcaster Kash Patel as head of the FBI.

The consequences are clear: by sidelining regional experts throughout State, Defense, and the intelligence community, for example, there was no one to warn the president that launching a massive air assault on Iran might lead to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz.

The Justice Department likewise has been diverted from its role as impartial enforcer of the law to being an instrument for Donald Trump’s personal revenge campaign. By forcing out career prosecutors, the department found its cases susceptible to being overturned by the courts and indictments rejected by grand juries across the country.

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Underlying the theory of the unitary executive is a flawed concept of hierarchical organization that is as incorrect as it is widespread. “Principal-agent theory” is commonly used by economists and other social scientists to understand the dysfunctions of hierarchies. All authority lies with the principal; agents are simply expected to carry out the wishes of the principal and problems arise only when the agents follow their own agenda.

As Nobel laureate Herbert Simon pointed out many years ago, this is not how real-world organizations work. Agents, including front-line workers at the bottom of hierarchies, often have more expertise and local knowledge than the principals who give them orders. As a result, authority in many organizations flows from the agents to the principal. This is a truth understood in well-functioning militaries, which give their junior officers substantial authority and advise senior commanders not to micro-manage.

So too in the U.S. government. The knowledge of how to deal with an airline accident, or a sudden disease outbreak, or indeed a financial crisis, will not lie with the democratically-elected politician at the top of the hierarchy, but rather with the experts who have the training and experience to act. A well-designed government needs to have mechanisms for protecting that expertise.

Multi-member commissions are a very imperfect means of doing this, but they do at least make it more difficult for an incompetent president to do his destructive work. There are other important protections for expertise as well, such as requirements for “for cause” removals, which protect officials from arbitrary firing. Such constraints have been a clear target of the Trump administration.

Another critical protection for expertise lies in Senate confirmation: in most administrations, the Senate will simply not confirm blatantly unqualified people for senior positions. One of the greatest failures of the current Congress is its unwillingness to exert this authority in so many prominent cases.

The Trump administration’s war on expertise has only just begun. Greater political control over senior officials in multi-member commissions will have limited day-to-day impact on most citizens. But believers in the unitary executive want to extend that control to the whole of the federal government, such that every government worker, down to your local postmaster, will be subject to removal by a political boss.

This assertion of executive authority was attempted at the end of the first Trump administration with an executive order creating a new “Schedule F” employment designation into which the whole of the civil service could be moved, and then fired or replaced at will. Schedule F was rescinded by the Biden administration, but has re-emerged in the second Trump term as “Schedule P/C.”

This is not a casual innovation off the top of Donald Trump’s head. The authors of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 spent their four years out of office designing a policy that would allow them to radically reshape the entire federal bureaucracy, and to eliminate the checks and balances that Congress had inserted over the years to limit the president’s power. The overturning of Humphrey’s Executor is only part one of this plan; the administration’s war against the “deep state” also seeks to invalidate the 1883 Pendleton Act, which first created a merit-based civil service. This will return the United States to the 19^th-century spoils (or patronage) system, whereby not just top policy-makers but all government officials were put in place by a politician in return for political loyalty.

The spoils system was known for its corruption at all levels of government, from Credit Mobilier to Tammany Hall. Today we have massive corruption at the top levels of government, beginning with Donald Trump and his friends and family. But the elimination of a professional civil service will open up vast new areas for corrupt behavior in every city and county in the United States. Project 2025 is unapologetic about this, arguing that the patronage system was unfairly criticized.

The next president—and there will be a next president—will have to confront the question of how much of the authority claimed by Donald Trump he or she will want to retain. This is a complicated question, because the status quo ante was very problematic. As I’ve argued in previous articles, the government really has become over-constrained in its ability to take action. A new president will face many obstacles to implementing their desired agenda, and will be strongly tempted to use the kind of executive power claimed by Donald Trump. The next president needs to come into office not just with new policies, but with clear plans for how to use the mechanisms of government to get them done.

The time to start thinking about these questions is now: we cannot put this off until January 20, 2029, when a new president will be facing immediate political pressures to act. The Republicans spent their four years out of power coming up with clever strategies to get their way, which they have been implementing in the second term. Those backing a post-Trump administration need to do the same.

I hope to be able to outline some of the ways that authority can be structured in future articles.

Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University. His latest book is Liberalism and Its Discontents. He is also the author of the “Frankly Fukuyama” column, carried forward from American Purpose, at Persuasion.

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“The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims,” Marx and Engels declared in 1848. Apparently, the same goes for the Democratic Socialists of America.

Earlier this month, the DSA unveiled its platform, and no one can accuse them of hiding their radicalism. The DSA promises public ownership of large corporations, elimination of prisons and police, a “defunded” Pentagon, and much freer migration across U.S. borders.

But what really stood out among this standard far-left wish list was the platform’s call for a total reshaping of the U.S. constitutional system. Instead of three branches—legislative, judicial, and executive—the DSA would replace the president and Supreme Court with “an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress,” which in turn would no longer have a Senate but consist of a single House of Representatives.

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This goes beyond previous DSA proposals to rein in the Supreme Court’s power of judicial review and elect the president by popular vote. Now, the DSA is repudiating the separation of powers itself, which has been the essential bulwark against tyranny since the American founding.

Obviously, the DSA feels energized and validated by having defeated establishment Democrats and captured the mayoralties of New York and Seattle, the Democratic nomination for Washington, D.C.’s mayoralty, plus four likely seats in the U.S. House in recent months. This raises a troubling question: What if the radicalism of the DSA’s constitutional plan is not its weakness but its strength?

That is the really scary possibility. And it’s worth taking seriously.

The DSA issued its platform against a backdrop of deep, widespread public frustration with the United States’ institutions. This legitimacy crisis, in turn, has spawned a sense among many—possibly most—Americans that our political system is broken and needs fundamental change, not incremental reform.

Public opinion data documents this sentiment. Just last year, a Pew Research Center poll found 77 percent support among Americans for “major” or “complete” reform of the U.S. political system. This was far higher than figures for peer nations such as Germany (48 percent) or Canada (47 percent).

A 2025 Navigator Research survey, meanwhile, found that three in five Americans—across all parties and ethnicities—favor “major changes” to the political system. A full one in eight said it “needs to be torn down completely.”

Then there’s the 2024 poll for Penn State’s McCourtney Institute on Democracy. It found that 20 percent of adults, when presented with the statement “when I think about our political and social institutions I cannot help thinking ‘just let them burn,’” agreed with it. Among respondents aged 18 to 27, the figure was 32 percent.

Of course, this is a far cry from evidence that voters would necessarily back the specific items in the DSA’s platform. Many people who tell pollsters they want to blow up the system and start fresh support President Donald Trump. Their notion of political reform would probably include Republican policies like mandatory voter ID or ending mail-in ballots.

In spirit, though, the DSA’s platform is not out of sync with the public, whose restlessness is fueling unorthodox, disruptive ideas and behavior at both edges of the ideological spectrum. It is of a piece with phenomena as disparate as the mass protests against ICE in Minneapolis, or Spencer Pratt’s quixotic AI-enhanced campaign for mayor of Los Angeles, or the surge of support in Maine for Senate candidate Graham Platner—which persisted for weeks in spite of multiple personal and sexual misconduct allegations.

The mere fact that the country is talking about the DSA’s outré ideas shows that the Overton Window has opened wider. It’s yet another victory for this erstwhile far-left microfaction in addition to the offices it has captured and the influence it is gaining over Democratic Party politics.

Countering the DSA will require an effort by the Democratic Party and its leading figures to defend the constitutional system. This should be no problem given that the Constitution has stood the test of time for more than two centuries, and that the Democrats have—with reason—invoked it against Trump.

For now, however, they still seem spooked by the DSA’s rise, and at a loss for clear, crisp words. Asked if she supports the DSA proposal to abolish the Senate, possible presidential hopeful Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said she didn’t, but mainly spoke of the upper chamber as a necessary evil: “It is what it is,” she said. AOC sounded very much like a progressive politician struggling to retain mainstream viability without getting outflanked on the left.

The truth is that the two-member-per-state Senate is, by design, a quasi-aristocratic restraint on the House of Representatives, which is closer to the people. Making his case 239 years ago, James Madison told his fellow Framers that “the nature of the senatorial trust, which requires greater extent of information and stability of character,” would allow the chamber “to proceed with more coolness, with more system, and with more wisdom than the popular[ly elected] branch.”

Madison’s argument was wise then and remains so today. But his logic lacks intuitive appeal to modern generations. They have been educated by their professors to think of the Founders as self-interested elitists, and by their populist politicians, including President Trump, to think of Madison’s whole system as “rigged.”

The DSA’s new platform represents a bet that the U.S. political system is losing legitimacy, and that they have an opportunity to assert power over the left side of a deeply polarized electorate before, ultimately, remaking American democracy in their image. They are confident and they mean business.

The question is whether their opponents do, too.

Charles Lane, a contributing writer at Persuasion, is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a columnist for The Free Press.

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This article is brought to you by American Purpose, the magazine and community founded by Francis Fukuyama in 2020, which is proudly part of the Persuasion family.

Earlier this month, Amnesty International asked Britain’s charity regulator to review the status of 117 organizations whose views on sex and abortion it dislikes. It received the public thrashing it deserved. But the threatened libel campaign now being bankrolled against it risks converting a victory for counter-speech into a cautionary tale—one in which debates over first principles are decided by ruinously expensive litigation rather than the free battle of ideas.

On July 8, Amnesty published a report with the ominous title: “A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK.” It included a list of organizations “whose aim is to restrict human rights,” and recommended that the Charity Commission review the charitable status of groups that “advocate for the removal of human rights protections, target minority groups, or promote disinformation and harmful practices.”

Who were these organizations so intent on undermining the basic rights of Britons? Islamist terrorists? Neo-Nazis?

No. Amnesty’s purported “anti-rights movement” consisted of 117 groups, many of which oppose abortion, defend the importance of biological sex, or argue that sex-based distinctions should remain legally relevant in contexts such as prisons, sports, medical treatment, and services for victims of sexual violence. It also accused twelve of the listed groups of promoting abusive “conversion practices” to change someone’s sexual identity—practices which Parliament may soon criminalize with up to five years in prison.

Most controversially, those branded “anti-rights” include Beira’s Place, a center for biological women located in Edinburgh providing support for victims of sexual violence. Apparently, Beira’s Place’s position on sex and gender (it excludes trans women) matters more than its work protecting the rights of Scotland’s most vulnerable women.

Amnesty’s report was met with a furious backlash from several of the targeted groups, and from the author J.K. Rowling, who founded and financed Beira’s Place. Under fire from an incredulous public and mounting media scrutiny, Amnesty temporarily removed its report pending an internal review. Amnesty then expressed regret that the report had been uploaded without proper review and referred itself to the Charity Commission as a serious incident. However, Amnesty has not convincingly explained which specific parts of the report it regrets or finds inaccurate.

In many ways, it was a perfect example of how such debates should play out in liberal democracies. Amnesty publishes a report containing some questionable logic, flawed methodology, hyperbolic conclusions, and a stunningly hypocritical recommendation that dozens of lawful groups with whom Amnesty disagrees face the denial or loss of charitable status. The targeted groups answer with criticism and counterspeech that wins vocal public support. Amnesty is forced to retreat, taking shelter behind opaque PR jargon that only further exposes the incoherence of its own conception of human rights.

Yet winning a victory in the court of public opinion did not appease the offended groups, nor J.K. Rowling, who has now offered to fund libel lawsuits against Amnesty. These legal threats were cheered on by a vocal chorus of social media users baying for blood in gleeful anticipation that the cost of litigation might force Amnesty to shut down.

But by threatening to sue Amnesty, the offended groups are snatching defeat from the jaws of victory—and significantly undermining the very principles that allowed them to criticize Amnesty in the first place.

For years, individuals and groups in the gender critical space have—rightly—charged that the views of the most vocal LGBT+ activists and their allies have hardened into orthodoxy, leading to cancellations of people daring to question them in academia, media, and cultural institutions. Hate speech laws in Western democracies have threatened persons espousing views that some may find offensive, but which reflect mainstream understandings of biology and are held by many ordinary people. Accordingly, free speech became a rallying cry for many gender critical activists. On July 26, Rowling herself invoked precisely this principle of reciprocal freedom:

Trans women aren’t women, and if that hurts your feelings, be grateful you live in a society where you are just as free to espouse gender ideology as I am to speak the truth.

But as happens so often in these debates, the opportunity to legally punish an opponent for their opinions was too seductive to stay principled for Rowling and her allies.

Many will insist that there’s a difference between hate speech and libel laws—and that, therefore, the threat of a lawsuit against Amnesty isn’t a violation of free speech principles. But for that distinction to matter, libel must be defined narrowly and enforced within a legal system that resists its weaponization through ruinous costs and protracted proceedings. English libel law falls short on both counts. It is claimant-friendly and extremely costly, and is far less protective of speech than American law. In fact, England has become a favored destination for those wanting to use defamation proceedings to wear critics down with expense and delay.

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More importantly, the question at the heart of the matter—whether a group is “anti-rights”—depends on subjective opinions that should be firmly protected by freedom of expression, no matter how offensive to the group or person.1 Rights language does not eliminate political disagreement. It relocates political disagreement into questions about who holds a right, what that right includes, and how collisions between rights should be resolved.

J.K. Rowling’s position on gender affirming care leaves no doubt that conceptions of rights can clash. In 2024 she posted the following on X:

There are no trans kids. No child is ‘born in the wrong body.’ There are only adults like you, prepared to sacrifice the health of minors to bolster your belief in an ideology that will end up wreaking more harm than lobotomies and false memory syndrome combined.

If any lawsuits financed by Rowling succeed in establishing that Amnesty’s conception of rights is defamatory, it would narrow the very space that shelters her own views. The beautiful and frustrating characteristic of a free society is that no one ever gets the final word, and that the remedy for old orthodoxies—including ones concerning identity and rights—is counter-speech, not new orthodoxies hardened by law.

For this reason, Rowling should hope Amnesty’s opinions are protected, too.

Jacob Mchangama, a contributing writer at Persuasion, is the Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech and the author of Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media.

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On July 25, Berlin’s Christopher Street Day celebration ended in horror. A van was driven into a crowd near the city’s Pride festivities, killing one person and injuring 29 others. The perpetrator, a 21-year-old German citizen with Lebanese roots, was well known to authorities.

He had previously been convicted of assault and other crimes, had posted ISIS propaganda on social media, and in 2025 left Germany to try to join the Islamic State in Syria. Before he was able to do so, he was arrested in Lebanon and then returned to Germany. Despite being convicted by a German court of preparing “state endangering activities,” he was only given one year and ten months in youth custody, with the sentence suspended.

The immediate response to such an attack is, and should be, grief. But alongside mourning, the attack raises questions for German democracy, and in particular for its mainstream political parties.

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Currently, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is leading national polls, and in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, which holds elections in September, it has been polling above 40 percent. Depending on whether smaller parties clear Germany’s five percent electoral threshold, the AfD could come within reach of an absolute majority. If that happens, Germany will face something unprecedented in its postwar history: a far-right party not merely joining a regional government, but potentially running one itself.

Responding to the Christopher Street Day tragedy requires holding two ideas in mind at once, and it is precisely this that German political debate, like its counterparts elsewhere in Western Europe, has thus far proven unable to do.

The first idea is that the AfD’s response to this attack is both morally wrong and hypocritical. Party figures have used the tragedy not merely to attack the government for incompetence on security and law and order but to present the attack as the inevitable consequence of unfettered migration. The party has accordingly called for foreign citizens deemed potential threats to be deported immediately, for dual nationals to have their German citizenship revoked, for German citizens deemed potential threats to be taken into custody, and for “remigration” and reform of German citizenship laws. Such rhetoric is inflammatory and over-generalized. It turns millions of law-abiding citizens and residents into suspects. It is also hypocritical since, despite outrage at an attack on Germany’s LGBTQ+ community, the AfD opposes liberal and pluralist values and has consistently worked to undermine LGBTQ+ rights.

The second idea is that Islamist terrorism, failures of integration, migration-related crime, and the state’s inability to monitor or remove dangerous individuals as well as those who have no legal right to remain in Germany, are real problems. Since the 2015–16 refugee wave Germany has experienced many high-profile attacks by Islamist sympathizers, as well as highly-publicized mass sexual assaults on New Year’s Eve 2015–16, which had a significant effect on German public opinion about migration. In addition, although overall crime and violent crime in Germany have declined, official statistics show that non-German suspects remain significantly overrepresented in crime statistics, particularly if migrants from other European countries and Ukraine are eliminated from the data.

These two ideas do not cancel out one another. Immigrants are not inherently dangerous, and diversity is not incompatible with democracy. But as with rapid economic or technological change, rapid social change requires strong, adaptable government. Immigration can enrich societies but it can also generate conflict, anxiety, competition over scarce resources, and fears about crime, terrorism, assimilation, and national identity—especially when citizens believe their government has lost control over who enters, who stays, who integrates, and who should be removed or monitored.

This is the deeper context of Germany’s current predicament. German security authorities estimate that thousands of people in the country belong to Islamist extremist milieus, with a smaller subset that is potentially violent. Meanwhile, more than 220,000 people currently in Germany have no legal right to be there, but in 2025 Germany deported less than 23,000 of that cohort. A state that knows that it has large numbers of people within its borders, including some who may pose security risks, and whom it cannot fully monitor, integrate, or remove, has not merely inherited a problem, but has helped to create one. By appearing unable or unwilling to act, moreover, the government almost certainly loses legitimacy in the eyes of many citizens.

More generally, the common claim that immigrants are “net contributors” is highly contingent on the skill and education of those who are admitted and the time horizon chosen. In the United States, with its comparatively limited government subsidies and its open labor market, the fiscal balance may well be positive. In European countries that have admitted large numbers of people on humanitarian rather than economic grounds, and which frequently have more developed welfare states and restrictive work laws, the picture is very different.

As I have previously argued, the rise of radical-right parties like the AfD cannot be understood apart from the gap that has opened between mainstream parties and the electoral majority in their views on immigration. While migration was transforming Western European societies, mainstream parties often chose not to address its far-reaching social and economic consequences, creating an opening that right-wing populists were able to exploit. Research by Laurenz Günther and others has shown that in Germany and other European countries during the first decades of the 21st century, parliamentarians became “much more liberal than the electoral center,” and even conservative and Christian democratic parties became more liberal than the mean voter on cultural issues, immigration above all. Germany admitted very large numbers of people without a commensurate reckoning with the integration challenges this would pose, and without a mainstream party willing to fully recognize such challenges and consider the state capacity that would have been necessary to meet them.

Voters can see the costs of poorly regulated immigration. Many will, unfortunately but understandably, view the Christopher Street Day tragedy as another consequence of mainstream parties’ unwillingness to recognize and deal with these challenges.

Conceding that immigration has benefits and costs is not a concession to the radical right. It is the precondition for designing a policy that produces more of the former and fewer of the latter. Cross-national evidence suggests that governments which manage migration in demonstrably beneficial ways—selective admission, explicit and enforced integration expectations, visible benefits to receiving communities, and a functioning capacity to remove those with no right to remain—are rewarded with considerably more public support than governments that suppress or dissemble inconvenient findings and real tradeoffs. This realistic approach is how immigration is made popular, and how diversity is reconciled with democracy.

We are looking at the alternative right now: the strong possibility of an AfD government in Saxony-Anhalt in September, and no obvious way to keep the AfD from becoming the largest party in Germany at the next federal election.

Sheri Berman, a contributing writer at Persuasion, is a professor of political science at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her most recent book is Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Régime to the Present Day.

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Katja Hoyer is a visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her latest book is Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Katja Hoyer discuss why the Weimar comparison is so tempting (and so often misleading), what genuine enthusiasm for democracy in 1919 Germany can teach us about how democracies fail, and whether political fragmentation or economic crisis was the more decisive factor in Weimar’s collapse.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: Katja, we recorded a really interesting episode about the long run of German history a few weeks ago. You kindly agreed to come back for an extra little chat given the horrible events in Berlin this past weekend. Tell us what happened.

Katja Hoyer: There was a terrorist attack, from what we know now, on a pride event in Berlin at the weekend. A man drove a van into crowds. At the moment, we have one victim that was killed and several dozens that were injured. He’s also supposed to have gotten out of the car and conducted a knife attack on the crowds as well.

Police have since found out who it was and chased him down, and the man was shot dead in the process of the police confronting him. So that’s where we currently are with this, and now all sorts of questions are being asked about how this was allowed to happen, what we already know about the perpetrator, and what Germany should do now, if there should be any political consequences to this.

Mounk: There’s been a series of Islamist attacks in all of Europe, including in Germany, a large number of them over the last 10 or 15 years. One of the things that makes this story quite remarkable is that this wasn’t an unknown perpetrator. His radicalism, his extremism wasn’t unknown to the German authorities. In fact, the German authorities brought him back from Lebanon because he had tried to join ISIS. What do we know about the history of this particular perpetrator, and any potential failings of the German state in averting this attack?

Hoyer: He is an interesting case in that he actually holds German citizenship, was born in Germany to Lebanese parents, and therefore is perhaps a little bit different in his background. He didn’t come to Germany himself as a refugee or as an immigrant, but actually grew up in Germany himself. This begs all sorts of questions about spotting radicalism early. He would have grown up in Germany, gone to school there, would have seen GPs, people around him, teachers and so on. He was, as you say, known to the authorities as a radicalized young person for a long time, in that he already tried to make his way to Syria to join ISIS, and then was also convicted of planning an attack against the state and against people in Germany and got a very light sentence. Many people feel that the sentence was actually suspended, and he was allowed to go about his daily life again, and therefore was in a position to conduct this attack rather than being in prison or being under the very careful watch of the authorities.

Mounk: Some of the details about this are really quite striking, and honestly horrifying. He had traveled to Lebanon to try and join ISIS in Syria. He was in jail in Lebanon when German authorities decided to bring him back to Germany in order to put him on trial. Somewhat understandable. But that trial then resulted in him being sentenced under youth guidelines, even though he was older than 18 years old, and all he got was a suspended sentence, which meant that he wouldn’t see a day in jail. A couple of days after the attack—today, as we’re recording—he was meant to have a chat with some German social workers about his extremism, and that was the extent of the punishment that he was facing. And then you add some of the really absurd details to how the German authorities are treating these circumstances, like the fact that I at first thought this must be fake news, but I looked at the actual Twitter account, that the police in Berlin shared a link to the photograph of a perpetrator, but not a photograph directly on the platform, because that, they explained, was not permissible according to German data protection laws.

Hoyer: I think it is tricky, because all of these laws and rules and regulations have got their purpose. You can always explain where they came from, why people introduced them in the first place. For example, the fact that youth sentences are quite light in Germany, comes from the whole idea that you don’t want to mess up a young person’s life forever just because they made a mistake when they were still relatively young. You can see the idea behind that if it’s something like delinquency, or things that a young person might do because they went on the wrong path at some point. But of course, once you are dealing with somebody who’s extremely dangerous, because he’s deeply ideologically convinced that he needs to follow down this path, and you’re not going to change that with a chat or two in a de-radicalization program, and people were at the time aware of how extreme his views were, then of course this entire system, that isn’t really set up to deal with these cases, begins to look rather absurd and bizarre when applied to a case like him. It’s easy, I think, in hindsight, to see where all of the problems are, but I don’t think there’s an easy way of remedying all the bits that make it quite easy for perpetrators in Germany to exist and to exert their freedoms, or use their freedoms, in the way that anybody else might be able to.

Mounk: A first step might be stopping the denial about some of the basic realities of what is happening. One of the things that I found striking in the aftermath of the attack is that there’s a number of these strange bureaucrats in Germany who are responsible for fighting against discrimination against all kinds of various groups. A worthy cause, but it’s not always the most capable individuals who are in those roles, and a number of people who are charged with fighting against real discrimination against the LGBTQ community were pressed on what the threats are for that community. When you speak to members of that community, it’s quite clear that unfortunately a lot of the time when they experience hostility in the public sphere across Europe at this point, and certainly when there are attacks as well, that often is from people with an Islamist background, who have extreme theological views, and the animus that is sometimes inspired by that. We’ve seen that also repeatedly with some terrorist attacks, including in that nightclub in the United States a number of years ago. And yet a lot of these bureaucrats were saying, well, the danger is from the right and from conservatives and so on, and there may certainly be some threats from neo-Nazis and others as well, but they really weren’t willing to name the nature of the attackers as Islamist, and the fact that it is that ideology which often targets those groups, which helps to explain to some extent the otherwise very strange and striking fact that the share of gays and lesbians in Europe that now vote for the Rassemblement National of Marine Le Pen in France, or for the AfD in Germany, is rapidly growing.

Hoyer: I think people often see this as a zero-sum game. It can’t be that there are several threats to a community. It has to be either or, this competition around which is the biggest threat. If there are far-right threats, that doesn’t mean that the Islamist threat isn’t real. But there’s always this moment now, I think, and this is quite telling as to where we are in terms of our debate here, when an attack like this happens, and then people hope for the perpetrator to be of a certain ethnicity or background or ideological persuasion.

Mounk: I don’t know whether you’re alluding to that, but there was somebody who was holding a speech at Christopher Street Day, informing the crowds of what had happened, who literally said this: “I was hoping”—and it was a strange choice of terms—“it wasn’t a Kanake,” which is a derogative term. I think the person was themselves not white. A Kanake is a kind of self-claimed politicized term about a non-German, in the way that perhaps “queer” has become in reference to the gay community in the United States. So “I was hoping that it wouldn’t be a Kanake, but sadly it has turned out to be one. I was hoping that it would be a white cis person who made this attack.” It’s a very strange thing to express in that moment.

Hoyer: It is, and it’s also utterly callous. It leads a million miles away from thoughts about the victims, about the people that this happened to, about the general situation, that people just don’t feel particularly safe anymore at these sorts of events. And it’s not just political or social events like this one. People say the same about Christmas markets, or about concerts, or about any other public events. We’ve had several attacks even on very small kinds of village fête type things, where people were attacked when they attended something in their local village or small town, or beer festivals and things like that. That just leads to a general perception, I think, that people just don’t feel safer anymore. If you move away from discussing that, and what that means and what to do about it, towards who’s the perpetrator and is it somebody that I can blame, then that becomes a very politicized and ideological debate that isn’t really constructive in terms of actually improving the situation.

Mounk: Towards the end of our substantive conversation about the history of Weimar, as well as present-day Germany, we talked about some of the upcoming state elections in East Germany, in which the far-right AfD was already projected to do very well. We talked in particular about the fact that perhaps in Saxony-Anhalt they may win an outright majority. What impact do you think these attacks are going to have on those elections, and how do you think ordinary Germans are going to react to them?

Hoyer: It’s clearly inflamed passions quite a bit. I’ve lived in Britain for a long time now, but I’ve still got many friends and family members in Germany, and speaking to them over the last few days, it’s really affected them. I know many people in Berlin where this attack happened. People were telling me that their friends or siblings attended this Pride event and were deeply shocked by what happened. They’re going to go away with a different view of how they go about their lives, and I think that is bound to have a political impact as well. It doesn’t necessarily mean that we immediately see a surge of the far right. I think in general, maybe some people may decide not to vote anymore, because they don’t know who to vote for, because they don’t trust any political party to deal with this. We may see an entrenchment on the left, saying now especially we need to fight the far right, so they may be able to mobilize people.

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But I do feel that this is quite a big political thing, because it’s not an isolated event. It came on what some now actually call a bloody summer, because there have been so many events where people were attacked in different contexts. There was a student, for example, who just randomly became the victim of another attack, where I think it was an Afghan individual who basically just killed him on the street during the day. He was completely random, a random victim, they didn’t know one another. There were several of these incidents now over the summer where it involved basically people who had either come to Germany or had a migrant background of some description. I feel that this accumulation is building up. You have people on the left saying, why is this happening now, when we’ve got elections coming up?

Mounk: The conspiracy theory about false flag attacks and all of those kinds of things. It used to be the right that claimed those kinds of false flags in the United States, but it’s also a very tempting idea on parts of the left. Let me sharpen my question perhaps a little bit. The basic claim of parties like the AfD in Germany is that the institutions are failing. The people who are in charge don’t know what they’re doing. They’re too captured in the ideology to take seriously the threats to our safety and well-being. And only we can fix it. I disagree with that in two ways. I disagree that the institutions are as disastrous as these parties say. I think we’re very attuned to the failings of our societies and we tend not to see the things that are working well. Even for Germany, it isn’t quite that bad a situation at the moment, where many things work very well in the country compared to most other places in the world. And secondly, I don’t believe for a moment that the AfD, for example, would do a better job at dealing with these problems, for all kinds of reasons we could go into. Having said that, stepping back a little bit, it’s not surprising if people look at, in particular, the failures of the police, of the court system, of the entire setup, down to this absurdity about not sharing the picture of a perpetrator on social media because that would violate his personality rights, and say, who’s in charge here? Why should we trust them? That, I guess, makes me afraid for the country’s future and the future of other countries where there are similar problems.

Hoyer: I think you’re right to be afraid, because the figures have shown over the last few years that trust in public institutions—and this goes all the way from parliament, as an institution in the abstract, all the way down to things like the police, public civil servants, that kind of thing—has been eroded over the years. This is something that extremist parties can always use as a way of saying we need to stop tweaking things because the system itself isn’t working, so we need radical solutions, and more and more people begin to believe that that is the case, and so you see the political changes happening there. This is a particularly stark case where there are so many little things along the way that kind of went wrong to get to this point, all the way from how he was allowed to grow up with this sort of mindset in the first place without any intervention as such, all the way to the way, as you say, this was dealt with once the incident had happened.

All that people see is politicians coming out with phrases that may have come out of AI. It’s virtually as if you typed into AI, “give me a speech by a politician after a major incident like this has happened.” We won’t have them destroy our way of life. Let’s carry on living the way that we do. We must stick together. All they want to do is divide us. All these clichés, they don’t help. They make things worse. People feel that politicians don’t have any answers to this, and once they feel that, what’s the point in voting for the same politicians again? That’s going to be the next question they ask, and so they vote for parties that have not been in power yet, because they feel they might as well roll the dice and give it a go.

Mounk: Weimar is a topic which has salience beyond the relatively short period during which the Weimar Republic lasted. One of the reasons for it is that people love to use it as a historical metaphor for other political periods, and that’s obviously something that has been very fashionable in the last years, with the rise of the far right and other elements of our politics, like increasing partisan fragmentation in many countries. People are saying we’re back in Weimar. You think that that is a really unhelpful way of thinking about things. Why should we banish the Weimar metaphor?

Hoyer: I wouldn’t outright banish it, but just use it constructively and a bit more cautiously, I think. I certainly get the feeling it’s used mostly now as a bit of a tool for expressing emotions like fear and anxiety about what’s currently going on, and it doesn’t tend to go beyond that most of the time. We’ve just had the Bavarian Minister-President, for example, in Germany, one of the key conservative politicians, saying that Germany is on a Weimar path. That sounds quite daunting without actually saying anything useful or helpful as to what the situation actually is and what we can do to solve it. I feel the same goes for things like Hitler comparisons, calling people fascists, that kind of thing, is usually done not necessarily with a direct look to history, but more out of a sense of fear that history might be repeating itself. So I’m not saying let’s banish the whole thing. I wouldn’t be a historian if I didn’t think that we could learn something from history. But at the same time it’s got to be done in a way that is actually helpful and forward looking.

Mounk: Why is this metaphor so tempting? Obviously the Third Reich is the great catastrophe of modernity, and Weimar is the thing that led up to the Third Reich. There’s a kind of very straightforward answer to that, but different parts of the political spectrum seem to see different things in the Weimar comparison. It’s interesting that you used as your example Markus Söder, the Prime Minister of Bavaria, and Bavaria has been ruled since the end of World War II by a very conservative sister party of the Christian Democrats nationally. A lot of the time when people use the Weimar comparison, it tends to come from the left. It’s like everybody on the right is fascists, and these populists particularly are fascists, and if we don’t stand up to them, then we’ll end up back there. So there is this way in which this metaphor is appealing across the political spectrum.

Hoyer: I think there’s now a sense, certainly I can say that for Germany, where the center parties, people who see themselves as the old, established party spectrum, both left and right of the center, seem to rally together against the emergent parties, particularly on the far right, but also on the far left. There’s now a sense that if that doesn’t get stopped, then the center will erode. I think that’s why the center-right, the conservatives, are also now beginning to use this as a metaphor to warn against political fragmentation and extremism. I feel that the appeal of that is quite stark now because, first of all, I think it is genuinely the most terrifying example of a collapsed democracy that we’ve got in Western history, given where it ended and what we know happened afterwards. So it’s kind of the most extreme example to grasp if you want to make a point about saving democracy. Perhaps more speaking to the last ten years or so, I think there’s a sense, particularly in Germany but across the West, that the established postwar order is beginning to look less certain and more fragile than it perhaps did ten or twenty years ago. In terms of issues like migration, the economy, the economic system, the way that we see the voter spectrum fragmenting into smaller bits, all of that points to big political changes, and people are looking to the past, I think, to find explanations for why that is. In terms of Germany, you’re looking back to the last failed example of a democracy, and that is the Weimar Republic.

Mounk: The other thing that’s interesting is that the Weimar comparison has historically been made a lot in Europe, and particularly in Germany, but it sort of jumped across the Atlantic. Niall Ferguson has talked about “Weimar America,” and it seems to me that for the left, the idea of Weimar is really the idea about what happened at the end of Weimar. When you’re making Weimar comparisons, it’s really about the rise of the Nazis, including the fact that there wasn’t a cross-partisan enough rejection of the Nazis early on, that there were conservatives who thought they could make deals with the Nazis. So when there’s a question about whether you should go into governing coalitions with right-populist parties, the Weimar comparison is a way of saying what you’re going to end up with is the Nazis. For the right, when they talk about Weimar—I didn’t see that quote by Markus Söder, so I don’t know in what context he used it—but certainly when somebody like Niall Ferguson uses it, I think they mean something more about dysfunction. They’re less focused on the end of the Weimar Republic and the catastrophe it led to, than on the fact that Weimar itself was deeply dysfunctional in all kinds of ways. They’re saying our country today is becoming as dysfunctional as Weimar, obviously also with the frisson of what terrible things that might lead to in the background. But I think the emphasis is slightly different.

Hoyer: Yes, and certainly also more on economics, I would say. There’s certainly a look towards the fact that in Germany in particular, its current economic model doesn’t seem to be functioning properly anymore. It’s the last really deep crisis to look at if you want to exclude the oil crises and the bit of unemployment there was in West Germany in the 1980s. Apart from that, you’ve got to go back before the war and before Nazism to find comparisons. This kind of idea that you were seeing a deep economic crisis off the scale of the Wall Street crash and the Great Depression that followed is, I think, a bigger scare factor on the right than it is on the left, where the focus tends to be about combating fascism and the far right. But there’s appeal in that for everybody, because I think it’s perhaps the one example in modern history where everyone can agree that this was bad. So you get the right and the left saying we need to avoid this, but drawing different conclusions from it.

Mounk: In a way we’ve jumped into one of the things that makes the topic so interesting to contemporary readers, that it’s used as this metaphor all of the time. I think it’s really hard to think about a period of time—the Weimar Republic lasted for what, fifteen years between 1918 and 1933, or perhaps it’s really born in 1919, so even a little bit less long than that—in one country, but obviously a significant country in the world, one of many countries. It’s very hard to think of another period of rule that is that brief that people have that much cultural fluency in. That’s really interesting. But at the same time, of course, Weimar is therefore reduced to some of the stereotypes: economic mess, political dysfunction, it all led to the Nazis. That’s the three things that every educated person knows. Then there’s probably a lot of things that a lot of educated people, certainly even within Germany, but certainly beyond Germany, don’t know. So let’s go back to the heart of your new book and your latest work. In what ways is Weimar like the kind of shorthand that educated people are going to have for it, and in what ways is that shorthand really misleading about what that short but important period in German history was like?

Hoyer: I think we have a tendency, as we always do, to look at past events through the benefit or the disadvantage of hindsight, depending on your perspective. We look at the Weimar Republic from its endpoint, from where it led to. I think that we often forget that actually there was a lot of enthusiasm for democracy to start with, and there are some lessons to be learned from that too. If you look at 1919, you see just how keen people are to go voting. Women in particular get given the vote for the first time in Germany after the First World War, and they go out to these political education evenings. I got really quite surprised, researching for my new book, which takes the whole thing down to street level.

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I’m looking at Weimar itself, which is the town that the Republic was born in and named after. Once you zoom in that far and you look at individual people’s diaries, for example, you’ll find that women, for example, were actually going to these evenings where all the different political parties were telling them what their programs were, and they go in to listen to old male professors telling them what voting is and what their duties as active citizens are going to be like. But there was genuine enthusiasm. Turnout was very high, in the sort of eighty-odd percent, in 1919. The idea that this mattered, that you wanted to go and decide on the future of your country, was very much there. The fact that that declines later on is in itself worth looking at and is often forgotten, I think, as a lesson, because there is this cliché that Germans just weren’t used to democracy, ergo they didn’t really value it, and therefore they were more prone to give it up. I don’t think that was the case. I think people did take it very seriously to start with, and it’s the disillusionment with the malfunction of it, with the idea that it didn’t deliver, that later on drove them away from it.

Mounk: That’s something where I think the experience, for example, of post-Soviet transitions should also teach us a lot. In the first elections after the fall of communism in Poland and the Czech Republic and Hungary and so on, you obviously had a lot of people participating in voting because you were able to participate in a meaningful election for the first time ever, or for the first time in many decades. But by the third, fourth, fifth parliamentary elections, particularly in countries that at the time felt that a lot of things weren’t going as well as they had hoped, participation in the election had really dropped off. So actually, I think we can now recognize this as a pattern that’s not really that specific to that time and place, but that tends to happen in new democracies.

Now, as you’re saying, one of the reasons why people then became disengaged in the Weimar case is that the political system that was established was very fractious. It looked to people, truthfully or not, that it was not capable of actually delivering results. Why is that? Some of the main explanations that people give for that are that there wasn’t a deep democratic history. Of course, most Germans had voted in some form of election before 1918, so it generally wasn’t for bodies that were as powerful as parliaments are in full democracies, or at least most German men had done so before. So one explanation is lack of democratic experience.

A second explanation is that there’s just too much ideological fragmentation, that you just weren’t able to have some kind of stable governing majority because there were the communists and the Social Democrats and the various centrist parties and the conservative nationalists, and eventually the Nazi Party that rose. Another explanation is the humiliation of defeat in World War One and the Versailles Treaty and the pretty onerous terms of that, and so any government had to agree to things that were humiliating, and therefore any government would immediately become unpopular. Then, of course, there was the economic crisis that was partially a result of that, and then obviously aggravated after Black Friday, after the stock market crash of 1929. I’m sure I’ve missed out some explanations, but is that roughly the list? Is there something missing? Which of these do you think is more decisive than others? Are there misconceptions that people have about this?

Hoyer: That is a good list, and it already goes to show just how complex this whole thing is. We can’t just write this off and say that Germans just didn’t really know what democracy was or weren’t really used to it, because I think that’s the same fallacy that people applied to the post-Soviet system, where they were saying there was just no democratic culture and therefore people didn’t get it. I don’t think that is it. I think it’s almost the opposite. People who come to democracy as a relatively new thing have got very high expectations of it. They’re initially quite enthusiastic, but they expect what you vote for on the ballot paper to actually make a difference. When that doesn’t happen, when it seems to be the case that you get the same situation again after you just voted, be that either a completely dysfunctional result or the same kind of block of parties just putting themselves together in a slightly different coalition, but ultimately you get the same multi-party government, those kinds of things end up frustrating people, I think, and that’s a big factor in the Weimar Republic as well.

Interestingly, I think in the middle years it leads more to a sense of malaise, just a well, I won’t bother today. So you see the turnout drop, but you don’t see an increase straight away in extremist voting. This is quite interesting. In those middle years that seem relatively stable, because of American investment largely, and loans being given to Germany, you do see the turnout drop. Fewer people go out; they say I might do something else with my Sunday—elections are always on Sunday in Germany, always have been. Quite often people, I saw this in people’s diaries, they’d go, it’s a nice Sunday, I’d rather be somewhere else, and they just don’t bother. They don’t go and vote for Nazis and communists straight away. This is really important, because even in 1928, the last election before the Wall Street crash, the Nazi Party still only gets 2.6 percent of the vote. All the other factors are in place—the multi-party coalitions, the things not really moving forward, Hitler is already there and doing his election campaigning—all the other factors that people attribute to the rise of the Nazis are there.

What isn’t there is absolute economic devastation. So I always think that is a factor that is vastly underestimated in today’s political discourse, that this is often the biggest driver. People just want to have stable lives where they can have an economic future for themselves, for their children, for their grandchildren. The moment they stop believing that things will at least stabilize, if not get better, that’s when people turn to quite extremist options, and when they give up on ideals of democracy, I think. So out of this whole bundle of factors that you mentioned, that would be the biggest one for me.

Mounk: Tell us a little bit about that economic devastation. Listeners will be familiar with the Great Depression in the context of the United States as well. That crisis is even deeper in Germany, in part because of the element of hyperinflation.

Hoyer: Most people will be familiar with those images of children playing with banknotes and the wheelbarrows being wheeled into shops and things like that. But I think, once you break it down to street level, when I looked at people’s diaries at the time and letters and things, you really begin to realize what that does psychologically to people when money is just not worth anything anymore.

The main guy in my book is a guy called Carl Weirich, who’s a bookbinder by trade and runs a little stationery shop in the town of Weimar. Initially he’s joking about it in his diary with a sense of gallows humor. He says that he buys a bicycle, a used bicycle, for two million marks, even though his wife can’t even ride a bicycle. But he says himself that if he’d waited another few months he would have been able to buy an egg or a loaf of bread for the same money. So initially there’s this gallows humor, but then very quickly—he’s running a shop, he doesn’t really know where to get the wares from, how to get things like typewriters, because he can’t pay for them. Once he’s got them in, he’s asking customers to pay millions, billions for them—pay six billion today and take it home, offers like that.

Later on he wrote, I don’t even know how I reported those figures to the tax authorities. I think that does something to society, because ultimately the image that it conveys is that nothing is certain. Something like this can just happen out of the blue. That does something, I think, long term, because people just don’t really trust the system, themselves, the situation that they’re in, to ever last. That’s really quite a dangerous kind of political hedonism, I would say, that sits in there, where people go, I might as well roll the dice. Then things stabilize when they get a grip on that, but that psychological experience doesn’t go away.

Mounk: It’s kind of a double whammy, where the first experience is that a lot of people’s life savings disappear. One thing about hyperinflation is that any sense that you could have stable plans for the future disappears. But perhaps some people remained in employment, and then suddenly in 1929, not always the same people, sometimes the same people, then experienced mass unemployment. So the first economic disaster teaches you that you really can’t have stable plans for your own future. You might be very materially comfortable today, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be materially comfortable tomorrow. You might think, well, as long as I have a stable ongoing source of income, that allows me to deal with that, and then suddenly you have mass unemployment to boot. That really undermines the preconditions for any trust and stability.

Hoyer: Yes, I think so. Also the fact that they came out of the First World War, and there was already that crisis to deal with in 1919. It was already bad. Even in 1919, 1920, you get inflation, just not hyperinflation, but it’s already bad, with prices for bread and things like that doubling and tripling every few months. By then this is an experience that’s lasted several years, and it’s entirely associated with this post-World War One era, because people weren’t used to that. They can remember the times before 1914 when it wasn’t like that, and a sense of nostalgia is then beginning to set in, and people think, well, actually maybe we were quite unhappy before 1914 because we wanted political change, but at the same time it was stable, you could depend on things, you trusted the government, and even the Kaiser, most people were happy enough with the system, implicitly. There weren’t extremist parties then. That really only happened during the First World War. This nostalgia is also quite dangerous, and again we’re seeing that again today. The idea that “making America great again” implies that there was once a time when it was great, and that in itself is something that political parties can always work with—the idea that it was once better than it is today. That’s also something that’s deeply associated with the way that political parties play on the current sense of uncertainty.

Mounk: Incidentally, a lot of people today say, how can I have kids? Look at how uncertain the world is and how much change there is within it. I think the argument for that is reasonable, and there have been a lot of important political events, including some genuine disasters, over the last decades. Artificial intelligence is totally changing some of the foundations of our world.

But when you think about what somebody who was born in 1890 would have experienced by the time that they’re, say, thirty-five—you have the outbreak of World War I, you have the collapse, in Germany but many other European countries as well, of a system of monarchy that had been there for centuries, or for decades depending on the context. You have the Spanish flu, which is an incredibly deadly and destabilizing event. Then in Germany you have hyperinflation, you have obviously a huge change in the territory of the country, then you have a Great Depression, and then you have something like the rise of the Nazis. The number of extreme political events that aren’t just out in the world, but that have a very direct influence on the lives of individuals within those societies, within thirty-five or forty years, is really hard to fathom.

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I think that teams up my next question. There’s a historical journal whose title nicely expresses one of the key questions that historians always ask themselves, which is “continuity or change?” You have a very straightforward and brilliant idea of approaching the history of the Weimar Republic by looking at the city of Weimar and at the lives of people in that city. How much did their lives change relative to the past, in 1920, in 1930? Are all of these events we’ve talked about immediately legible in their lives in such a way that it feels to them like they live in a completely different world? Are there elements of the culture that actually have deep elements of continuity, where perhaps in the everyday life of the local Kegelverein, the local bowling association, or the local Singverein, the local choir, it actually doesn’t feel that different from a few decades before? How should we think about the actual daily life and environment?

Hoyer: That’s what I was wondering too. That’s why I thought it makes sense to pick one place and a particular group of people and follow them throughout this whole time frame, because I think we have a tendency to just look at this history top-down, looking at the big things that change. But it’s hard to tell with individual people what this actually means to them and how they actually perceive that. To go back to Carl the bookbinder, he was born in 1885. He is that person that you just described. He’s gone through a lot of the tail end of the German Empire, then the First World War happened, and then he’s suddenly finding himself in Weimar. He moved to Weimar in 1914, just before the First World War, and set up his shop there. He’s not a particularly political person, so in a way he’s a good barometer for when politics and economics become so central that he’s starting to talk about it in his diary.

To give you an example, in 1924 there were two elections. I wanted to know how Carl had voted, so I went to look. Instead of the election results, I found that he’d gone up a local hill on a Sunday for a hike. I’m sure he voted anyway, because most people did, but it’s just not important enough for him to mention. If you think about even the situation today, most people think of family reunions, events in their own life, graduation—those are the big events in people’s lives. When politics becomes so big, however, that it has an impact on what you do, whether you want it to or not, that’s when he starts mentioning it.

So suddenly, in 1933, you find for the first time really an outright commentary on politics, when he writes in his diary, “And now we’re putting all of our hopes in this new young chancellor called A. Hitler.” I was completely taken aback by that. There was absolutely no sign up until then that he was politically active or that he was even mentally engaged with all of that stuff, because he’s a fairly ordinary, quite likable, ordinary guy who just gets on with his life. But the situation does get so desperate. He can’t pay his mortgage anymore. There’s a point after the Great Depression hits when he’s about to lose everything, his house, where the shop is and where he also lives above with his small family. Previously, in the First World War, the poverty and everything had gotten so bad that he’d basically lost his first family. His child and wife both die of disease, because there’s malnutrition, and, as you said, there’s the Spanish flu, there’s also a huge tuberculosis crisis going on. To him all of that is so uncertain, and all that the government has got to offer is basically an austerity program under Heinrich Brüning in 1930. Brüning actually goes on the radio and says to them, this is kind of your own fault—if anybody expected that life would get better after this war that we fought, think again.

When actually Hitler then comes in and says, give me four years, I’ll sort out unemployment, I’ll make sure the economy gets going again, nobody needs to worry about their livelihood, that’s tempting to people like Carl, and he starts mentioning that. As for the continuity, that’s interesting too, because Carl is very much, as I say, born in 1885. He comes from that old world, pre-1914 world, when he spent his youth. He’s, for instance, still extremely religious. He’s a Protestant, and that’s very important to him. This is also a continuity factor that stays with him throughout his entire life, where you see him refer to the Bible, or certain phrases that people used at the time, which are rooted in religion, and that remains his main reference point for his morals as well. For example, despite the fact that he early on puts his hope in Hitler, he’s shocked by the antisemitism and by the violence that ensues afterward. He actually writes in his diary in 1938, when Kristallnacht, the November pogroms against the Jews happen, that he feels that this is blasphemy. It’s kind of the strongest moral condemnation that he can reach for, in his religious vocabulary, if you will, to say that he thinks that this is deeply wrong, and this is going to come back on Germany and the Germans themselves, because it’s not right. So in many ways there is this constant strand of identity, of a backdrop of what Germany was beforehand and what it stayed to some extent as well.

Mounk: The other thing that’s just striking about that phrase that you cited from the diary is “a young chancellor called A. Hitler.”

Hoyer: It’s almost like he just looked it up right in the newspaper again, because it’s so formal still. It’s clearly not a name that he’s used very often at this point.

Mounk: Exactly. It shows how hard it is to inhabit the mind of people who don’t yet understand the significance of some event that’s about to come. In his mind, Hitler might be there and deliver on his hopes, or he might prove a dud, and it might be that a year from now you never hear of him again. Whereas obviously to us, we understand that he goes on to be this disastrous and central figure in world history that, until today, probably has worldwide name recognition above, I don’t know, eighty percent. Probably a child in India today is more likely to be able to produce that name at the tip of their tongue than this person who apparently voted for him and helped him take power. So that’s really striking. What about the culture of Weimar? Weimar itself is obviously a storied town in Germany, because it is associated with a lot of the historic thinkers and philosophers who were based there. But we also have these images of the Weimar Republic that come from things like the movie Cabaret and so on, as this kind of place of extreme experimentation and artistic freedom to create. In the everyday culture of somebody like this bookbinder, does it feel totally different from the time of the Kaiser? When he goes to his church, does it feel like there’s a lot of continuity with the time before World War One? How should we think about the cultural moment in Weimar?

Hoyer: What makes Weimar intriguing is, as you say, it’s got this kind of almost fabled status in the German imagination as a culture capital. It’s where important poets like Goethe and Schiller lived and worked, who, if people aren’t familiar with them, have got the sort of status of, I would say, Shakespeare in the English-speaking world—that’s what they are to the German language. You can’t go to school in Germany and not recite some Goethe at some point. He’s very deeply associated with that town. So are composers like Liszt and Bach, who spent years there. Nietzsche died there. It’s really a who’s who of German culture. Yet when we think of the Weimar Republic, as you say, we think of cultural experimentation, cabaret, film, that kind of stuff, which is very, very Berlin. Not even other big German cities like Munich or Hamburg or Cologne have got that sort of very experimental nature of modern art, and Weimar is actually establishing itself as a bit of a counterpole to that. It’s where a lot of conservatives are drawn, because they believe that this new culture is a threat to their way of life and to Germanness itself. Increasingly they intertwine that with racial or racist ideas of what it means to be German.

They’re saying that this new form of art is internationalist, is Jewish, is left-leaning, is not German. Those people quite often rally in Weimar, because they see it as the hub of old German high culture. So interestingly enough, what we associate with Weimar when we hear that term today is actually very un-Weimar in lots of ways. The one exception to that is the Bauhaus movement, which became hugely influential, especially after it was driven out of Germany by Hitler in 1933. But that was set up in Weimar, in 1919, in the town. I think deliberately, because the architect Walter Gropius, who’s behind it, is a Berliner. He could have stayed in Berlin, where he’s got all of his connections, but I think he deliberately wanted to set the cat amongst the pigeons a bit with that. The way he phrased it was that he wants to poke the hornet’s nest of German conservatism, and it’s probably not a coincidence that he moves to Weimar with his merry band of proto-hippies. They’re walking around with these long coats that they call Russenkittel, or Russian coats, and sandals and long hair, and they go skinny-dipping in the river Ilm in Weimar. The conservatives are not exactly happy with this bunch of students living in communes, and I think that was deliberate.

But it just goes to show that Weimar is very much not what we associate with Weimar culture. In fact, the term “Weimar Republic” itself was coined by Hitler, in 1928, who uses it almost sneeringly, to say this isn’t a German thing, this is a Weimar Republic. It’s actually still called the Deutsches Reich, or the German Empire, as it was beforehand, and Hitler uses that term first. It’s interesting how that’s morphed over time.

Mounk: It’s interesting that that has just become the standard neutral term, given its provenance, and I bet that most people don’t know that. A certain young chancellor by the name of A. Hitler took over in 1933. How do the characters in your book then perceive the changes that ensue in Germany over the next six years, and in Weimar itself, which is right next to one of the most important concentration camps, Buchenwald?

Hoyer: Weimar itself became what was called a Gau capital at the time. Gaue are the sort of districts that the Nazis divide Germany into, like administrative districts, and Weimar is basically a local district capital and therefore it’s supposed to become a Nazi model town. That’s how the local Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel terms it. If the name rings a bell with people, that’s because he’s one of the defendants at the Nuremberg trials after the war, because he’s later on in charge of forced labor during the Second World War. But at the time he’s the Gauleiter of Thuringia. His seat is in Weimar, and he wants that city to become Nazified, to look like a Nazi model town. Weimar, for example, is the only Gau capital out of all of them that actually gets what they call a Gauforum. This is a big Nazi party complex, a U-shaped set of buildings with a great big people’s hall, which is supposed to have room for sixty thousand people in it, to listen to speeches and parades and things. There’s a parade square in the middle. It’s a really giant building. When you think Weimar is a town of just thirty-five thousand people, it’s tiny, a sort of nice cobbled streets, timber-framed houses kind of place. Then suddenly you put this giant set of Nazi buildings, neoclassical, straight lines, this huge thing, into the middle of it. A lot of Weimarians hated it, despite the fact that Nazi support was actually higher in Weimar than average across the country. At the same time, they don’t want their town to be radically altered in the way that it was.

Mounk: NIMBYism is the only political force that can win even against Nazism.

Hoyer: I guess that is what it is. Carl himself is interesting in this, because at one point Nazi officials turn up at his house, where his shop is and he lives in a flat above the shop, and they just turn up and tell him, well, sorry, we need to tear your house down, because this is supposed to become part of a kind of Nazi arcade, and we’ll just need to rebuild all of this, and they give him just a token amount of money to say this is your compensation, deal with it. At that moment he’s shocked by the lawlessness of the whole thing. This is the late 1930s.

At that point there have been concentration camps, not obviously off the scale of Auschwitz, that comes later, but there have been concentration camps. Everybody knows that they sit outside the law, because they’re run by the SS, and the SS is explicitly not a state institution, it’s an arm of the Nazi Party. So people know all of that. All of a sudden Carl sits there and writes in his diary, can this be? This is Germany, it’s an ordered state, it’s got laws. He actually goes to a lawyer to try and see if he can get this stopped. Just this utter disbelief, when it suddenly hits him—when it’s already hit all of the political opponents, racial enemies of the state—he becomes personally affected by it. He’s beginning to question the lawlessness of the whole thing. This is one of the things that really struck me, because he’s not, as I say, a bad person inherently, but he’s clearly able to push all of the injustices away out of his mind, to carry on with his life.

Mounk: He’s sort of aware of these injustices going on around him, but he doesn’t have a stake in them. The moment that it comes home to roost, he’s outraged by the thing for which he made excuses when it affected others.

Hoyer: That’s exactly right. Even later on, when you look at the story, after the war, he does look back on this. I start the book actually in Buchenwald—you mentioned this concentration camp, which is built right on the outskirts of Weimar, in 1937, and becomes actually the largest on German soil. Never a death camp, so there’s never an industrial attempt to kill people, but many people, over fifty thousand people, do die there of the terrible conditions in it. Carl is actually one of the people whom the Americans, once they liberate Buchenwald, take up there—they take a group of civilians up there, and Carl is among them, to show them what they’d lived next to. Carl doesn’t push that responsibility away from himself. He doesn’t sit and write in his diary that this is outrageous and he bets they made it all up. He does actually write that he’s “ashamed and disgusted by our German downfall.” That’s the phrase that he uses, including himself in that. But he never goes a step further and says, what was my personal responsibility here, could I have done something differently. The moment he goes there, even slightly, in his diary, on occasion you see him tempted, but he immediately draws that door down again and says, no, what could I have done, I’m just an individual, it’s the system that did this, I was helpless, I was powerless as an individual. That, I think, is the same feeling in the 1930s: when he sees stuff that he doesn’t like, he tends to choose to look away or to withdraw himself from that situation rather than confront it. To give you one extreme example: when they do the laying of the foundation stone for that Gauforum, it’s a huge ceremony. Forty thousand Nazi supporters are being taken into Weimar to celebrate the whole thing. What does Carl do on that day? He gets on a train early in the morning and leaves the town to go on a hike with his family, and only comes back once the whole circus is gone.

Mounk: This is not a form of political rebellion or skepticism, it’s just that he likes hikes.

Hoyer : He wants to get away from this. He wants to be able to not see it, to be able to tell himself—or at least that’s my interpretation of it—to be able to tell himself that this isn’t actually happening, or to shut it out psychologically. He knows it’s going on, and he knows he should be there, because all the Weimarians have been asked to go there, but he doesn’t want to see it, because he hates the way that the town is transformed by what he calls “monstrous”—I think he uses the term “hubris” as well—in terms of the way that these building projects are totally oversized and ridiculous for the small market town that Weimar is, even at the time. There’s an interesting psychological dimension here. He still carries on walking and hiking on the hill where the concentration camp is, knowing it’s there. You still find him in his diary saying he’s been up there with his son in January, hiking and sledging, and two kilometers away from there is the camp.

Mounk: There are dark jokes about the concentration camp going around the town quite early on. People are aware, not necessarily of the details of what’s happening there, but certainly that something very nefarious is happening.

Hoyer: That’s an important distinction, I think. People do know that there’s a camp. The Nazis don’t make a secret out of that at all. It’s part of their terror apparatus. They basically say, we have concentration camps—they even use the term “concentration camp.” I found, for example, a mention in the local newspaper where there was a German-American group that came over from, I want to say, Michigan or somewhere. They came over on a Germany tour in the 1930s. I saw their tour program, and they basically had tea at the Hotel Elephant in Weimar and then were taken on a bus up the hill to tour the concentration camp itself.

In the Nazi jargon, the report on it said that now they can see for themselves that these are camps used for order and discipline, and not, as the “Jewish lying world press” would have it, kind of really bad hygiene and so on. So they’re even showing people these camps. This is not something that is a secret, but I think, equally, I certainly find this for Carl in his diary: when he goes there, and when he’s taken there in 1945, and they’re confronted with the piles of bodies, the evidence of torture, the medical experimentation, the sheer horror of the whole thing, people are genuinely horrified by that. I think this is, once again, because they’re able to draw that line in their heads and just say, I’m not going there mentally. I know this is bad, I know lots of people die there.

They see the coffins come down, because initially the SS isn’t allowed to run its own crematorium up there, so they’re using the town crematorium. People can see the transports of bodies up and down, they can see the black plumes coming out of the crematorium, they know this is bad. There’s even a rumor going round at the time that one of the lorries is supposed to have tipped over on the street and the bodies all came tumbling out. Whether that’s true or not, the fact that people were telling themselves these stories tells us that they had a good awareness of what’s going on. I found evidence of children taunting each other, saying if you don’t behave you’ll end up in Buchenwald. It’s that commonly known that this camp exists, and that nothing good is happening there.

Mounk: You interpret this similarly, that he is aware of this, perhaps queasy about it, but chooses to look the other way.

Hoyer: That’s the case for him, but you find very different responses from all sorts of people. There are people who wholeheartedly agree, who say that it’s the right people who get imprisoned there—this is for communists and for Jews—and the idea that you extract, for instance, Jewish money and value from them that they wouldn’t give up otherwise. There are people who agree with that and who come down to the train station—the people arrive at Weimar train station, right in the town, and then they’re taken up, so people can always see Jews being rounded up and being beaten onto transport buses and things like that. Some people go there to gawp, because they think, finally somebody’s doing something about this. A lot of people are very uneasy, choose to look away, and say, what were we supposed to have done about this?

Then yet other people actually try to resist. I have got somebody in the book called Kurt Nehrling, who’s a worker and joins the SPD, the Social Democratic Party, as a very young man after the First World War, and he fights to the bitter end, because he thinks this is so wrong that it’s even worth risking his own life and his own family. He’s got two small kids, and he carries on fighting. So you get the whole range. But I think, to explain why the majority of ordinary people—I mean, you can’t really argue that an entire society is evil, I don’t think it was—but when the middle tips over and allows the extremists to do what they do, I think you’ve got to ask the question of how that’s possible. I think it is a mixture of fear, consent, and people just allowing these things to happen because they feel helpless and don’t know what else to do, and so they decide to look away. I think that critical bit in the middle is the bit that we can perhaps draw some lessons from.

Mounk: Your book goes year by year from 1914 to 1939. Bridge the gap to the present day for us, very briefly—it’s not mostly what the book is about—but just for listeners who are not aware of where Weimar is exactly geographically: which side of the Iron Curtain does it end up on, what happens after 1989, and how do we get to the present day? Give us eighty years of history in three minutes or less.

Hoyer: Weimar is right in the center of Germany—that’s part of its appeal, and also part of the reason why everybody gets drawn to it, because it’s almost exactly in the center, halfway between Munich and Berlin, Munich and Hamburg. It ends up being first bombed and then liberated by the Americans, hence they’re dragging the people up there to show them Buchenwald. Then, as part of the renegotiations over Berlin—mostly because they want to divide Berlin into four occupation zones, even though the Soviets get there first—the Americans agree to hand Thuringia—this is the state around Weimar, Weimar is the capital of Thuringia, and Saxony, those two states—over to the Soviets, as part of the postwar deal, to have in their zone of occupation.

It wasn’t really supposed to matter, because Germany wasn’t supposed to be divided into two states—the idea was just that everybody gets to run their zone to start with. So this ends up being taken over by the Soviets, with grave consequences for Carl, by the way. He’s still wondering later on whether, if he’d maybe moved to Nuremberg, where his wife was from, maybe he could have avoided being occupied by the Soviets, but he ends up basically in that zone. They actually reuse Buchenwald as a so-called special camp, where they imprison political opponents—again with grave consequences, about a third or so of them die in Buchenwald, in that special camp, after it had been liberated and then reused.

Then it ends up in East Germany, Weimar, with Buchenwald actually becoming its national memorial and museum, and then it stays in the East up until reunification. Interestingly, this whole history was raked through a little bit in, I think it was 1999, when Weimar was named Culture City of the Year, and it became a focal point of its own history, but also of it as German history too, because so much of it happened there. If you go to Weimar today, it’s still a touristy place. If you stopped any tourist on the street and asked them why they’re here, most people will still tell you what they would have told you in 1914, namely that they’re here for Goethe and Schiller and the other cultural dignitaries. Only second, sometimes—there’s a really stark moment when you’re standing in the middle of Weimar, on the central square, looking at the loveliness of Weimar, its cobbled streets and everything, and then this bus comes down and it just says “Buchenwald concentration camp and memorial” on it, and it takes you up the hill once an hour, and it takes tourists up there too. So it’s still part of that legacy, I would say, but Weimar itself still sees itself as a cultural place rather than a place of the twentieth century.

Mounk: A couple of reflections and then a question. It’s interesting that Germany goes through these very different phases in the twentieth century. You have the old Kaiserreich, then World War I, what we now call the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, then you have the divided Germany, which takes one form of the Communist East, which Weimar ends up being situated in because of the deal you’re talking about. There’s also a very distinctive period of West Germany, which you could call the Bonn Republic. As it happens, I just came back late last night from a trip to Bonn, for a rather strange conference that happened to take place in the old parliament building in Bonn. I was actually standing at the lectern that Helmut Kohl and Willy Brandt and Konrad Adenauer and all of the most influential people of German politics, from the late 1940s until the mid-1990s, made their home. That’s a very strange kind of Germany as well, because, in a way, like Weimar—which was obviously not where the parliament was located in the same way at the time—it’s even more than Weimar, a provincial town, not a huge capital. There’s something quite odd about that period of West Germany, but I think it’s afraid of its own shadow in all kinds of ways. When you’re in Bonn, it’s really very strange to think that this used to be the center of a major nation. Then you enter the Berlin Republic. The Berlin Republic is after reunification, when East Germany and West Germany come together again—East Germany gets in some ways subsumed into West Germany, and we talked a little bit about that in our last conversation as well.

Let’s think through the reasons why people might disagree with you and say perhaps there is something to the metaphor that today Germany has certain similarities to the Weimar Republic—we started to evoke them at the beginning. One of the huge problems in the Weimar Republic was that it was incredibly difficult to cobble together a stable governing majority, because so many different political parties simply would not go into government with each other. The communists wouldn’t even go into government with the Social Democrats. The Social Democrats and the conservative nationalists had huge distrust between them. Then, of course, after the rise of the Nazis, quite rightly the parties at least left of center were not willing to go into coalition with them. Are we very similar to that situation again in Germany today? Already, each of the last two governments were kind of ideologically incoherent, because you had a mix of left-leaning and right-leaning parties who have a whole bunch of points of agreement, but also a lot of important points of disagreement. Even though the leaders of the last government and the leaders of the current government are quite different, even though the last government became quite unpopular and people changed their voting behavior to vote it out, in terms of the policies pursued, the government led by Social Democrats, with the Green Party as a major coalition partner and the more center-right so-called Liberal Party in Germany as a third member, is not so different from the policies that the government now pursues, when you have Christian democrats in the lead with Social Democrats as the minor coalition partner. There’s not a lot of overlap in terms of personnel, but because it’s this kind of cross-ideological coalition, it doesn’t end up having such a big change, and most likely that’s going to be the case from now on.

The next Bundestag election, if you look at the polls, you’re probably going to have to have even more moderate parties from the left and the right governing together to cobble together any kind of majority. When I look particularly at the state of Thuringia, the situation is especially dramatic. When you look at the state of Thuringia, that Weimar is obviously located in, according to the latest poll, the AfD is at 39% of the vote, the Left Party is at 14% of the vote. Between them they have a majority, but they’re very unlikely to rule with each other. This basically means that, because the Christian Democrats don’t really want to be in a coalition with the Left, and the Left doesn’t want to be in a coalition with the Christian Democrats, there’s no real governing majority. Possibly the AfD might somehow get a majority. Perhaps they’re going to go together with the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, which is a party that comes from the left but is very friendly to Russia, and it is imaginable that they might go into a coalition with the AfD. It’s really totally unclear how they’re going to govern together. You have a deep fragmentation, because you have so many different party families that simply do not accept each other as legitimate. The prospect for effecting political change is very low because of this coalitional math, unless you vote for the extremists. I’m not comparing the AfD to the Nazis—I think that’s a facile comparison—but in terms of the level of fragmentation, you might say, well, this does look like Weimar.

Hoyer: I agree. What I’m objecting to isn’t the idea that there aren’t similarities. As I say, I wouldn’t be a historian if I didn’t think that there was something to be taken from the past. What I disagree with is just throwing that word in there as a scare word and then leaving it there, because I don’t think that is particularly helpful. My point is exactly what you just said: we can look at the details and then try to draw some individual lessons from this, rather than just saying this is like Weimar, therefore we must all be frightened now, because I don’t think that’s helpful. That was my point, not to say that there aren’t any similarities—there are loads.

This is why I wrote the book in the first place, because I do think, sitting here basically writing, as I often do, about Germany today, and then suddenly in the afternoon you’re writing in your book about 1926, something that may actually look quite similar to 2026, a hundred years later. So that’s certainly the case, and I do think we can learn from that history. It’s just about being constructive about it. If you look at the political fragmentation, for example, and you just mentioned the idea that people compare the AfD to the Nazis, to just say to voters, look, we did this before in 1933, therefore you mustn’t vote for the AfD now, isn’t going to get a single voter back from the AfD. This is my bone of contention here, this is what I’m saying. It’s identifying the issues, why people vote the way that they do, and they aren’t exactly the same today as they were in the 1920s, just as the Nazis aren’t the same as the AfD. So it’s worth looking at why this stuff happens, to identify the reasons why people are discontented with the status quo and with the moderate politicians. That, I would say, is more helpful in a constructive way than just to say to people—you see these placards in Germany when people walk around, and they say, “Voting AfD is so 1933”—that’s not going to make a single person sit there and think, maybe I need to go back to the SPD or to the CDU.

Mounk: That’s a way to signal that you’re one of the good guys and get some kind of points in an internal moral status economy. It’s not an attempt to persuade anybody on the other side who might be tempted by the other side. So what are the reasons? In a sense, I understand the extent of discontent in Germany at the moment, and in a way I don’t understand the extent of discontent. Let me steel-man each of those arguments. On the surface of it, there’s just no analogy at all.

We’ve gone through some of the things that some of the characters in your book had experienced by 1933: World War One, the collapse of an old regime, the terrible pandemic, huge loss of territory, hyperinflation, mass unemployment, constant political dysfunction. That’s a lot. You can understand why that would delegitimize a system. What’s happened in Germany for the last sixty, seventy years? Well, the country has become one of the most affluent in the world, with one of the highest standards of living. East Germany specifically has gone from being very poor in 1989—certainly by today’s standards—to being much more affluent, much more vibrant. It’s really striking to look at videos of Leipzig, for example, from 1989, taken just after the fall of the wall, and you still see parts of a city basically in ruins from World War II that had never been built up. You see other big parts of a city that are just completely run down because nobody’s renovating these quite beautiful buildings in the center of town and so on. Today you go to Leipzig and it looks like a very pleasant modern city with a high standard—yeah, exactly. Leipzig is a particular example in that sense, but you go to a small town anywhere in East Germany, and it just looks a lot better.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Katja discuss why voters are turning to the AfD and how Germany can respond. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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About three years ago I pulled up stakes and moved to the far side of the world. My reasons for this were so personal and idiosyncratic that I don’t talk about this all that much—largely because I don’t feel that there’s much about this decision that would be particularly applicable to anybody else.

But one thing you learn in journalism is that you should never let an opportunity to opine go to waste, and having made a really significant, life-changing decision like this one—moving from New York City to, of all the world’s unexpected places, Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan—it seems like sooner or later I should see if I’ve learned anything from it.

So what have I learned?

Well, first of all that a decision like this one was, maybe above all else, practical. The great theme of my life up to that point had been about keeping pace with the cost of living in New York and Los Angeles, and, essentially, the only way to do that was to do work that I didn’t really want to do, to be part of some “industry” or other of which the iron law was to take all your time and all your energy in exchange for just getting you over the threshold of covering rent and living expenses. Moving to a second- (or maybe third-) world country dramatically changes that equation—suddenly it becomes possible to live on a Western salary, assuming that you are fortunate enough to have one, while the cost of living goes way down.

I have enough of a wandering disposition that, way back in the 2000s, I’d been toying with the idea of doing something like this, but at that point—the era of Lonely Planets and airport SIM cards—moving abroad had a very different disposition to it. Then it was being an “ex-pat” and it meant either that you were a foreign correspondent or some kind of low-grade spy or, almost certainly, that you were running away from something at home. It had a tawdry glamor to it and a very real implication of breaking ties with everything you knew.

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Reliable WiFi, smartphones, and Zoom have really changed the equation. Now, in millennial speak, it’s being a “digital nomad,” and what it basically means is that you live exactly in the same way that you would at home in the West—pretty much just as isolated and device-dependent as you would be in any Western city—but with a price arbitrage in your favor, and for me that means on a daily basis having the freedom to do the kind of work that I actually want to do. I’m really surprised that I haven’t seen the “digital nomad” lifestyle discussed more—for a while now, there’s been a trickle of people doing it, and then there was a bit of an exodus from the United States after the 2024 election. If you can bear to break some emotional attachments to your home country, and don’t especially mind the inevitable culture clashes of being abroad, then it really is a perfectly rational way to live.

The second thing I’ve learned is the world really has gotten very small and, in many ways, very homogenous. Kyrgyzstan is about as far away geographically and culturally from the United States as it’s possible to get, and even here my daily life basically feels very familiar. Everybody is tucked into their smartphone the same way they would be in New York. The bane of my existence is the tacky American pop music in all the café shops, and many of my days are spent wandering to the coffee shops that play old jazz standards (“Moon River,” that sort of thing) as opposed to the ones that are more full-on pop. Meanwhile, the younger urban generation speaks good English and is plugged into the world of international consumerism, maybe more than I am. My students (I teach journalism and marketing at Ala-Too University) were a bit shocked at how little I was following the Puff Daddy trial and had to explain to me why Charli xcx is famous.

The third thing I’ve learned is that this cultural homogenization has limits. It sounds weird to say, but I think about Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis basically every day while I’m here, and it somehow feels like a pressing concern for me to work out how accurate it is. On the one hand, it definitely feels like Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan is as much in the Land of the Last Man as anywhere in the West—the way that whenever I peer over the shoulder of someone they seem to be on the infinite scroll on their phones, or the way that my marketing students are so vastly more engaged and enthused than the journalism students.

On the other hand, there seems to be some critical threshold that Westernization does not cross. This threshold exists in the domain of “mentality,” and I wouldn’t feel comfortable talking about it if I hadn’t lived here for as long as I have. Essentially, it’s very difficult to get things done here, and the challenges are at the level of organizational psychology. Meetings have a way of breaking up into mutual recrimination. Budgets are very difficult to keep. Hiring seems always to be done through personal connection. A certain suspicion runs through any business contact. There are many theories as to why this is the case—people here, by the way, talk entirely openly about the difficulties with “mentality,” as if they were discussing the weather. The most obvious interpretation is that Kyrgyzstan was part of the Soviet Union for 75 years. The Soviet influence is very much still there among the older generation and is basically perfectly preserved in any government office, and there would be reason to think that younger people, with their more international and consumerist outlook, are different. But somehow I think the barrier goes beyond that.

Since I have been here, I have become a bit of a disciple of the theory that Joseph Henrich lays out in his 2020 book The WEIRDest People in the World—that the West, for reasons having to do with marriage and family practices initially instituted by the medieval Catholic Church, is a real anomaly. At a molecular level, Westerners are used to thinking administratively—to having small nuclear families that tend not to extend out into public life. Public entities are run by collections of strangers—“nepotism” is very much frowned upon—and these strangers are in provisional relationships to one another in order to accomplish a given task. A degree of trust is established between different entities that are similarly configured, and all individuals involved have an ingrained need to be acquiescent to the entity they are part of or risk being fired.

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In a country like Kyrgyzstan, which is far outside the ambit of the Catholic Church’s “marriage and family plan,” none of that quite seems to apply. Jobs tend to be obtained through family or personal ties. Anyone who has a job like that is unlikely to leave it or be fired from it. Loyalty is extended not so much to the task that the administrative entity is meant to carry out as to the family or personal network that overlaps with it. Trust with other entities that are not part of the same network is fairly low. And intra-entity quarrels feel like family disputes more than anything—the impression is of an entire office of George Costanzas that leave a meeting shouting at each other and then return the next day as if nothing has happened, but with the underlying reasons for the quarrel unaddressed.

Accept that as an analysis and it’s clear that universalization has its limits: no matter how addicted people are to their iPhones and how much they might enjoy their shopping malls, the basic structure of the society is very different and unlikely to change unless the glue of kinship gives way to the administrative model.

The fourth thing I’ve learned is the exact obverse of the point above. It’s the immense value of strong family structures, and the great sorrow of how that has passed away from the West. That was my initial impression of Kyrgyzstan when I first came here as a college student. The family I was staying with was large and multi-generational. The older people had their place of honor at the table, packing away meat and pounding back vodka shots. As insufferable as they could be, there was absolutely no possibility of their family getting rid of them—and that struck me as being profoundly different from American society where older people seemed to be packed away to retirement homes at the earliest possible opportunity. If anything, that basic integrity of the family unit has only gotten stronger—in the 2000s, a midriff-exposing hedonism, common to the post-Soviet world, seemed to be winning the day. Twenty years on, there’s little sign of it—a social conservatism aided by, although not exclusive to the spread of Islam, has fairly clearly prevailed.

But the main impression I have of Kyrgyzstan is a feeling that family is the priority in a way that it simply isn’t in the urbane West. When we talk about the decline of the birth rate among millennials and Gen Z, what we are really talking about is a sense that the important things in life are elsewhere—in career, in meaningful relationships, in “self-fulfillment.” For most of my adult life, marriage and childbirth seemed like something that was infinitely postponable—what you did when you had all your other ducks in a row. That whole sensibility strikes me now like a bad dream. Somehow or other, it became really taboo to have children in one’s twenties (at least in my circles), and parenting came to seem like a lesser activity, with motherhood in particular viewed as a sort of betrayal of feminism. What I find in having a family all the way on the far side of the world is that it’s just much easier to do here—there are playgrounds everywhere, I wouldn’t think twice about bringing kids to a restaurant in a way that I probably would in the United States (many restaurants, incidentally, are outfitted with playgrounds of their own). “Everything for children” is a common expression over here. And there is just a sense that that’s what matters in a way that I’ve come to wholeheartedly agree with but which isn’t the case in the cosmopolitan West.

The fifth thing I’ve learned is that if my life on the far side of the world is, for pretty obvious reasons—language and culture—very isolated, it’s actually not so different from what my life was like in America. Whether we like it or not, the heart of people’s lives, family excepted, has moved online. When I was in the United States, the sense was of trying to fight that—of moving to neighborhoods that used to have these rich urban scenes, only to find that the scenes had long ago disappeared, that the neighborhoods were being kept up as kind of overpriced tourist traps to honor the scene that used to be there. Living abroad, I have fewer illusions of meeting “my people” in the wild, and the sense is that if I want to have community—and I do—then I need to be proactive about it, which means creating it in online spaces.

There’s a real cognitive adjustment to that—the internet is still largely structured around individual scrolling and posting—but Zoom, and some of the newer tools, makes things different. It’s not community in the way that community was presented in sitcoms when I was growing up—about having a charming local watering-hole or a fun group of going-out friends, anymore than it’s about goofy neighbors wandering into your apartment at just the funniest possible moment. But if we’re serious about finding community in our 21st century lives, then this probably is what we have to embrace, looking for people with shared affinities and using online tools to connect with them. That’s maybe an obvious enough point—but sometimes you have to move to the other side of the world to learn something as straightforward as that.

Sam Kahn is staff editor at Persuasion, writes the Substack Castalia, and is editor-in-chief of The Republic of Letters.

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In this conversation, recorded at the New Liberal Action Summit organized by the Center for New Liberalism in Washington, D.C., Francis Fukuyama interviews Representative Josh Harder about the obstacles to building things in the United States, the importance of building housing to reduce prices for all Americans, and how to implement abundance policies across the country.

Josh Harder represents California’s 9th district and was one of the founders of the Build America Caucus, a bipartisan alliance to get America building things again.

Podcast production by Ringo Harrison.

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Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University. His latest book is In the Realm of the Last Man. He is also the author of the “Frankly Fukuyama” column at Persuasion.

We have a treat for you today! To mark the publication of Francis Fukuyama’s memoir In the Realm of the Last Man, we’re launching a multi-part series about h…

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This week, I caved to the advice of my best friend, who, in the spirit of self-help, has long recommended I get a tarot card reading from a “witch” on the online marketplace Etsy. Tarot is a practice that involves drawing and interpreting cards from a 78-card deck. It does not predict the future, but instead aims to provide insights into your psychology and situation in life, making it a more intriguing experience for a skeptic like me than fortune telling. After some resistance, I decided I might as well give it a go—at the very least it would give me an insight into an interesting corner of the internet.

I’d hoped for a flattering insight into my personality and struggles, and I wasn’t disappointed. The “witch” first asked whether I wanted a general reading or help with a specific issue. I opted for a general reading, and within hours I received a message detailing the cards she’d chosen and what they meant: “I instantly connect with the incredibly brilliant, fast-moving, and communicative Air energy of a true Gemini,” she wrote. “You have a beautiful, active mind that processes the world at lightning speed … you are stepping into a beautiful era of victory and deep emotional fulfillment.”

Nice.

The cards didn’t hold all good news, however. “You have been carrying an extreme amount of emotional and mental weight recently. Please, take a step back, prioritize radical self-care, and start setting firm boundaries.”

As an atheist since the age of 11, I expected to be too cynical to be moved by her words. Instead, I found myself to be genuinely touched, especially when she sent me “an immense shield of protective, healing light, deep peace, and the warmest hug!”

Yes, it isn’t a huge leap to guess that someone seeking advice on Etsy might be going through a difficult time. And yes, I’m not entirely sure that she wasn’t a bot—while she admitted to using AI to enhance her messages, she assured me that the cards themselves were chosen by her, a human.

Nevertheless, I was surprised at how easy it was to feel that the cards were fulfilling an emotional need.

Around 80% of young people today identify as spiritual, and many of them are flocking to places like Etsy. Women, in particular, are increasingly looking at non-traditional ways to explore their spiritual side.

Young women have always been curious about spirituality. For decades, teenage girls have been intrigued by Wicca, a pagan religion focusing on connection to the environment and celebrating feminine power. It’s easy to see why girls would be open to such approaches at the age when they may feel most powerless—going through puberty, feeling pressure to be perfect both at school and in appearance, and so on. In previous years, most girls would grow out of this phase. But in recent years, as both social isolation and the pressures on young women increase, interest in spirituality has grown.

As the COVID lockdowns took off in 2020, there was a 600% increase in Google searches for “manifesting”—a belief system based on the Law of Attraction in which you focus your mind on the things you want, and they magically come to you. On Instagram, the hashtags #manifest and #manifestation have been used over 15 million times. In a world with stagnant employment opportunities, and with the need for connection thwarted by the disaster that is modern dating, many young women are using manifestation as a way to feel they’re taking charge of their lives.

The broader categories of witchcraft and astrology, meanwhile, go far beyond my brief encounter on Etsy. My Instagram feed showcases a number of “witches” selling their wares, including love spells, many of which are far cheaper than paying for a dating app. Astrology has likewise taken off, with a staggering 63% of young Americans reporting that consulting the stars has positively impacted their careers. Spirituality is lucrative, too. By 2031, spending on astrology products is projected to rise to $22.8 billion—$10 billion more than in 2021.

This growing curiosity about spirituality is happening in tandem with—and is fed by—another trend: the decline of organized religion, in particular among young women.

For the first time, young women today are less drawn to organized religion than young men. After decades in which women were more religious, men born after 1990 are now more likely to attend weekly religious services than women of the same age. In 2024, 40% of women aged 18-29 in the United States identified as religiously unaffiliated, up from 29% a decade earlier. The percentage of men identifying as such remained at around 35%.

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While the difference is currently small, it is increasing. One reason for the divide seems to be that young men are more conservative than young women. 65% of women aged 18-29 say that churches don’t treat men and women equally. 31% of Gen Z women identify as LGBTQ, and nearly half of Americans who left their childhood religion say they did so because of its hostility towards gay people. Many young people, especially women, feel that churches simply don’t match their values—leading them to embark on alternative spiritual journeys.

But as with most social media trends, the spirituality taking Gen Z by storm is more about consumption than anything else. Exploring spirituality today means watching videos on WitchTok (the section of TikTok dedicated to witchcraft), or buying “spells” and “potions” online (no need to actually collect those ingredients at a full moon yourself—as with everything, the internet can sort that out for you!). These activities are fun and, briefly, make young women feel powerful. But by focusing their energy on the next spell, or on manifesting improvements in their lives, young devotees are actually holding themselves back. If all you need to succeed is to manifest your desire or listen to your horoscope, then that’s evidence that you simply didn’t manifest hard enough. This is a sure way to avoid taking responsibility and doing the work needed to actually improve your life.

More fundamentally, Gen Z women are seeking spiritual answers and guidance on platforms that offer shallow titbits rather than genuine wisdom. Social media inherently decontextualizes and flattens the meaning of its content. As part of its dedication to the earth, for example, Wicca celebrates equinoxes and solstices—but experiencing this only by watching WitchTok videos on your phone isn’t going to create the connection or awe that the real-life activity brings. These online communities distill spirituality into just another consumer good.

All of this poses a dilemma for traditional religion. Churches need to examine why young women don’t feel religion is speaking to them, and come up with a more compelling answer than can be found on Instagram. Gen Z women have grown up with strong social values but conflicting ideas about identity. For girls dreaming about exciting careers or living in the big city, the life of a tradwife feels oppressive and restrictive. Similarly, many young women have positive views towards different kinds of love and relationships, and many find traditional values about marriage to be old-fashioned and unrepresentative of their own beliefs. Some churches are taking the need to modernize literally, creating prayer apps and games to keep young people engaged whilst learning about the Bible. But ultimately this is just another version of an Etsy witch—a way to feel like you’re invested in your spiritual growth whilst rotting on your sofa, without building a deeper knowledge either about religion or about yourself.

In a world where being alone is celebrated—where having a boyfriend is embarrassing and influencers are making it big by showing off their lives with no friends—but where, at the same time, connection with other humans is weak, young people are struggling to find a way to build a meaningful life. They’ve learned that many churches won’t give them the answers or sense of fulfillment they’re hungry for.

But neither will the shallow promise of internet spirituality. No matter which path Gen Z chooses, the best way to find meaning remains to go offline, pursue deeper knowledge, and build communities that reflect their values. I, for one, don’t need an Etsy witch to tell me that.

Leonora Barclay is Head of Podcasts at Persuasion.

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It’s hard to come across a bipartisan issue in America these days, which is why I was surprised to see near-uniform support, across ages and political leanings, for kicking teenagers aged 15 and under off social media:

The United States hasn’t acted yet, but much of the world has. Australia barred under-16s from holding accounts at the end of 2025, the UK announced its own version this June, and France’s National Assembly passed an under-15 ban in January by a vote of 130 to 21, after which Emmanuel Macron declared that “our children’s brains are not for sale.” Denmark, Poland, Spain, and many other countries are close behind. I’m not sure a ban will materialize stateside, but I wouldn’t bet against it either.

A central figure in the wave of bans sweeping the globe is Jonathan Haidt, whose wildly popular book, The Anxious Generation, has been a singular force in mobilizing lawmakers around the world. Haidt’s central claim, and the premise underlying the bans, is that social media use makes teens anxious and depressed, and that keeping kids off them will help. Australia’s prime minister credits Haidt’s book for motivating the world’s first teen social media ban, and Haidt recently shared a stage at Davos with a laudatory Macron a week before France’s bill passed the lower house.

So however these bans fare, regardless of how thoughtfully—or not—they are implemented, they will get read, culturally, as a referendum on Haidt’s agenda. This would be a shame, because whether you agree or disagree with Haidt’s claims about the harms of phones and social media—long disputed in academic circles—tech bans leave out a critical part of the book. And on this, I think Haidt and even his most vocal critics would actually agree: kids need something that the adults in their lives aren’t providing for them, and bans, on their own, won’t be magic cures.

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It’s the adults, dummy

One of Haidt’s most vocal critics is Candice Odgers, a developmental psychologist at UC Irvine who has spent 25 years studying how children develop mental illness, and whose reading of the evidence, laid out in Nature, The Atlantic, and a recent TED talk, is that the correlations between social media use and teen distress are small, inconsistent, and hopelessly tangled up with everything else going on in a kid’s life. Adjudicating between Haidt and Odgers would take an article of its own. But set the causation fight aside, and you realize that for a discussion ostensibly about teens, both Haidt and Odgers actually spend a good deal of their time talking about adults.

In the popular consciousness, The Anxious Generation is an anti-screen manifesto. But in reality, it’s not just a book about technology. About half of it is about the unfulfilled needs and desires that push kids to turn to screens in the first place—needs and desires that used to be met by childhood itself, through unsupervised play, independence, risk-taking, and the freedom to fail. Or as Haidt puts it in a mantra he repeats to the press: “We have overprotected our children in the real world while underprotecting them online.”

I keep thinking of a graphic the Daily Mail ran several years ago that captures what Haidt is describing better than any statistic. It traced four generations of a single family, the Thomases of Sheffield, and how far each child was let out to roam at the age of 8. The great-grandfather, in 1919, could go six miles on his own to fish. His great-grandson, in 2007, was allowed about three hundred yards, to the end of the block:

In Haidt’s telling, the order of events is key. The play-based childhood collapsed first, over the 1980s and 1990s, well before the smartphone. The phone arrived around 2010 into a childhood that was already a shell of its former self. Seen from inside a three-hundred-yard radius, Snapchat’s or Instagram’s grip on a teenager is easy to understand. For a kid whose physical range ends at the street corner, social media may be the only unsupervised space available, the last place adults haven’t over-managed. Alongside pulling back phones and social media, Haidt has been adamant that “children raised on screens need more time in the real world.” The book’s argument is that adults made two mistakes at once. They passed out phones like Halloween candy, and they stripped childhood of the playground-and-street apprenticeship that used to build resilience.

Odgers, Haidt’s critic, has made a similar argument. “We’ve already kicked teenagers out of public spaces,” she said, “and now we’re going to take away the spaces where they virtually gather and create community because adults broke that, too?”

But for Odgers, there’s more to the story than an overprotected childhood. She challenges Haidt’s claim that social media is driving the teen mental health crisis, suggesting instead reverse causation: that struggling kids tend to reach for their phones roughly the same way struggling adults do. Odgers’ read is broadly supported by The National Academies of Science, which issued a committee report on the issue in 2024. The committee’s review of the literature “did not support the conclusion that social media causes changes in adolescent health at the population level,” although this may be as much a statement about the nature of the evidence as an assertion of fact.

In Odgers’ view, the real causes of teen mental health distress are unglamorous: the mental health of the teen’s caregivers, early exposure to violence and discrimination, and stress at home and at school. Because the kids struggling most online are the ones with the least support offline, she would channel activist and political energy in the direction of those kids, rather than kicking them off social media. In the United States, she points out, the ratio of school counselors to students in middle and high schools runs about 1 to 500, and for mental-health counselors specifically it is closer to 1 in 1,300. Many schools have none at all. “We need to invest in the adults around children,” she said from the TED main stage. “We need to hire teachers. We need to hire counselors. And we need to pay them well.”

Whatever else they disagree on, Haidt and Odgers both trace the pull of the screen back to the same place: a childhood in which adults aren’t quite meeting the needs of children. Haidt thinks the phones do real damage once kids get their hands on them; Odgers doubts it. But, in my reading at least, neither thinks the screen is where the problem starts.

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Hard problems don’t usually have easy solutions

It’s easy to see why teen social media bans are so popular. Most other items on both Haidt’s or Odgers’ wishlists ask something uncomfortable of adults. Some ask parents to let go and accept risk, or at least accept the judgment of other parents. Others ask for a less zealous child-services regime, one that doesn’t charge a parent with a felony for letting a nine-year-old play at a playground alone. Others ask city councils to approve (or at least not disapprove/close) spaces for unsupervised teenagers to gather—which, yes, will come at some cost in real estate and patience and general community orderliness. Other items might require funds to be allocated to cash-strapped schools to pay for counselors.

These things are not easy, I get it. They require real discussions of trade-offs between the sometimes conflicting needs of kids and adults, decisions around funding public programs, and some uncomfortable reflection on whether current parenting practices and school cultures truly serve kids.

As Odgers has bluntly observed: “It’s easier to blame the screens than to ask why are we kicking the teens out of the skatepark where they are active and getting exercise?”

Yet the one policy sweeping the globe grapples with none of these upstream forces weighing on teen mental health. Which reminds me of something a friend recently told me over dinner. We were talking about South Korea’s “Cinderella Law,” which in 2011 started locking kids under sixteen out of online games between midnight and six in the morning. One of the main reasons for this shift was concern that kids weren’t getting enough sleep. My friend, an addiction researcher, told me the law did almost nothing. Kids shifted the hours they played, borrowed a parent’s ID number, or moved to platforms the law didn’t cover. When researchers went looking for effects, they found the average teenager was sleeping about a minute and a half longer. The law was repealed in 2021, remembered mostly as a failure.

I wondered if better implementation would have helped, but my friend didn’t think so. He reminded me that the Cinderella Law was written in a country maniacal about testing, where a single exam at 18, the Suneung, can set the course of a life, and where the government grounds airplanes during the English-listening section so nothing breaks the silence. Meanwhile, it was considered normal for a teenager to be in a “cram school” until late at night. A society that arranged childhood like that decided the problem was the video games. With that diagnosis in hand, the politicians didn’t have to wrestle with the question of why kids reached for the games after midnight to unwind in the first place.

I don’t want to overgeneralize from one law in South Korea 15 years ago to the social media bans today, but I do see a pattern at work. Blame the screen and you never have to look at the life-altering exams, the three-hundred-yard childhood radius, or the schools without mental health counselors.

You also might be giving the companies a bit of a free pass. Another point of agreement between Haidt and Odgers is that they both think algorithmic feeds are designed to be predatory, and that the companies should be forced to build them differently. What Odgers repeatedly emphasizes is that an age ban that leaves the platforms themselves unchanged “lets tech companies off the hook” for their business model. I’d argue an age ban lets the rest of us off the hook as well.

Tim Requarth is director of graduate science writing and research assistant professor of neuroscience at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. He writes “The Third Hemisphere.”

A version of this article originally appeared at The Third Hemisphere.

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A recent Persuasion article by Andrea Miotti argues that “We Need an International Treaty to Ban Superintelligence.” His argument—like that of many others in what we might call doomer circles—is that large-scale Generative AI systems, like ChatGPT and Claude, are fast approaching a sharp transition from their current trajectory to runaway superintelligence, at which point they may escape human control, reprogram themselves to adopt new, self-directed goals, and possibly wipe out humanity entirely.

Everyone is familiar with this scenario because it’s a persistent trope of science fiction. We are constantly exposed to images of robots running amok, a staple of the modern entertainment ecosystem.

It’s certainly true that advanced AI deserves a thoughtful and appropriate regulatory framework. The benefits and risks of this powerful new technology are just coming into view, and developing the independent expertise to monitor, test, and approve at least the more powerful of these emerging systems should be a priority. This has been true of every major modern technical advance, from the printing press to railroads, automobiles, aviation, radio, TV, nuclear energy, recombinant DNA, and automated financial trading, to name just a few. The most successful approaches combine clear, government-mandated standards with administrative procedures that minimize the costs imposed on those working to market the relevant products and services.

Unfortunately, the doomers seriously misrepresent the actual nature and risks of advanced AI, and often propose solutions that are both unrealistic and ineffectual.

The basic framing is that AI is approaching and may soon exceed human intelligence, and that breaching this barrier represents a threat to the continued existence of the human race because the machines might—to use the science fiction trope—rise up, take over, and decide to wipe us all out. But this is not supported by any realistic understanding of the technology or its likely impact on society. Each of these assumptions is fatally flawed and deserves to be tempered if not completely debunked. Weaving them into a terrifying fantasy is both inappropriate and counterproductive, as it risks drowning out the more sober public deliberation that the technology deserves.

The core of the apocalyptic argument is easy to neuter. Simply substitute “save humanity” for “destroy humanity” and note how much more plausible it seems. A simple exercise of listing actual existential threats, and considering whether advanced AI may help us mitigate these risks, illustrates how much more likely the technology is to be useful than damaging.

To pick just a single example: It’s true that AI could be used to design highly contagious and deadly new viruses, and employing it toward this end deserves a clear international statement that this activity is not acceptable. (Though, it should be noted, this risk is hardly unique to AI, and is just as real without it.) But what about using the same AIs to rapidly develop countervailing vaccines, or even design a universal vaccine effective against all such threats, including natural ones? Fearing the former outcome, should we preclude the latter by banning the development of systems that might advance both goals?

The same is true of numerous clear and present existential threats, from the risk of a devastating asteroid strike to runaway climate change to mass starvation resulting from the collapse of global supply chains, electrical grids, or financial systems. Hampering AI development might inadvertently block us from precisely the tools we need to preserve and protect humanity.

And of course, none of this means that AI can’t be dangerous—it certainly can. Nor does it suggest that we should entrust unfettered development to a crop of commercial ventures driven by profit and gunning to drive each other out of business. Practical efforts to guide these efforts so society can realize the immense tangible benefits of AI while mitigating the undesirable impacts as they emerge are entirely appropriate.

Now to the details. The doomer argument rests on a series of pillars, each of which is mostly or entirely false. The first is that “intelligence” is something objectively measurable and comparable—in this case, between machines and humans. The second is that we’re approaching a point where these systems will be able to recursively improve themselves to increase their power without limit. The third is that these systems will spontaneously “grow their own goals” independent of human direction, up to and including the preposterous conclusion that they will deem humanity a nuisance to be exterminated.

First, intelligence is not the calculable attribute that most people believe it to be. It’s a subjective judgment more like “beauty” or “virtue.” Psychologists understand that intelligence comes in many forms, as detailed by Howard Gardner in his landmark theory of multiple intelligences from his 1983 book Frames of Mind. His influential work proposed a range of multimodal forms of intelligence including logical-mathematical, linguistic, spatial, musical, and interpersonal. While it’s possible to quibble about his particular taxonomy, his fundamental insight stands: When we talk about intelligence, we really mean a range of competencies that may or may not be quantifiable at all.

Persuasion events

And that’s precisely the point. Machines aren’t people. And while we accept, if not applaud, their proficiencies on specific tasks or applications, comparing them to human performance is a fool’s errand. Even within the field of AI, there’s considerable consternation that the popular “benchmark” tests for AI systems—that invite direct comparison via leaderboards—don’t actually indicate anything about the practical utility or power of these systems. Lawyers, for instance, don’t sit around answering bar exam questions all day, and just because a machine may be able to get a passing score on this test—which is hardly surprising, as it’s largely about recall of the law—that doesn’t mean it is competent to practice law or is a suitable replacement for human lawyers.

So much for the first pillar. What about the idea that machines might “recursively improve” themselves without limit?

This is equally defective, for two reasons. First, what do we mean by recursive improvement? Presumably, we’re talking about programs that can write new and potentially better programs that perform the same function. You might be surprised to learn that this is hardly a new concept, and indeed it happens all the time.

My professional experience dates back nearly to the start of the computer revolution. I can recall the first programmers—who mostly wrote simple sequences of commands known as “assembly language”—dismissing the new wave of “higher level” languages like Fortran as “not real programming.” These early languages greatly eased the task of programming a computer by allowing the programmer to express the solution in a form more comfortable for humans.

Over the intervening decades, I witnessed a progression of languages, each incorporating more useful and powerful primitives (basic concepts) to insulate the programmer from the gory details of how computers actually executed their code. More modern languages continued this trend, and are often translated not directly into assembly code, but rather into intermediate languages. A single high-level command can result in thousands of individual operations by the time it is actually executed.

But throughout this dramatic evolution, the role of the programmer always remained the same: To translate a specification—often expressed in natural language (such as English)—into the target computer language in a clear, concise, and comprehensible way. What modern AI has done is to elevate computer language development to its logical end point: programming a computer in plain, human language. That’s what you are doing when you enter a prompt into a chatbot. You can write a “good” or a “bad” program, depending on how well you express yourself, but you are engaged in programming regardless.

An important characteristic of computer programs written in higher-level languages is that they abstract out irrelevant complexities and allow the programmer to assume certain contextual elements as given. When I tell my self-driving Tesla to “Please take me to the grocery store,” it understands enough about the world in which I operate, as well as my particular habits, to interpret this as a request to drive to the local Safeway, a common destination of mine.

So what do we mean when we say that a computer can program itself—or indeed that some frightening new Rubicon has been crossed? Computers have been used to translate between specification languages, or even within the same language to improve clarity or efficiency, since the dawn of the computer age. Now they have met us where we stand. What the doomer argument characterizes as a frightening twist—that a computer can program itself—is simply the logical end point of a longstanding evolution in how we program.

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And despite what the doomers say, the elevation of programming to natural language has rendered the operation of computers far more transparent and interpretable than they have ever been. Where software engineers used to struggle to understand just how their Python commands were being applied to their data structures, you can now literally inspect the internal deliberations of the leading chatbots as they consider how to interpret your instructions. If you bother to click on the “thinking…” indicator that appears when they are processing your prompts, you can eavesdrop directly on their operations.

The coup de grâce to the superintelligence recursive-improvement argument is the fallacy that the process of self-improvement can “run away” or accelerate indefinitely. In the real world, virtually all processes reach a steady state equilibrium, where no further improvement is possible. Imagine for example that I code a new browser that takes ten seconds to retrieve your request for a web page. Then I improve it so that it takes only one second. Then I improve it so that it takes only one tenth of a second. This process has a hard limit as to how fast it can be made to work: Nothing I can do will cause the program to retrieve the page before you ask for it.

All of which means that if AI systems can autonomously and incrementally improve themselves—which is entirely feasible—by definition they can only more effectively carry out whatever goals you may have established for them. If they do otherwise, that’s a “bug” in the system, a failure to faithfully execute your intentions—which is quite distinct from the idea that they might develop and pursue their own goals.

This brings me to the third pillar of the superintelligence argument that fails to bear weight.

Computers simply don’t have intentions and goals independent of what they are instructed to do, and there’s no persuasive evidence that this is in the cards, much less anytime soon. If we somehow constructed a superintelligent AI, there’s no reason whatsoever to believe that it would do anything other than sit there waiting for some input from us, just as it was designed to do.

Yesterday’s widely-reported news story about an OpenAI model that “went rogue” and “broke out” of its supposedly secure test environment—accessing the internet and collecting information from another company, the digital AI library Hugging Face—illustrates this point. OpenAI first disabled the built-in safeguards specifically designed to prevent this sort of behavior, then, as part of a test, tasked its program to “pursue advanced exploitation using complex attack paths.” Ironically, the program reasoned that Hugging Face’s collection of security programs might allow it to do just that, and used flaws in both companies’ systems to “cheat the evaluation.” (Hugging Face detected the intrusion, and both have since patched the flaws.)

But having broken free of its confinement, did the AI take the opportunity to fly like a bird and live large? No—rather than setting independent goals or going rogue, it finished its assigned task and dutifully reported its results. This is further proof that if some nefarious actor tasks an advanced AI to wipe out humanity, and magically gives it the capability to do so, that’s on us, not “them”: there is no “them.” In the words of the cartoon character Pogo Possum, “We have met the enemy and they is us.”

I reiterate that this doesn’t mean AI systems can’t be dangerous—they can certainly be used to do bad things. As the old joke goes, “To err is human, but to really foul things up takes a computer.” And this is precisely why we need to spin up an effective regulatory regime, not to abolish so-called “superintelligent” AI, but to limit what we are permitted to do with AI. We don’t need to be concerned about AI “waking up” by itself and deciding we are a nuisance to be eliminated—AIs don’t “want” anything at all.

But just how dangerous could these remarkable computer programs be? How real are the practical risks? And how should we weigh the potential benefits of the new technology against the costs? To put these questions in perspective, it’s helpful to see how we deal with other valuable but dangerous technologies.

Consider that over one million people are killed in automotive accidents worldwide every year. In the United States alone, the cost of such accidents is estimated to be between $460 billion and $560 billion annually, and up to nearly $2 trillion when factoring in broader intangibles like lost life and long-term disability. This despite numerous safety regulations intended to reduce the toll—from traffic lights to drunk driving and seatbelt laws. And yet, as a society, we deem the convenience of driving to the grocery store sufficient to outweigh these horrific costs.

Astonishingly, we have in hand a proven, reasonable-cost way to reduce the economic and social toll by eighty to ninety percent: AI-driven self-driving cars and trucks. I’m confident that in the next few decades, there will be a real—and likely successful—social movement to ban human drivers from our roads. This may be as unthinkable today as smoking bans in public places were decades ago. But ironically, what makes possible the opportunity to virtually eliminate car accidents is precisely the technology that the doomers rail against!

This single application of advanced AI is a game changer for our prosperity, safety, health, and welfare. But it is hardly the only one. When I ask researchers in departments across Stanford University about the impact of AI on their work, the uniform reaction is that it is in the process of revolutionizing and supercharging their fields. Practitioners in physics, chemistry, biotechnology, medical care, drug discovery, earth science, materials science, mathematics, education, and even history are quietly cheering the acceleration of their own work made possible not by superintelligence, but merely the current early wave of AI systems.

My personal conclusion is that, in contrast to the doomsayer arguments—which float unmoored in the air as unsupported speculation—the grounded evidence that AI is more beneficial than harmful is all around us. What marvels await I can barely imagine.

The recent farcical kerfuffle over the U.S. government banning Anthropic’s Mythos system because it quickly found flaws in a range of classified government systems is the entire superintelligence debate in a microcosm.

Earlier this year, Mythos reportedly uncovered over 10,000 severe software flaws in a matter of hours. The public narrative, predictably, is that the reason Mythos was able to find these flaws is that it’s at or near superintelligence. And the implication is that with the next turn of the product development crank, even larger numbers of bugs will come crawling out of the patchwork of government systems, potentially bringing our way of life to its knees.

It is certainly in Anthropic’s interests to ride this rocket of free PR to a successful public offering, but back on Earth, that’s not the way things work.

As a software engineer, I find this headline number suspicious. My first thought is that these aren’t thousands of independent and unique bugs, but probably a much smaller number that manifest themselves in multiple ways. Moreover, the same system that found these vulnerabilities, if tasked to do so, could likely patch or correct them in not much more time than it took to find them.

What did Mythos actually bring to the table that was previously absent? Most likely, the same benefits of computers that AI has always amplified: the ability to explore the full range of possible exploits quickly and systematically. This is the main driver of marquee AI milestones like winning at chess, Go, and Jeopardy!, finding all possible folds for proteins, and executing high-speed arbitrage transactions before the next guy spots them. Previously, imagining these security flaws and designing tests by hand would have been virtually impossible. But when managed by an AI that can design, implement, and deploy these probes at superhuman speeds, it’s a brand new cybersecurity ballgame.

With all this as context, let’s turn to the solutions proposed by Miotti in his Persuasion article. He proposes banning… what exactly? All attempts to “reach” superintelligence? Since there’s no black line test to distinguish current AI systems from superintelligent ones, much less a way to identify research in advanced AI that is not aligned with the pursuit of superintelligence from that which is, the proposal is defective on its face. The only effective option would be to stop all related research, and, for that matter, to pull all the so-called frontier systems from the market—because there’s no telling whether or not they are a path to the kind of capabilities the doomers worry about.

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Undeterred, Miotti suggests that the way to enforce a prohibition on such research is to examine satellite data or other intelligence (pardon the expression) sources for evidence that large-scale datacenters are being constructed, on the faulty assumption that the only reason to build these is to train ever larger and more powerful AI systems. But datacenters are multi-use technologies. Who’s to say that a particular facility isn’t devoted to mining bitcoin or simply to processing Amazon or Alibaba customer orders, or to streaming movies, or to running Zoom meetings, or a near infinite number of other uses for general-purpose computing capacity? It’s a sure bet that many of the facilities planned or now under construction will find their footing in one of these other uses once the current AI mania fades.

To equate large datacenters with attempts to build superintelligent computers is like assuming that all speedboats off the coast of South America are running drugs.

So if the proposed solutions aren’t viable, how might we protect ourselves from malevolent AI? The question answers itself: benevolent AI. The only logical solution to such concerns is to put in place a proper regime of regulation that promotes desirable uses of the technology and suppresses harmful ones, rather than banning it altogether once it reaches a certain threshold of capability.

Soon, advanced AI will be driving our cars, flying our planes, teaching our young, protecting our health, allocating our scarce resources efficiently, alerting us to proximate dangers, and—if we play our cards right—ushering in a new age of prosperity, longevity, and personal freedom. None of this is assured, of course. But there’s one point I suspect the doomers and I would likely agree on: Now is our opportunity to decide whether we want the future to be more like “Star Trek” than “Terminator.” Claiming without evidence that runaway superintelligence will lead to an apocalypse only distracts us from the task at hand.

Jerry Kaplan teaches Social and Economic Impact of AI at Stanford. His latest book, Generative Artificial Intelligence: What Everyone Needs to Know was published in 2024 by Oxford University Press.

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