Liberalism’s Future: A Symposium
American Purpose continues the discussion Francis Fukuyama initiated in our pages on the “discontents” with liberalism on the left and the right.
Liberalism and Its Discontents
Today, there is a broad consensus that democracy is under attack or in retreat in many parts of the world. It is being contested not just by authoritarian states like China and Russia, but by populists who have been elected in many democracies that seemed secure.
Democracy’s Discontents
They didn’t attack the Supreme Court. Despite decades of fury from the American Right that the judiciary’s unelected judges were a form of “tyranny,” the insurrectionists didn’t attack the branch most representative of liberalism’s rule of law. Instead, they attacked the citadel of democracy itself: Congress sitting in session to count and certify the v…
Individualism’s Staying Power
It’s now a commonplace that liberal democracy is under threat or in retreat in much of the world. Francis Fukuyama offers a deeper analysis of the crisis, noting that liberal institutions and norms such as the rule of law; human rights; and the independence of institutions like the courts, law enforcement, the military, central banks, and administrative…
Religion, Freedom, and Prosperity
The United States today is more diverse than it has ever been. A demographic snapshot of millennials, the largest segment of the United States population, shows that they are the most ethnically and racially diverse generation in our history. They are less white (55 percent) than Gen X (59.7 percent) and the Baby Boomer generation (71.6 percent). Mil…
The Left’s Due—and Responsibility
Francis Fukuyama’s essay on liberalism is both descriptive and diagnostic. It attempts to explain what liberalism is, before turning to the question of who is challenging it today. Fukuyama concludes that there is no alternative to liberalism—which does not mean that those on the right are not trying to replace it in some places around the world, while …
The Centrality of Technology
In his essay “Liberalism and Its Discontents,” Francis Fukuyama defines classical liberalism as an “institutional solution to the problem of governing over diversity.” This problem became existential after the Protestant Reformation and the religious wars that followed it, Fukuyama writes; what we call liberalism today was “simply a pragmatic tool for r…
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