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Pratap Bhanu Mehta is Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi and Laurence Rockefeller Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Pratap Mehta discuss nationalism, radical forms of self-identity, and the likelihood of war between India and Pakistan.
Note: The first part of this conversation was recorded on April 30, 2025 with a follow up on May 12, 2025.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: Obviously there has been a very serious flare up of a long-standing conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir in the last days. As we're recording, there is now a ceasefire. We very much hope that it will hold, but it is not certain. Both India and Pakistan are nuclear nations, so the ferocity of the conflict between them is very concerning. Give us a little bit of the background here. What's at issue over Kashmir? Why is it that this conflict that has gone through hot and cold periods over the last decades has now flared back up in this dangerous manner?
Pratap Mehta: It is an absolutely unprecedented moment in India-Pakistan relations and I think one cannot overestimate the gravity of what has actually happened. But I think it is important to begin by making this point: in this conflict, the issue is actually not Kashmir. Kashmir is the pretext and I'll explain why. The issue has actually been more Pakistan's identity as a state. Kashmir is “Muslim India,” the only Muslim-majority state. Pakistan not only claimed that in 1948, but actually began armed conflict right at the birth of the two nations. India and Pakistan have gone to war over Kashmir several times. But what has changed this time? We have to look at the bigger picture. For Pakistan's identity, three elements are very important.
The first is the institutional centrality of the army. It is very important to understand that in Pakistan, the army has actually been the central institution. The army will continue to do things to make sure that it has legitimacy inside Pakistan. It's not a coincidence that this crisis flared up at a moment when the army's legitimacy inside Pakistan was at its lowest. So in some sense, it's actually the political economy of the army that, in part, drives using the Kashmir issue as a pretext.
The second thing that holds Pakistan together is a kind of anti-India ideology. Pakistan is internally struggling. As you know, there's an even greater, much more dangerous, powerful insurgency on its western front in Balochistan, with incredibly high casualties for the Pakistan army. So for the Pakistan project, the anti-India story has always remained the central glue. It's actually quite remarkable that even 70-75 years after independence, Pakistan's not been able to meld its provinces Punjab, Sindh and Balochistan into a robust national identity. I think these are the two larger contexts in which the use of Kashmir then becomes important. India and Pakistan have settled Kashmir several times after the 1971 war. There was the Shimla agreement and both sides agreed to a line of control.
But after the 1971 war, Pakistan decided that the instrument it was going to use to politicize Kashmir was not legal claims at the United Nations, political-diplomatic claims, or even conventional war. It was going to use sub-conventional means like terrorism. This was also the period that coincided with a much more radical Islamic turn in the Pakistan army, which was then fully aided by Pakistan positioning itself as a frontline state in the war in Afghanistan against Russia. The United States was fueling this Islamist jihadist complex because they thought that infrastructure was going to be very useful in the fight against Russia. But that infrastructure almost acquired an autonomous life of its own, and a centrality for the Pakistan army. So I don’t think Kashmir is the real issue here. The real issue is Pakistan's identity and the political economy of Pakistan.
Mounk: Tell us a little bit about the changes that have happened in India, because just as Pakistan is struggling with its identity, India has been struggling with its identity a little bit as well. Narendra Modi is trying to turn a nation that has always been majority Hindu into a Hindu nation in which its Hinduness is in some ways part of its definition. One thing that has led to is an announced change in the status of Kashmir. How are you seeing that conflict and how do you see—more broadly—the future of Muslims within India? There's, I believe, over 200 million Muslims in India. And I think one of the big questions is whether—if India becomes a Hindu nation—that group stays loyal to the idea of India as a nation or starts to feel marginalized and excluded in ways that might make it feel like it's not part of a state.
Mehta: Pakistan's Kashmir strategy has in part been premised for a long time on this absolutely false assumption that you could actually incite Indian Muslims against the Indian state, producing communal polarization within India. One of the most remarkable features of this incident—again, not surprising given India's history—is that on this particular issue, Indian Muslims are 100% with the Indian state. This includes even the most ardent Muslim critics of this government like Asaduddin Owaisi, who is the most influential Muslim leader. Nobody has ever accused him of mincing words or holding back. They are absolutely clear that Pakistan's actions are a liability to Indian Muslims. This is in part because they could potentially jeopardize their well-being. And in part because Indian Muslims have consistently voted with their feet and stayed with India, no matter what, at least under current political circumstances. Even with a Hindu nationalist India as it currently exists, they think they have a better chance of fighting a battle for their well-being in India than they do in Pakistan. It's one of the reasons why Al-Qaeda, ISIS and all these Muslim radical movements have had so little success in India. There was a democratic outlet and safeguard.
Now, you're absolutely right: if that democratic safeguard were to collapse, all bets would be off. But India isn't quite there yet. One silver lining that has come out of this crisis, which I hope that the government will build on, is that it paradoxically united India, contrary to what Pakistan expected. I think it's important to understand India's strategy for dealing with Pakistan post-1971 and post the astonishing 2008 attack on Mumbai (known as 26/11)—two days of killing civilians in the Taj Hotel in Mumbai. Up till now, India's response to Pakistan's terrorism has been to exercise strategic patience and restraint. Both are nuclear powers after all. Yes, terrorism deserves an answer. India was within its rights to take action. But India was always cognizant of the fact that there are risks associated with a disproportionate response to terrorism. That doctrine has changed with the Modi government. The Modi government's view has been that strategic patience and restraint only emboldens Pakistan, and unless you actually inflict some costs on them, you're never going to be able to deal with the problem of terrorism.
Mounk: Just for some context here, one of the reasons why that is a difficult thing to calibrate is that, on the one hand, Pakistan is a nuclear power and you want to avoid all-out confrontation. But on the other hand, there is a very strong suspicion—and some significant evidence—that these terrorist groups are sponsored by the Pakistani state. These are not groups that have no relation to the Pakistani state.
Mehta: In fact, that evidence is overwhelming and it's visible. This is not some sort of clandestine knowledge. Look at who the figures are that the Pakistani state celebrates. This is well recognized by the international community. Pakistan has been under all kinds of financial sanctions throughout its history, after 26/11 and a range of previous attacks. Frankly, India has hit a brick wall on that. And I think that’s for a structural reason—because terrorism has become a central instrument for the Pakistani state. I don't think anybody can deny this. Even the Pakistani state doesn't quite deny it explicitly. So the only question is, “What is India's response?”
And as I said, the Modi government's view was that that strategic restraint was only emboldening Pakistan and you needed to impose costs. It has to be said that the Modi government thought imposing those costs on Pakistan might also bring them domestic political benefit. So the Modi government has consistently raised the expectation domestically that if there is a terrorist incident, there will be some kind of appropriate military response. After an incident in Balakot almost three years ago, India carried out air strikes, for example, against terrorist camps. So that's one massive change in doctrine, which is that terrorism itself is an act of war. They don’t make the distinction between sub-conventional warfare and regular warfare.
What is surprising this time compared to previous responses is how extensive the Indian response was. It was careful not to target civilian areas. Given the range of India’s targets, at least as far as one can tell, civilian casualties aren't that many. In fact, India has been quite restrained. But the number of targets is high: air bases in Lahore, Rawalpindi, Sialkot, Karachi and a number of cities. And there are some unconfirmed reports—this is a matter of speculation from places like The New York Times—that actually India also managed to target Pakistan's nuclear facilities. Pakistan's response was to use drones extensively. It also launched missile attacks, and except for one, most of them seem to have been thwarted. So what was distinctive about this moment was not just that India has changed its doctrine, but it was willing to deploy missiles on a very wide scale. Frankly, I think it has taken everyone by surprise.
Mounk: Now we're entering the realm of speculation, but what do you think is going to be the future of this conflict in the short run and in the long run? Is this ceasefire that has recently been announced going to hold or are we likely to see a return to hostilities? What do you think is the prospect for managing this conflict over the course of the coming decades?
Mehta: I think there's two things. I think the ceasefire will probably hold in the short run, meaning for the next six months or so. In part, this is because Pakistan needed an IMF loan. And I think one of the conditions the United States put forward for approving that loan was for Pakistan to adhere to the ceasefire. But there are two structural factors that make me very pessimistic that the ceasefire will hold. One, as I said, is that this infrastructure has been very central to the Pakistanis' military operations in India. And this infrastructure is immense. It's hard to see a state letting this infrastructure go very easily.
Secondly, one of the paradoxical consequences of India's actions is that India has now basically declared that any act of terrorism will provoke a response. Now, if you think of the incentive structure here, if you actually wanted to produce conflict in the subcontinent, some kind of low-grade terrorist activity is a kind of low-cost option. I suspect there will be groups that will be tempted to test that out. The second reason—and I think this is important and something that has changed in this conflict—is that China has played a very important role. 80% of Pakistani arms come from China. In fact, one of the most interesting features of this conflict has been how almost all the great powers have seen this as a testing ground for different weapon systems: How has Rafael done? How has the Chinese JCE jet aircraft done? It is actually quite incredible how much this conflict was a playing ground for these competing technologies. Insofar as China has now cultivated Pakistan as a kind of all-weather dependable ally, the case could be made that if China wanted to hold India down, this is a pretty low-cost option. It might not want this conflict to get out of hand, but I think contrary to what many people thought—that China could use this conflict as an occasion to deepen its rapprochement with India—one of India's worries is that China has made it very clear that it is going to at least not prevent—if not be an active enabler of—this kind of sub-conventional terrorism option.
Mounk: Thank you so much for helping us make sense of this conflict and for the rest of this conversation.
Mounk: Your argument is that there is a global crisis of legitimacy which affects liberal democracies and the liberal project, but which also affects the alternatives in very interesting ways. To start off, why is it that the liberal project is in such a crisis of legitimacy in 2025?
Mehta: Most of the bases have been covered by many of your other speakers. There's a couple of things just to take the conversation forward. The liberal democratic project—or the project of any political regime for that matter—is in a sense embedded in three other institutional formations. The first is the economy, the second is the state, and the third is the global context of geopolitics.
One way of thinking about the crisis of liberal democracy is not to begin with questions like, is this a crisis of liberal ideas? Is this a crisis of liberalism? It is to actually begin with those three formations and ask the question, is there something about those formations at this historical juncture that all political regimes are finding difficult to manage? The economy is the obvious one. Political legitimacy in part depends on creating a viable social contract around the economy. Those social contracts are more successful that present the economy as a non-zero sum game and can produce the right kinds of class compromises. Historically, this was between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy in the 19th century. Post-World War II, for a brief period, it was between labor and capital. Interestingly, that’s maybe the only 20-25 year period in global history where wage growth and productivity growth were kind of aligned. Then they got misaligned in favor of labor briefly, and later there was a backlash. Astonishingly, across the world—whether in China or the United States—wage growth has not kept up with productivity growth.
There's something about that social contract that seems to a lot of people to be a little bit off. Are the class interests that our current economic situation is producing causing tension between the college educated and the working class, both in class terms and status terms? Is there something about our economic model that is making this tension a lot more non-zero sum? Honestly, there are no easy answers to this question. You see both the left and the right kind of struggling. I think the center's view on this was roughly more Machiavellian in our approach about the economy, saying, don't be fatalistic about it. At every economic juncture, there is some inconvenience you have to deal with. And once you deal with it, another inconvenience crops up. You somehow hope that the state can manage this dance enough to produce a collective confidence about the future. This is not just fatalistic business cycles. It requires deft policy management.
The remarkable thing is that everybody—the left, right and center—is struggling to come up with what that mix is. You have these extraordinary ironies where the left now embraces the bond market as the savior of democracy, and the right—like Scott Bessent—is saying, we stand for Main Street against Wall Street. At one level, it's easy to laugh at this, but at another level, I think it is indicative of just how complicated the management of modern economies is. China is actually having a version of its own struggle. The Chinese economy arguably is struggling even more deeply. There is a contradiction between the investment-led model that brought it immense success, and its inability to pivot to a much larger welfare state. You could say that the crisis is not so much one of liberal democracy per se. The crisis is in part one of social imagination for dealing with the economic side of things.
Mounk: I want to hear about the other institutions in which the crisis is embedded. But while we’re on the economy, why is it that this crisis is driven by economic factors in places that are so different from each other? It seems that there is a problem with economic legitimacy, both in countries that have experienced a lot of economic stagnation for the last 20 or 30 years, like Italy or big parts of Europe, and in countries that actually have had quite robust growth over the last 30 years, like the United States. You see it both in developed economies, like in Western Europe and North America, and in countries that are still really catching up to the productivity frontier and therefore transforming the lives of many of their citizens, like India or China. Even within those places, in countries like India, GDP per capita still remains comparatively low; in places like China GDP per capita has really jumped up over the course of the last few years, but you now have real problems with youth unemployment, etc. It seems to me that the way the economy has developed in these different places is so heterogeneous that it's surprising no one has managed to build a social contract suited to these vastly different economic contexts.
Mehta: That's a wonderful question. One preliminary remark about the economy: I think one of the big challenges we are facing politically when we think about the economy is, how do we actually represent the state of the economy? One of the things we've discovered in the last few years is that there's a kind of discrepancy between the way in which we technically represent the economy, and how it actually functions in practice. Even during the last elections, the headline GDP number looked fine. Inflation didn’t look too bad. Actually, unemployment numbers in historical perspective in many democracies are not that bad compared to the ‘70s. So I think one of the interesting things we are struggling with is this kind of discrepancy between what an aggregate of social scientific representations of the economy looks like and the way it feels to different constituent groups.
I think it's proving harder for the political establishment to tell these consistent stories. Here is one example of this—both an example of this representation story and of a fundamental contradiction that's emerging. You hear critiques of neoliberalism in the West. Many of those critiques of neoliberalism are actually well taken in terms of what it did to state capacities and the way it eviscerated a common discourse around the economy, in some cases with advanced economies. And yet, there is no getting away from the fact that the period from 1989 to 2009—the peak of neoliberalism—is one of the most astonishing periods in world history in terms of the drop in global poverty. It's also one of the most astonishing periods in world history in terms of building state capacities in the global South, including India and China. So when we read these critiques of neoliberalism here, it's almost like there's no global context for it.
Mounk: One of the striking things—looking back at the political change that I've seen over my own lifetime—is that when I was a student, the WTO was extremely controversial. I started university about a year after those famous protests against the WTO in Seattle. The argument against it was that this would hugely benefit the rich countries, making them much more affluent and lock countries like China into a permanent state of poverty. Today, when you look at criticisms of the WTO, they're very different. The argument is that allowing China to join the WTO led to job losses for steel workers in places like Michigan—who, by global standards, are relatively wealthy—and shifted much of that wealth and industrial capacity to countries like China, which were initially portrayed as the likely victims of globalization.
Mehta: Absolutely. It's actually the Global South that's more likely to now maintain the so-called liberal international order, because it benefited a great deal from it. But I think one of the things it actually brings out—and I think it's implicit in your comment—is this fundamental contradiction: If the locus of legitimation is the nation-state, and legitimacy depends on the internal distribution of power, goods, and resources, then this framework is inevitably in tension with the idea of global redistribution.
I think Vice President JD Vance was actually quite candid about this: the problem, he argues, isn’t that China hasn’t liberalized—it’s that China is getting rich. In both economic and geopolitical terms, that poses a significant challenge. But it also poses the challenge that there has been a fundamental contradiction between many of the interests of the workers in the Global South and in the Global North. It's remarkable in a country like India, which has such anti-imperial instincts that the left in the north is an object of much greater suspicion than the right has been in a sense on this issue. When the principle of legitimation is entirely domestic, the obvious question is, who are the winners and losers domestically? The political question then becomes, what is it about the political mechanisms and the form in which liberal democracy is practiced that prevents those states from either compensating or preparing the losers for this kind of globalization?
Now, there are two views on it. One view basically says that it's globalization that's the problem. Globalization imposes such a hard constraint on policy that states do not have policy agency on their domestic welfare policies to be able to actually engage in this balancing act. In fact, this argument goes one step further. There is this interesting argument in political science saying that you actually have a big turn to identity politics under conditions of globalization, in part because the room for contestation in the economy has reduced. So if you have to build political coalitions, you have to actually fight on something else. If it happens to be identity politics, it will be a lot more non-negotiable. That's one theory: that globalization produces a hard constraint.
The other is actually not a globalization story. It's much more of a domestic corruption story. It suggests that the supposed constraints of globalization have, in some ways, been used by elites as an excuse to avoid necessary domestic reforms. One clear example from the United States is education inequality, which has long been a major issue—partly because education is funded through local taxes. This creates vast disparities and undermines what should be a key instrument for promoting equality of opportunity. It raises an important question: does globalization truly prevent the development of a more robust education system? We see similar patterns with healthcare and housing—two of the primary sources of discontent in global politics across most northern countries, whether in London or New York. Again, it's not obvious that globalization has been the hard constraint. Rather, the invocation of globalization as a constraint has, in some cases, allowed domestic political economies to avoid reform.
Some might call this a system of cronyism; others, more charitably, might describe it as a mistaken view of how the state should regulate these sectors. Take American healthcare reform, for example—it has little, if anything, to do with globalization. What we’re seeing in politics today is, in part, a contest between two narratives: one that blames globalization for domestic failures, and another that sees domestic political choices as the true source of inequality and dysfunction. And in a way, one uses the other to avoid engaging in the domain where these concerns could actually be addressed.
Mounk: It seems to me that the problems of health care and housing are perhaps problems that crop up at a stage of economic development irrespective of globalization. These are problems of wealthy societies, precisely because wealth allows people to live longer, driving up healthcare costs. It's because we are a wealthy society that the cost of labor is much higher than the cost of resources. So healthcare costs go up because they're so labor intensive, as do education costs and child care costs and other such things. You can think that there's a deep failure of dealing with that in the right way. The American healthcare system is deeply imperfect in all kinds of ways. But that underlying problem is just caused by the fact that America is much richer today than it was 50 years ago. The same goes for Britain and other such countries.
Of course, the same thing is true for housing. One of the problems of housing is that there's a lot of competition for good housing because people have a lot of money. The other problem is that a wealthier society finds it much harder to build, gives much more power to constituencies that want to preserve the property values and want to stop outsiders from moving into the communities through zoning laws and all kinds of other things. It certainly isn't the trade with China which makes it harder to expand housing in California or in New England.
Mehta: Of course, just to build on that—and to make what is perhaps the most obvious point—all surveys show there is deep anxiety about immigration in advanced democracies. That anxiety exists on many levels. In a more nuanced discussion, we would unpack it further. At a basic level, every state has the right to regulate its membership. It’s hard to deny that proposition. For better or worse, the nation state—with its bounded membership—is still the foundation of political legitimacy in the modern world. That’s the political form we currently have. There are concerns about illegal immigration.
There's also a second, more complex concern about the cultural assimilation of new migrants. And this brings us to a fundamental tension: can a globalized world survive under conceptions of the nation-state that resist open membership and fail to reimagine national identity in more inclusive terms? Some of the concerns surrounding immigration are both genuine and justified. I do think that liberals—people like us—are sometimes too blasé about the effects of immigration, especially its distributive impacts. Who bears the cost? And particularly in contexts where many citizens already feel neglected or politically invisible, the arrival of new migrants can intensify resentment. That creates both a real political problem and an economic one.
At the heart of this is a deeper contradiction: our political legitimacy is based on bounded, historically rooted identities, but our economic system increasingly relies on mobility—of goods, capital, and people. At some point, this asymmetry was bound to create friction. A decade ago, there was a powerful argument that the best way to reduce global poverty was to allow greater migration of low-skilled workers. That argument still holds weight, but its limits become evident when it's implemented within the rigid frameworks of current nation-state systems.
Mounk: That's very interesting. We've mostly talked about the economy. What about those other ways in which liberalism and liberal democracy is embedded in this broader institutional context? Why is it that they have been contributing to the crisis of legitimacy?
Mehta: So, two things. First, there’s the economy. Second—let’s call it “the nation-state complex” for simplicity—we’ve already touched on the idea of the “nation” in various ways. Within this domain, I think there are two fundamental issues where liberalism has historically struggled, and where its most authoritarian tendencies have often emerged. The first is the question of membership. Liberal democracies have always wrestled with defining who gets to count as a full member of the political community. One could argue that the United States, for instance, wasn’t even a full democracy until the 1960s, largely because of this unresolved issue. There's no simple theoretical answer to the question of membership. Instead, societies have often stumbled toward practical, improvised settlements.
The second issue, which is closely related, is the need for modern nation-states to construct a story about their past—a shared historical narrative that explains why they constitute a "community of fate." Nationalism, in this sense, is the most expansive and potent form of identity politics. It anchors collective identity in history, myth, and memory. Liberalism's authoritarian moments are almost always driven by nationalism—because nationalism has the power to override all other moral and political considerations. In its name, individual rights can be abridged, dissent labeled unpatriotic, and historical inquiry reduced to dogma. This is why nationalist authoritarianism often involves a contest over the production of knowledge and collective memory—whether it’s the 1619 Project or the 1776 Commission, the debate isn’t only about historical facts, but about what kind of identity we want to shape. If this project of national identity is seen as collective and foundational, it inevitably places limits on critical reasoning. You can have identity politics, or you can have reason—but not fully both at once. And so liberal societies are being asked to choose.
The third tension builds on this identity dynamic and lies at the heart of modernity itself. As you’ve discussed with Francis Fukuyama, one of liberalism’s most romantic promises is the freedom of self-definition—the idea that no one can impose an identity on me, that I can choose who I am. This is a profoundly emancipatory impulse, a rejection of essentialism or inherited categories. But this clashes with another modern impulse: the belief in objective identity—that there are certain stable, factual aspects of who we are. We see this tension clearly in contemporary debates over gender and sexuality. On one side is the radical idea of identity as entirely self-authored; on the other, the claim that some aspects of identity are biologically or socially fixed. If we take both of these views seriously—at their best, not as political caricatures—there is a real philosophical tension between them. Radical self-definition can be unsettling because it challenges deeply embedded norms and institutions. And it's not a coincidence that gender and sexuality, though often not economically consequential, are now the site of some of the deepest psychological and political struggles over identity. What we’re seeing, then, is a moment where liberalism’s most utopian impulse—freedom itself—can feel too disorienting. And some are beginning to say: we don’t want this much freedom if it means giving up all forms of collective identity or certainty.
Mounk: That's very interesting and I think a few things tie together here. I go back to this moment in the 1990s when the big evangelists of the internet were saying that what this new technology would bring is an easy way to connect with people who now are too far away and with whom communication is now too costly for us to genuinely be in conversation with them. They therefore predicted that this would lead to an age of tolerance and mutual communication and people who seem to have different identities getting much closer to each other. It does strike me that one of the fundamental things about the last 30 years is that in fact, abolishing the cost of communication has had the opposite result. When you are able to communicate with anybody in the world—when you can encounter anybody in the world with their point of view and their proclamations about their own identity and their own worth on social media—what you actually want to do is to seek out the people who are the most like you as possible. And that may be in part because of the dislocations of globalization. I think it may be because of just the new means of communication in the form of social media and other such things.
That is the background to this debate about liberalism and self-determination. One is inspired by the Frankfurt School’s critique of the Enlightenment: that perhaps the very foundations of liberalism are self-undermining. That's a kind of conservative critique that some people have made. When we come from societies where there's very strong social background norms, where there's very strong expectations for how you should live your life, very strong gender norms, but also all kinds of other norms about how one should act in the world, the liberatory cause of liberalism was very strongly felt. We needed to be set free from the constraints that societies had traditionally put upon us in those ways. Nowadays, people might feel that those constraints have been pushed back to such an extent and have become so irrelevant to how much of the world works, that we have less of a need to be liberated from them. People who emphasize the need to be freed from them have a misunderstanding of what the actual problem of the day is. They're really just encouraging license rather than liberty, to use one old way of putting this.
A second way of conceiving of this moment would say that what's happened here is a misunderstanding of what liberalism actually consists of. It would say that perhaps in part because of the liberals themselves, we have overemphasized the ways in which liberalism is individualistic and in which liberalism does exhort people to self-create in that kind of way. This idea says that a strain of liberalism that really does price autonomy over everything else has become too strong in our culture. Part of the response is to return to a form of liberalism in which you recognize that the very basic liberties that this tradition gives us are precisely motivated by our understanding of the importance and need of social connection. Why is the freedom to worship so fundamental to liberalism? Why is the freedom to assemble so fundamental to liberalism? Because we understand that people are embedded in religious communities that are very important to them and because we understand that they may feel the need to get together and assemble with people who are part of some group or community that is really important to them. So, liberalism from the start really wasn't that kind of individualistic ideology, even though perhaps the strain within it that sometimes makes a mistake of over-emphasizing this has been overly prominent. What do you think? Is the crisis of liberalism one of reshaping its emphasis in the right ways and responding to this moment in a way that speaks to it? Are those things that can happen from within the liberal tradition itself? Or do you think there's a more fundamental misalignment—namely, that liberalism's liberatory instinct has, in a sense, been parasitic on pre-existing social norms and customs that have now exhausted their coherence or legitimacy?
Mehta: I have a slightly different take. I mean, all of those are valid concerns. And I think one of my worries—as you know—is that the debate over liberalism has been continuing since the 19th century. Even in the last 30 years, there’s been a standard series of critiques and a standard series of replies: that yes, liberalism does actually have its own version of community; it also has its own version of the good. I mean, we can go over those philosophically. But I think what’s going on in this moment is slightly different. And I think you’ve characterized it well. You’re exactly right that liberalism emancipated us from certain kinds of social restraints. But the premise of that emancipation was that those social restraints would be replaced by some kind of self-restraint. Liberalism is fundamentally an act of immense trust in other human beings. One of the reasons illiberalism breaks my heart—whenever there’s an act of censorship, whenever there’s interference with someone’s autonomy—is that it’s also a kind of breaking of our trust in other human beings. That act of trust was premised on the idea that, as human beings, we don’t want coercive restraints imposed from the outside, but we do want the formation of selves that can actually exercise good judgment. That’s a characteristic feature of 19th-century liberalism. When people say it was “moderate,” I don’t think they mean moderate in its ideas. I think they mean it was moderate in the sense that it recognized the need for a particular kind of self—because when we say “respect other people,” respect is not just an idea. It requires shaping your inner restraint in how you speak to others.
I think what we need to think about now is not just a critique of those philosophical ideas, but whether there’s something about the institutional forms we inhabit today that makes this kind of moral psychology harder to hold on to. So, there could be a more old-fashioned critique of the current moment that says, look: people have always been motivated by the desire for fame. If you design an information system regulated by profit, you will in fact start bringing out the worst in people. It’s not so much a refutation of liberalism—it’s a deeper question: where does the sense of good judgment and self-restraint that liberalism has always required come from? I don’t think there was a single liberal thinker who didn’t believe that this was essential. In fact, they would argue that it’s required even more precisely because we no longer have external social constraints. So where does that come from now? And does our current information order make it harder to develop?
Just to give one small example: the evisceration of the distinction between public and private was incredibly important for liberalism. Not just because the private sphere was protected from external interference. Not just because it was where individuality could be explored. But also because it was a space where you could make mistakes without massive public consequences. You might occasionally say something offensive to a friend and get rebuked for it. But it wasn’t an identity-defining mistake. Now, once something is said on social media, it becomes part of your public identity—whether you want it to or not. So I think the real question is: where does this sense of good judgment and self-restraint, which liberalism has always relied on, come from today? And I don’t think the answer can be to go back to older forms of external restraint. That ship has sailed—and probably for good reason.
The second thing I’ll say about liberalism—and this might be more controversial—is that even the most liberal societies have not just occasionally betrayed liberalism; they’ve also always had taboos. There were some areas where liberalism was quietly restricted. Take the free speech debates. On one level, we live in a time of extraordinary speech. Even censorship often draws more attention to speech than it suppresses—it’s often a way of mobilizing community power rather than silencing. But what’s going on in our censorship debates now? We can talk about the First Amendment and absolutist rights to speech. But historically, even in the most liberal societies, certain kinds of speech were informally excluded: discussions of race, criticism of certain countries, critiques of the nation. What’s different now is that it's difficult to carve out exceptions for just one or two taboos or communities—without counter-mobilizing others.
Take the current free speech debates. In multicultural societies today, every group feels phobia directed at it: Hindus speak of Hinduphobia, Muslims of Islamophobia, Jews of anti-Semitism. The community contest is now partly about how to mobilize enough power to make your exception recognized. Liberalism could get away with limited exceptions when there were just one or two dominant groups and a few shared taboos. But now, it’s easy to accuse liberalism of hypocrisy. Everyone can point to someone who doesn’t really believe in the First Amendment. And I’m not even talking about speech that’s clearly prohibited—like child pornography. I mean even critical speech about particular communities. So in some sense, I’d argue that liberalism now has to live up to its principles even more in a multicultural society—but is finding it harder to do so because the weight of group identities keeps pressing in. I get offended when speech is directed against my community. I seek an exception. But in a world where everyone is seeking an exception, the system breaks down. The problem is not liberalism as a philosophical idea—it’s the democratization of taboos.
Mounk: That's very interesting and I think it strikes me as absolutely right in the free speech debate. There was a set of asymmetrical taboos, particularly in the last years. Those then lead to each community saying, “Well, hang on a second. If we're not allowed to say X or Y about this topic or about that community, why on earth should I tolerate people saying these horrible things about my community?” There's two responses to that. One of which is to try to fight for your community having the same carve-outs and exceptions. Or you go in the other direction and challenge the need to have more robust free speech norms, including on topics that are going to make a lot of people uncomfortable. I think that the coherent response is that you can see how tempting it is to each political actor, whether they're on the left or the right, to deviate from it. I also thought what you said earlier was very interesting: that liberalism relies on the private-public distinction and that the real impact of technology has been to make the private impossible. This is something that I'm very struck by when I speak to my students. One of the most meaningful experiences to me at university was having those rollicking debates with people at 2 a.m. in somebody's rooms. It's not like we were being churlish. We were really trying to work out what we thought about the world. But I'm sure we said all kinds of stupid and offensive things in the process of doing that. It didn't occur to anybody that that might be in the newspaper the next day, because nobody was interested in us and social media didn't really exist. My students—who I speak to today—are very worried that anything they might say in that dining hall to a friend or in class, for that matter, might then be used as material for a TikTok of some classmate who attacks them and that might cast them out of that community. This topic is obviously linked because that is a question about being protected precisely from the mob of your peers when you're trying to exercise your free speech, not even necessarily in advocating for some controversial cause, but just in developing your own mind. I'm aware that we've been talking a lot about liberalism, but I think one of the things that's striking in what you've been thinking about recently is that for all of the deep crisis of legitimacy of liberalism, we see a similar parallel crisis of legitimacy in different ideological forms around the world. So before we delve into that, I think the first question to ask is, What are those other forms? What are the principal rivals to liberalism or liberal democracy in the world today? How should we think about their relationship to liberalism?
Mehta: As we discussed, there are different ways to think about the landscape of alternatives. Traditionally, it’s been framed as capitalism versus communism in economic terms, with political correlates. At other times, it’s been framed as authoritarianism versus democracy in different forms. I’ve been struck by—this is just a heuristic way of organizing—not just political theory in the 20th century, but also legitimizing frameworks across the 20th and 21st centuries. In different parts of the world, for better or worse, certain sets of questions came to dominate politics in the early 20th century. And out of those questions emerged legitimizing frameworks—ways in which societies think about political legitimacy.
One obvious example is the party-state as a political form, particularly in China. Of course, it originates in Marxism and was first perfected in Russia, but there is a very distinct Chinese development of the party-state. It has a well-developed political theory: What does it mean to be a vanguard party? How does the party mediate between the present and the future? It has its own theory of representation. And for years, Chinese political theorists have been preoccupied with the question: how do you make the party more representative? It has its own theory of political action—some of which, to be sure, has resulted in horrific human destruction—but it’s a political form that has endured. Many of the debates within China today still take place within the horizon of that political form.
A second project emerged in countries like Iran and Pakistan—though with many internal variations. This project is based on a deep recognition that, in the modern world, political legitimacy must in some way derive from the people. At the same time, it must also remain under the sovereignty of God. Syed Abul A’la Maududi, for instance, one of the most influential Islamic political theorists of the 20th century, coined the term “theodemocracy” to describe this vision. If China had party democracy, this was a kind of theodemocracy. This vision didn’t remain abstract; it led to real political movements and constitutional experiments. Pakistan and, to a greater extent, Iran institutionalized this framework in ways that continue to shape their politics today. Just as it’s hard for Americans to think outside the horizon of 1776, these societies are deeply rooted in these constitutional forms, for better or worse.
Africa presents a more complex picture because of its immense diversity. But the mid-century African political project was preoccupied with the question of what kind of political organization could prevent the color line from becoming an axis of injustice—not just in global politics, but domestically as well. If we take just these three projects—Latin America being somewhat more entangled with American and European intellectual histories—we can see that each was defined by foundational questions that have done at least two things. First, they have shaped the horizon within which internal political debates continue to take place. Second, they resulted in concrete regime forms, for better or worse.
Now, we find ourselves at an interesting moment. In some ways, these alternative projects—perhaps even more than liberal democracy—are reaching a point of internal exhaustion. They are confronting conceptual and structural problems that cannot be resolved without giving up significant elements of their original vision. The party-state, for example, cannot become a revolutionary project again—you can’t return to the Cultural Revolution. That model has been tested and found wanting. So how does the party-state reinvent itself as representative? Modern Islamic constitutionalism also remains unresolved. The fundamental tension between theological authority and democratic legitimacy has never been adequately reconciled in practice. And it’s not an accident that many of these foundational regimes are now turning toward greater repression than they did during the 20–30 years following the Cold War. We see this clearly in the shift from Deng Xiaoping’s China to Xi Jinping’s China. These regimes are also increasingly relying on nationalism as a legitimizing ideology, deepening the friend-enemy distinction, and using anti-corruption campaigns to justify more authoritarian consolidation. All of these developments are signs of internal crisis within these legitimizing projects. This doesn’t mean these systems will disappear tomorrow or collapse suddenly. One of the lessons we’ve learned is how path-dependent and historically weighty political systems can be. Theda Skocpol was right: revolutions don’t happen unless states implode from the top. And states can cling to their institutional forms for a very long time. But the sense of internal crisis is, I think, increasingly palpable.
Mounk: That's really interesting, so let's go through some of those cases. When you think about the internal crisis, for example, a post-colonial attempt at African state-making is relatively straightforward. Those countries, by and large, have struggled to forge a cohesive national identity. They're still very beset by rivalries between different tribes. They have not been very affected by building a lot of state capacity. They have by and large failed to lead a lot of economic development. Those remain some of the poorest parts of the world. Africa sadly remains the continent with the most civic conflicts, armed conflicts, wars, and so on. So it's sort of easy to see why you're saying that that is at a moment of internal crisis.
I think it's also relatively easy to see that when it comes to something like the Islamic Republic of Iran. That feels a little bit like some of the communist societies in Central Europe in the early 1970s. The regime might be able to hold on for a very long time or it might fall tomorrow, but genuine belief seems to have gone. It seems to have gone in a lot of the population, which is actually secularizing at a remarkable clip. It even seems to be gone within many members of the regime itself who seem more motivated, for example, by the material gains you can make from being a member of the Revolutionary Guard than by their founding ideology. It seems like power rather than ideological appeal is now holding that system together and we'll see how long it does that.
What about the case of China? They obviously do have some significant economic challenges, as we were alluding to earlier: high youth unemployment, GDP per capita that still remains a lot lower than that of Germany or the United States and for that matter a lot lower than Japan or South Korea. But China has solved a lot of problems that those other societies we've talked about have not. It has a very coherent sense of national identity, which is helped by the fact that there's a huge, Han majority within the country that is able to have very effective control over the full extent of Chinese territory, something that has eluded many historic dynasties in China, not just in the period of the Republic in the 20th century—almost the first half of the 20th century—but also towards big stretches of the Qing dynasty and many dynasties before that. It has obviously had very rapid economic development. All of that is enough to now make policymakers in Washington D.C. very worried that for the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union, and perhaps for the first time since earlier than that, they have a genuine peer rival. So, I can see how one can make the case for skepticism, but one can also make the case for bullishness. What's your case for why we should think of that model as having reached a genuine moment of internal crisis?
Mehta: I think it's important to distinguish between two levels here. First, I should clarify—it's probably obvious to your listeners that I'm not an expert in Chinese politics in every respect. That said, I think the distinction I'm trying to make is this: there are two levels to consider. At the first level, there's no question that the Chinese political experiment has been one of the most astonishing in human history. What China has accomplished over the past 30 to 40 years is staggering across nearly every dimension you've mentioned. In terms of improving human welfare—particularly if measured by poverty reduction—it has been enormously successful. China has, in many ways, earned a rightful place in global geopolitics, in ways that would have seemed unimaginable half a century ago. Empirically, it is a highly successful model.
The more interesting question, though, is conceptual: what does a legitimacy crisis look like in this context? For example, it's possible that the United States could remain economically stable and its state form intact, yet liberalism itself could still face a crisis. That’s the kind of analogy I’m drawing here. There are two key issues to consider. First, will the Chinese Communist Party’s hold on power increasingly depend on repression and surveillance? Compared to 10 or 15 years ago—particularly in the post-Deng era—there was a moment of greater openness, including intellectual openness. There seemed to be more internal confidence, which allowed for broader dissemination of ideas. From the outside, it now appears that this trend has reversed. And this isn’t unique to China. If we think there’s been democratic backsliding in liberal democracies, we might also say there’s been a kind of backsliding in the more liberal aspects of China’s party-state model. The left-right distinction, in this context, was internal to that model.
So if one is interested in the expansion of freedom—not necessarily in the form of Western liberal democracies, but in terms of a deep, presumptive trust in individual autonomy—then there does seem to be a retreat from that ideal. The second issue concerns the basis of the Party’s legitimacy. Historically, there was the revolutionary legacy, and it genuinely inspired belief. This wasn’t just a top-down project of command and control—it wouldn’t have succeeded if it were. There was also instrumental legitimacy: the Party delivered results, even if that came at the cost of surveillance and repression. The question now is whether that form of legitimacy is eroding. It could be replaced by something else. For instance, one could argue that Donald Trump’s presidency was a gift to China, allowing the Chinese state to position itself not just as a vanguard for China’s future, but as a counter-model to the West. There’s now a surprising degree of global investment in China’s success, particularly among those disillusioned with the American model. So the Party may pivot to a new form of instrumental legitimacy. One of the more interesting aspects of Chinese political thought is its ongoing concern with the representativeness of the Party. Chinese political theorists have long wrestled with this question. Yes, the Party can deliver material goods—but legitimacy is about more than that. It’s about a presumptive claim to speak for the Chinese people. Even Mao, despite the catastrophic outcomes of the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward, was driven by the idea that the Party needed to return to its revolutionary roots and not become just another distant elite.
There’s also a fascinating discussion around Confucian democracy in China. While it may not be deeply Confucian in practice, it raises valid questions about what would make the Party more genuinely representative. Thinkers like Wang Hui have explored this, and they rightly point out that similar legitimacy crises exist in the West. Does the two-party system truly represent the people, or is it merely a mechanism of electoral authorization? So there’s a parallel conversation in China: does the current party form still represent the people? Especially now, with the emphasis on the leadership principle and the relaxation of succession norms under President Xi, which had previously signaled a move toward institutionalization and openness. The increased focus on personal loyalty may be fundamentally at odds with the Party’s own self-conception as a legitimate system. At some point, that contradiction may become impossible to ignore.
Mounk: The other thing about China is that whatever one may think about the extent to which it is in crisis internally, it doesn't claim to have any particular model-like function externally. Whereas the Soviet Union was a universalist regime that did believe that it had a blueprint for how other countries would emulate it. I think the Chinese political elite recognizes that the political form they have is both too contingent historically and too culturally specific to be exported in the same ways. It is a strange mixture between a 3000-year Confucian history (a history of competitive state examinations that catapult you into the top rows of the state, the bureaucracy, society and the economy), between a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary party that has over time moderated and become in many respects quite small-c conservative. One of the striking things I found talking to people in China—who know China well—about Trump is that they don't see Trump in nearly as positive terms as you might imagine. You might think that from the Chinese perspective, they would look at Trump and say, he's blowing up America's leadership of the world, good for us, but in fact they're made very nervous by the extent of instability that Trump means for the global system because their tendency is, I think, to be quite small-c conservative in that way.
You take all these different elements together and it's just completely unclear what it would mean for political leaders in Nigeria or in Zimbabwe or in India to decide that they want to be more like China. There's just no blueprint to implement. Even insofar as the system thrives or doesn't go into some kind of internal crisis, it's not obvious that it can serve as a beacon for anywhere outside of that part of the world. It was in a way different during the Cultural Revolution. Back then, what was happening internally was much worse than today. But there were really young people in Paris—when you watch Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise in 1968, for example—thinking that Mao is shining the way to what we should do here in France. That doesn't really exist today in the same way. There's one big country that we haven't spoken about, which is ironic because it's a country that you're from and you know very well, and that is India.
I suppose 20 or 30 years ago, the way that I would have tried to slot India into this conversation would have been to say that India was at the forefront of making democracy, and to some extent liberal democracy, in a poorer part of the world. And so it's sort of at the forefront of a liberal democratic experiment. In fact, in many ways, it's the shining jewel in the liberal democratic experiment, because when it reached independence in the late 1940s, many people believed it couldn't possibly sustain that system of government. However, it turned out to be thoroughly democratic and actually respected the rights of religious minorities much more than might have been imagined at the time. Today, it's a little bit less clear that this is how one should slot India into the conversation because Narendra Modi has been trying to take the secular understanding of the country at its founding and turn it into a much more self-consciously Hindu nation, a nation that is not only Hindu by cultural tradition and by the fact that a great majority of its citizens are Hindu, but is Hindu in the political sense of having and recognizing a kind of primacy of the religion and perhaps political thought in the country. Where does India fit in? Should we recognize Modi as attempting a fourth answer to this question? Is it starting to actually propose a model of its own, which may again not be of much interest beyond the Hindu world, but which genuinely is an alternative to those other forms of government? Is it just an example of authoritarian populism or other kinds of impurifications of democracy that you're seeing in the United States and Western Europe and other places as well? Is it going to go back to being part of a liberal project? How do we place India into this conversation?
Mehta: That's a great question. One way to make the conversation comparative is to consider the two strands of modernity that the Indian democratic project has had to grapple with. The first strand is India's remarkable story as a global democratic experiment. It’s an extraordinary case of institutional improvisation—creating and sustaining democratic structures in a deeply diverse society. India adopted a liberal constitution that was strikingly forward-looking. It essentially declared that the political sphere must be unburdened by the weight of identity, history, and religion—not because those things are unimportant, but because individuals should be free to explore them on their own terms. That’s one vision of modernity. But there’s another strand of modernity that India has struggled with more deeply, and it goes back—if I may sound like a broken record—to the question of nationalism. In some ways, Narendra Modi has tapped into a conversation that has been ongoing in the subcontinent since 1857: what is the appropriate form of power-sharing between Hindus and Muslims? Partition in 1947 was one answer to that question—a kind of modus vivendi. It proposed that South Asian Muslims who desired a separate homeland could have Pakistan, a modernizing Islamic state, while India could continue as a secular democracy.
But I believe we are now at a dangerous moment in the subcontinent. The BJP’s core project seems to be to complete the logic of 1947—not to accept the compromise that allowed for Islamic neighbors and a secular India, which, notably, has more Muslims than those neighbors. The model the BJP draws on is not indigenous—it’s a European model, particularly from the 1920s and 1930s, rooted in cultural nationalism. One of their intellectual inspirations, Benoy Kumar Sarkar, was a sharp reader of early fascism. The alignment of ethnicity and territory is central to the BJP’s vision. In that sense, it is a modernizing force—but one that modernizes by redefining Hinduism itself. This project doesn’t just marginalize Muslims; it also reconfigures Hinduism. It reframes Hinduism not as a diverse set of sects, philosophies, and spiritual traditions, but as a singular ethnic identity. It’s the first major political attempt to colonize Hinduism in this way—something no other political force has managed. And because aligning ethnicity with territory often leads to violence, this project poses a serious risk to South Asia.
This isn’t a straightforward repudiation of the liberal project. In fact, there’s currently no viable alternative to liberal democracy in India. Even Modi seeks electoral legitimacy—he wants this to be a popular project. But the underlying diagnosis is that India failed to complete the logic of modernity by not becoming a proper nation-state in the ethnic sense. Modi now speaks of India as a “civilizational state,” but what he really means is an ethnic state. A true civilizational state, as envisioned by Jawaharlal Nehru, would be a palimpsest—layered with the imprints of every civilization that has touched it. The 1947 generation saw India’s identity as plural, shaped by many civilizations. So yes, this form of nationalism poses a profound threat to liberalism. But it’s not an unprecedented threat. The founding generation of India tried to learn from European history—to avoid the mistakes that came from obsessing over the relationship between ethnicity and territory. The BJP, in contrast, is taking us back to that very project.
Mounk: That's very interesting. I'm tempted to ask you more about India, but I feel like I want to bring in the ghost that has been hovering in my mind during this conversation: our friend and colleague, Francis Fukuyama. One way of casting what we've been talking about is in conversation with his brilliant and much misunderstood essay and book on The End of History. I wonder to what extent we align on our interpretation of where we're at with it. I wrote an article a number of years ago in which I argued that Fukuyama was ultimately right that there is no live ideological alternative to liberal democracy in the late 20th and now the 21st century. In the mid 20th century, fascism and communism really were live alternatives to democracy, being able to command the loyalty of millions of people. But today, when you look around, my list was somewhat similar to yours.
But yes, China is, as I like to joke, a country that works pretty well in practice, but it is a mess in theory in such a way that it makes it very hard to emulate that political system outside of China. There is a global crisis, in your words, of political legitimation because those countries don't provide a general tone of democracy. Now, the one part on which Frank perhaps was overly bullish was the ability of liberal democracy itself to be able to avoid an internal crisis of legitimation. And so the way in which we're in a strikingly different situation from what we might have anticipated 30 or 40 years ago is not that some great obvious competitor to liberalism has arisen. It is that liberalism itself has turned out to be much more internally weakened, divided and embattled than we might have anticipated back then. To what extent do you feel like that is what you've been saying and to what extent would you point out disagreements with that thesis?
Mehta: I actually agree with you. I think Fukuyama’s work has often been misunderstood. To put it in more philosophical terms, even the harshest critics of liberalism ultimately have to accept certain baseline values—most notably, some form of popular legitimation. Every modern republic, after all, is a “people’s republic.” You can debate how performative that label is, but it’s not meaningless. It reflects a fundamental recognition: no authority can claim legitimacy without, in some sense, invoking the people. And with that comes at least a nominal commitment to political equality. There’s no real alternative to this framework. Even political projects that challenge liberalism often internalize its language—especially the language of legitimacy and representation. They adapt it to their own ends, but they don’t discard it.
To lay my cards on the table: I think liberalism’s greatest virtue is its ability to reconcile a basic moral and political commitment to equality with a meaningful degree of individual freedom. Any political philosophy that aims to do both will, in some form, resemble liberalism. Where I might offer a slightly different emphasis is on the democratic dimension of this story. What I mean is this: societies must act collectively. One of democracy’s most powerful promises—its romantic appeal—is that it enables collective agency. It’s not just about voting or institutions; it’s about people doing things together. Now, philosophically, the constitutive conditions of liberalism and democracy overlap significantly. I’ve always found the term “illiberal democracy” to be something of an oxymoron. Freedom of association, freedom of expression—these are essential to both liberalism and democracy. So the overlap is real.
But there’s also a deeper expectation among citizens: that democracy should enable collective action. It should be a vehicle for the people to shape their world. And this is where populist authoritarians—Trump, Modi, Viktor Orbán—have found traction. They argue that the very institutions and values liberals claim protect agency—checks and balances, dispersed power, individual rights—have become obstacles to it. So we hear about a “crisis of democracy.” But from the populist perspective, the crisis began 20 years ago. Liberal democracy, they argue, became too procedural, too constrained. It stopped delivering on the promise of collective agency. What’s the point of democracy, they ask, if it doesn’t allow us to act? And in a way, they’re not wrong to identify that desire. Even nationalism, when framed as a democratic force, taps into this yearning for agency. Through vicarious identification with the nation, individuals feel their agency extended. I think we underestimated the power of that desire. We assumed we had figured out how to design institutions that could express collective agency while preserving liberal values. But those assumptions now seem overly simplistic.
Mounk: That's very persuasive to me. One very simple way of talking about the tension between democracy and liberalism—whether or not we ultimately believe that the idea of a liberal democracy is coherent or not—is simply to say that if those are the two fundamental values of our political system, if we want to have some meaningful way in which the preferences of the majority get translated into public policy and into the laws that structure our communal life, and we want to preserve the basic liberal rights of individuals to be their own masters, to decide for themselves what principles and what decisions should guide the life, including when that might entail doing unpopular things like worshipping some god that may be different from that of the majority, we need to consistently persuade a majority of the population to vote for politicians and movements and political parties that are antinomical to those liberties.
What seems to have happened over the last decades is a breakdown of the ability of those moderate politicians and movements to persuade voters to do that. Part of the reason for that is that a lot of voters would say, well, you're the ones who actually broke with the social compact to begin with because you were not translating what we wanted into public policy. There, we're back to the topic that you mentioned earlier as being one of the central ones, which is migration. One of the problems is that for a number of decades, publics, to some extent in the United States, in a much clearer way in Western Europe, have been telling politicians that they want less migration and more control of their borders. And they felt persistently that the political elite wasn't translating that preference into public policy. That's behind a lot of the willingness of those voters to now vote for politicians who are going to say, well look, we're going to put that in place and we don't really care about the other stuff that feels less important right now because you're so upset that we've broken this part of the bargain.
Mehta: I’d just add three supplementary points, or what you might call the “three elephants in the room.” First, there's a contingent but recurring pattern in American democracy: major crises of trust often unfold in the shadow of war. The Vietnam War, for instance, triggered a profound legitimacy crisis in the early 1970s. Similarly, the Iraq War left the liberal establishment without a credible foundation to claim allegiance to truth-producing institutions. And more recently, the war in Gaza has created a deeply polarizing moment—one in which, regardless of one’s substantive views on Israel or Palestine, there’s a pervasive sense of disillusionment. Everyone, in a way, feels betrayed. These wars don’t just polarize; they erode the moral authority of elites and institutions. Yet, this dynamic is rarely addressed head-on by either political party in the U.S. Second, as you hinted earlier, there’s a diffuse but powerful anxiety about the future. It’s not just about immigration or economic insecurity—climate change, interestingly, has also become a flashpoint. Polling shows that even environmental regulation is provoking backlash in some quarters.
Whether it’s the pace of technological change, ecological instability, or the sheer unpredictability of the global order, we’re living at a moment when the contours of the future are deeply unclear. And that uncertainty breeds a psychological vulnerability—a longing for simplicity, clarity, and control. In that context, populist narratives that promise to “restore order” or “take back control” become deeply attractive. It’s not just a technical problem; it’s existential. Without a shared horizon of hope or a vision of collective agency, we fragment into culture wars, identity conflicts, and zero-sum politics. Even liberal democracy, as Francis Fukuyama once suggested, needs a touch of utopian aspiration to sustain itself.
Third, and perhaps most obviously, there’s the structural issue of capitalism. I don’t think there’s a viable alternative to markets—they remain unmatched in mobilizing productive and informational capacities. But the current regulatory form of capitalism has deeply distorted the political process. The implicit liberal bargain was: you can accumulate wealth, as long as you don’t rob others of their political agency. Liberalism was premised on a separation of economic and political power. But that separation has collapsed. In Modi’s India, in Trump’s America, we’re witnessing the breakdown of that social contract. And we’re left with the old, unresolved question: can you sustain this level of wealth concentration without generating massive distrust in democratic institutions?
Mounk: It is a huge question mark, I agree. How are we going to be thinking about this crisis of global legitimacy in 10 or 20 or 50 years? One way of putting it is that perhaps global crises of legitimacy are the default mode of human governments. I know European history relatively well. I've recently been reading a lot about Chinese history. For most of the history of mankind, most regime forms could perhaps accurately be described as being in a moment of crisis of legitimacy with rare exceptions when there's a little sprint of good economic news, or you've just won a big military victory, or there's a new king or emperor that has climbed the throne and people are having high hopes for him. But for the most part, if you drop your metaphorical pin in some German land in 1570 or China in 1890, what you're going to find is a crisis of legitimacy. Should we think of an extraordinary moment of post-war liberal ascendance and the special moment in the economic bargain between capital and labor that you alluded to later, and then the post-Cold War moment of the United States having this global preeminence as an aberration, and that we’re reentering the historical norm? Or should we be sanguine that an adjacent and reformed liberalism or some other regime form is going to arise and prove capable of solving this problem of global legitimacy in a more lasting way?
Mehta: Two quick thoughts on that. One: of course I think one of the optimistic things about human beings is our reflexivity—the fact that if many people start feeling there is a crisis, it opens up the space for perhaps a different kind of politics and imagination. Maybe we needed this shock, as it were, and it’s certainly not too late. I don’t think this is a situation that is just overdetermined, in the sense that it’s simply a downward spiral. And, as you know, crises can be averted by the contingent world of politics. We wouldn’t be having this conversation if we didn’t believe in the possibility of politics in some way. One of the problems with political science is that we can’t code contingent variables, so we don’t take them very seriously.
Having said that, I think there are two things that are more worrying. Most of human history, in default mode, is in a legitimation crisis. But until the 18th century, most of human history also, in default mode, didn’t actually expect much by way of progress. It was incremental, and states didn’t do the kinds of things they do now. Our footprint on the planet—and on each other—was actually limited. I think these crises are coming at a moment when a couple of other major crises are also converging. I happen to think climate change is an issue. It’s been increasingly scrubbed off the public agenda, but the idea that humanity collectively is having a footprint on the planet that might risk making it uninhabitable is real. There’s also a technological revolution whose contours we don’t yet understand.
Finally, one of the dangerous things about this moment is the return of competitive geopolitics. The nicest thing about the “end of history” story was the idea that the world is not a zero-sum game, and that geopolitics doesn’t have to be a contest over primacy. But if it becomes a contest over primacy under conditions where domestic legitimacy is eroding, it actually puts the world in a very dangerous position. So I think, in a sense, the crisis of legitimacy—if we were all convinced about global interdependence and those norms held, if the nuclear norms held—we might take it in a slightly different way. But if you combine it with this incredible resurgence of a kind of race for primacy, I happen to think that race will, at some point, become very precarious and hazardous. You need a non-zero-sum view of the world for these legitimacy crises not to spill over into something more catastrophic.
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