the naval academy is not a modern university. we -- or west point, for that matter, or the air force academy or st. john's. we encourage debate, and we, because of that, invite you back anytime you want to come and speak again. thank you. next week, all right. [applause] so i'm sure you're hungry. all midshipmen here are welcome to eat upstairs, and we will start again at:45 with

welcome back to the 2820 fort mccain conference of the u.s. naval academy i am the deputy director of the stockstill center for ethical leadership. it is a great privilege to welcome yet another distinguished scholar here to annapolis. doctor francis is the senior fellow at stanford university's institute for international studies. and a faculty member on the center of democracy development and the rule of law. he is the director of stanford's masters in international policy and a professor by courtesy of political science.

he has written widely on issues of development and international politics. 1992 book the end of history and the last man has appeared in over 28 foreign translations his latest book is entitled liberalism and its discontent. he received his ba from cornell university and classics and a phd from harvard in political science is a great honor to welcome her to annapolis professor. [applause] >> i guess it is appropriate i am arising in defense of liberalism after patrick, is patrick still here? there he is. [laughter] okay. it will be an interesting counterpoint. so, excuse me i had a little

motorcycle accident on tuesday i am still feeling a little effects of that. if i stopped and grimaced a little bit you will understand why. in any event, i want to -- i consider myself a classical liberal. it's an important adjective but putting classical in front of liberal. i think there has been an evolution of liberalism in certain directions that are not necessarily implied in classical liberalism. i think most of the complaints about all liberalism have to do with the extensions of liberalism rather than a core doctrine. let me begin with a definition of what i regard as liberalism. liberals believe in that universal inequality of human dignity. that is to say, liberals do not believe there is a certain group

of human beings, a certain class that has superior dignity to other groups. and that dignity is something that needs to be protected by a rule of law that limits the ability of states to impinge on the rights of those individuals. it depends on things like constitutions, checks and balances that are again limits the power of the state. now that distinguishes liberalism from something like based on the single religious doctrine. it is also different from nationalism that takes one ethnic group or race and places that at a higher dignity to other people. now, a liberalism is compatible with nation states it is limited territorial jurisdiction. we can talk about that later so the world needs to be divided up

into nationstates but within the confines of the nationstates liberalism asserts citizens should be treated equally. i think they are basically three arguments that you can make an favor of liberalism. one is a pragmatic one. the second is a moral argument the third is economic. let me go over those in turn. the pragmatic argument stems from the origin. liberalism appeared in the middle of the 17th century as a result of the european wars of religion. after the protestant reformation european spent roughly the next 150 years fighting each other. something like one third of the population of central europe died in the course of the 30 years of war was a very bloodied conflict. a very cruel one and at the end

of that. a lot of european thinkers decided they needed to lower the temperature of politics. such that politics would not be around a central definition of the good life. they were competing definitions of the good life liberal thinkers argued the state ought to be neutral in regard to than that means is central liberal virtue is toleration. going to lower the horizons of politics in order to preserve life itself. so people would not kill each other of the sectarian differences that animated european politics in the previous generations. and so it's the memes of governing over diversity. the reason you want to liberal society's societies are diverse religiously, ethnically, racially in many different ways. liberalism is a way to allow the different groups to live next to

each other peacefully. the moral justification for liberalism really has to do with the protection of human autonomy and the ability of human beings to exercise choice. this ultimately has religious roots. if you go back to the book of genesis, adam and eve not to eat from the true the fruit of tree the knowledge of good and evil but they disobeyed god and are kicked out of the garden of eden. and thereafter human beings have the kind of intermediate moral status. they are not god. they do not have god's indignity but they're also different from the rest of nature. in the sense they can send a prayer and the fact adam and eve made the wrong choices in a way what characterizes the moral core of a human being.

human beings can understand the difference between right and wrong. they can choose to do right. they often times make the wrong choice but that makes them different from the rest of nature. and ever since then i think liberal societies have said human beings want to have that fundamental freedom. the occupation to pursue what beliefs you hold dear. that's fundamental to the dignity of human beings. so people use human dignity of all the time. if you ask what constitutes human dignity, what is the ground of it? i would say is a fundamentally this ability to make moral choices. the final argument really has to do with economics.

among the fundamental rights that liberal regimes protect is the right to own private property. the right to transfer. all protected by a rule of law the multitude make economic transactions. across different societies have been liberal ones. they have a fundamental rule of law that create the institutional framework of which eight modern market economy can arise. even a place like china but china opened up the world in 1978 that gave up central planning. it allows ordinary citizens to an fx own private property. keep the results of their labor

in china began to grow. it quadrupled its outputs in the next four years after the household responsibility act that allowed peasants to keep the surplus from their labor. they introduce incentives into what had been a complete truly centrally planned system bread that is the basis for china getting rich. now, and china is in no way a liberal society and it's a lot less liberal since the rise of xi jinping in 2013. but the prosperity of modern china is their adoption of a liberal understanding of property rights. i have not examines the economic miracle that they did. this is simply the latest in a whole series of economic success stories. beginning with the netherlands,

britain, other liberal societies were the pioneers would be first the commercial and then the revolutions because the ability to innovate and provide incentives to citizens to enrich themselves. it has produced a wealthy society. so those of the basic arguments in favor that i think are still very important. and necessary to keep in mind as of the question is why has liberalism come under attack as it has for both the right and the left? i wouldn't say most, but a surprising number of my students they do not describe themselves as a liberals for they feel liberal society has committed to many economic injustices, inequalities and liberal societies are too slow

correcting those. there is a critique that comes from the right that is unhappy with the fact liberalism doesn't set a combo for the whole society. it tolerates views for the good. religiously diverse but religiousdiversity and the like. i would say the sharpest criticisms are not of what i regard core classic liberalism. that assertion and has to do with what i regard real ideas into rooms they ceased to make sense and counter production consequences. there is a kind of symmetry because these extensions are on the right and on the left. we begin with the ones on the right. these have to do with what is

now referred to as neoliberalism. that is to say this is not capitalism per se. for some people i thanks so much more restrictive which has to do with the extension that are associated with economists the chicago school, gary becker, george stigler are people who argued state intervention is counter production. they argued for across-the-board removal for economic life. they associated this. with politicians like ronald reagan, margaret thatcher, ronald reagan famously said the scariest words he's ever heard our firm i am from the government and i am here to help. this began a whole.

in at least american culture i think for many europeans. when the state became the big anime is the enemy of economic growth. over regulated, and dis- incentivize creators of entrepreneurs and the like. the impacts -- we have to be fair about this. it was precisely this kind of neoliberalism taken to a global level that accounted for the quadrupling of global output early 1970s to the early 2003 2003created global trade systemt work the way the trade theory courses it should. if you have comparative advantage are able to trade you can expand markets very dramatically. and everybody gets rich. this is really what happened in that. the problem of course is what

the trade theorists tended to under emphasize was not everybody in your society got rich as a result of this process. and in particular low skilled people living at rich societies were likely to lose jobs and opportunities to similarly skilled people in poor countries. in 2001. the other thing was the whole mantra about taking the state out of the economy was applied in the wrong places. particularly in the financial sector. the financial sector cannot regulate itself. markets do not culminate they do not end in self regulation that protects the interest of society as a whole. we saw this from the sub crime prices at 2008 when banks were allowed to take excessive risks this is the culmination of a

whole series of financial crises that began with the sterling crisis in the early 1990s. in the asian financial crisis, argentina, russia, a whole series of economies and blew up because of the excessive movement of liquidity from one part of the world to another. and in a way the peoplehood forbade the theory of globalization of neoliberal economists in the united states for a hoist on their own when it came to roost in that financial crisis. i think this has been well documented. the rising inequality that has occurred precisely in those countries that adopted these policies first, has exacerbated the feelings of class, conflict, and working-class people been left behind. that in some way is at the root of the rise of populism. the second decade of the 21st

century. that is neoliberalism on the right. there's another distortion of liberalism on the left that you might label awoke liberalism. i think when a lot of people criticized liberalism they are not criticizing classical liberalism as i could find it. they're criticizing awoke liberalism. there are several aspects of this transformation of the way the left thought about inequality. so what defines a progressive is you do worry about social economic inequality. want to per address that. in the 20th century that inequality was understood in broad class terms. a marxist believes the world is fundamentally divided between

bourgeoisie and proletariat you need to equalize the outcomes might centralizing the memes of production and so forth in order to solve that problem. as we got to the end of the 20th century the sources of inequality came to be read to redefineda much narrower terms. it was no longer the inequality of big social groups are the proletarian but it came to center on narrower groups defined by race, ethnicity, gender and eventually inks like sexual orientation. inequality was seen not as much necessarily as economic inequality but inequality of dignity for certain marginalized groups were not respectedthis tf

focus mechanism for subsequent groups seeking social justice to fall into the same category of rights that needed to be corrected and used the same techniques like instead of relying on legislators, relying on courts in order to help achieve those equal outcomes.

it involved in arguments over this for the last several years ever since i wrote a book called identity, what's wrong with identity politics and i want to be clear about something. there is a form of identity politics and an illiberal form of identity politics. i have no problem with of the liberal form. i would say it goes something like this. people are treated as members of groups, they are marginalized as members of groups. this is most true with african americans simply on the basis of their skin color did not have equal rights in the liberal society if you are part of a group that has been mistreated you have every right in the world to mobilize on the basis of your common identities that is the source of your mistreatment and you enter the political system and make demands to treat you equally.

that is the essence of martin luther king's civil rights movement. i look forward to the day when little black children will be treated the same as little white children so that is the plea for a marginalized group that organizes on the basis of in identity category to basically demand equal rights to enter into that same liberal society. and a liberal form is when that identity category becomes a centralized meaning that it's the most important thing anyone can know about you, your skin color, gender, sexual orientation and that membership in a group will trump anything you accomplish as an individual, that is an ill liberal form of

identity politics and that's the part of the politics that i think becomes very problematic in a liberal society and you give out jobs, places and universities promotions and of alike simply on the basis of those identity categories that violates this fundamental liberal principle that we regard people in the society as individuals. we may judge them on their individual characteristics and skills, talent, accumulated abilities and natural abilities. if you treat people simply as members of groups you are violating that underlining premise and that is ill liberal. there's a lot of ways that this can go in terms of the way people are treated. i think that there's a big

controversy right now over things like cancel culture or woke culture but i would say in general, and i've argued of this this inmany different forms theg argument that i keep having is how broad and fundamental is this because a lot of conservatives would argue that we are living under a woke tyranny where every institution and the society is dominated by these identity categories and if you violate the kind of politically correct attitude towards those categories, you're going to be canceled. from my point of view this is not the america i experienced. i think first of all these identity categories do apply to a certain relatively narrow set of issues related to civil rights and related to essentially race, sex,

ethnicity, sexual orientation and the like and that we continue to enjoy liberal freedoms and almost every other regard so you can say whatever you want about president biden or a candidate donald trump and nobody is going to put you in jail. i think people think that we are living under a liberal tierney and ought to go live in a country like russia or china where you cannot make political statements that contravene those by the authorities. so in that respect there is i think a hierarchy and certain priority of liberal rights of which things like freedom of speech, freedom of association, this ability to speak out on political issues is important and is being eroded by certain parts of the progressive left but i don't think that it is a general characteristic of the society as a whole but that is something that we can argue

about. the other thing that has been going on does have to do with that second characteristic of liberalism that has to do with autonomy and the understanding of human autonomy this is the thing that gave human beings dignity in the eyes of god and had to do with of the ability to make basic choices, but those choices were ones that determined not by human beings, but by god. they existed in a moral framework that they themselves did not invent and moral judgments of them would be made concerning the way they lived up to these imposed rules and that is the essence of let's say martin luther's basic christian

freedom. it has expanded pretty relentlessly so that by the time at the end of the 19th century he creates this character who is free because not only does he have the ability to obey the law or not, he can make up the law himself and create the moral framework and this is what leads to what is sometimes labeled expressive individualism where the individuality expands all the way to your ability to establish the rules under which you are living and obviously you can't have a society if this is the case because what is a society if shared rules that allow collective action that allow people to live peacefully with one another and if everybody gets to make up their

own rules, that's not going to happen. this expansion of the realm of autonomy has been growing over time. some of it is actually abetted by changes in technology, so for example if you think about something like gender equality, a division of labor between men and women made sense in the hunter gatherer society and in many respects industrial societies because the ability to do useful work depended on upper body strength and ability to lift heavy objects and this sort of thing, when you go through the kind of socioeconomic transitions that we have seen in particular to a postindustrial society in which majority of

people doing useful work are not out there digging ditches or lifting big bales of cotton or steel bars but sitting in front of a computer for eight hours a day and naturally have a much larger place in the workforce so they took place beginning in about the mid-1960s was the entry of hundreds of millions of women into the workforce and they already made these into postindustrial societies but now it's happening universally and in this case it is technology that has allowed women to occupy

a superior place in the societies because quite frankly women are better at most jobs than men at a certain age. if you can give to a man or woman, they've got identical iq scores you're going to give them to the woman and she will be much more reliable and not to take stupid risks and so forth, so you have these growing shifts in the nature of gender relations across every society that's undergone this kind of shift. i think that it's wrong to say this is simply an ideological, ideology was part of it into the belief in women's equality was something that complemented the shift in workplaces but it's also something that is fundamentally created by the

technological nature of society that we have been living in a so that is the respect in which autonomy has been vetted by technology. i think the latest frontier battle has to do with human biology because when you think about something like assertions of gender fluidity that underlies a lot of the transgender activists agenda, it wouldn't be possible without the kind of medical technologies that supposedly make this possible, so this is another set of developments that's changed the nature, the perceived nature of what liberalism represents and i think that one of the unfortunate things is that now there are many people in the

world, antidemocratic, authoritarian willing to basically take woke liberalism as a substitute for liberalism itself. classical liberalism is all about political rights, the right of people to enter the political marketplace to speak out and mobilize but if you're listening to someone like victor or yvonne, it's all about lgbtq rights and other is that element of liberalism, but in my view it is unjustified extension of the understanding of the fundamental understanding of classical liberalism to undermine the legitimacy of the liberal project as a whole and that is something to keep in mind next time you're here with the

liberal authoritarian leaders criticizing liberalism and liberal societies. this is in fact what he has done. liberal democracy is a combination of liberal institutions on one hand with constitutional checks and balances and democracy meaning free and fair elections and for the democratic part of the combination liberal democracy. once you attack the liberal party you can undermine the democratic part because you can change the rules under which they occur which also happened in hungary and you will never lose another by gerrymandering and so forth.

this isn't based on the critique of classical liberalism but on a critique of certain woke liberalism. it is the easiest to reverse because it is simply based on policies and the united states today you've already seen a very substantial walking back from neoliberalism and in the 19 '90s you had the washington consensus belief by every economist that you needed to deregulate and privatize. today few people believe that in that extreme and we've actually returned to the 1950s or 60s industrial policies made a huge

comeback under the biden administration when the state is being used to promote a semi conductors, batteries, a whole lot of strategic technologies and those are things simply by changes in policy. it's harder to walk back woke liberalism in the sense that because it's embedded in a certain rights and autonomy, people are less willing to give it up but on the other hand i do think that you already seen the scions of that if you mandate policies that are fundamentally unnatural, they are not going to stick. i will give you one little anecdote in support of this. there's an italian journalist who wrote this nice book last year's with the sullivan

institute was a cult that existed in the upper west side of new york city that had a lot to do with artists and very well educated and creative people that were sucked into a cold that believed they were all very much on the left and they all believed the fundamental injustice was in the private ownership of property of karl marx but the nuclear family and that unless you destroyed the nuclear family, you couldn't achieve a marxist egalitarian society. so in their upper west side hideouts actually tried to do this. they would take children away from their mothers and have them raised by somebody else because they thought the most evil person was going to be the mother who would become a dictator and set the model for

dictatorship politically later on in life. it's a hard book to read because the personal costs this doctrine imposed on the cold members that lived in this cult was pretty unhappy children and warped individuals that came out of this movement and if you say what happened to it, wasn't this the cutting edge of individual liberation. people are deeply unjust and unnatural simply is not true and i think that you get a kind of natural evolution back to a form of social relationship that makes sense both for individuals

and often in terms of the darwinian underpinnings of selection and so forth and i think you're also seeing something of a reaction against certain forms of identity politics. the di was not controversial on many campuses and many boardrooms. i don't know what's going to happen in these areas. these are the areas that drive conservatives crazy but the one thing i want to say is in a liberal society because you can make free choices and you can discuss things and deliberate over appropriate policies, nothing is ever permanent and if something really does not make sense like ripping children out of their mother's arms and having strangers raise them,

it's not going to continue and there is going to be an adjustment that may take several years to occur but there is a self protective mechanism that applies to these kind of social changes. some of them because they are rooted very deeply in the changes of technology are not going to be reversed, so i think women in the workplace is something dictated by economic production today that you are not going to see them simply becoming stay-at-home why his mother's as in previous generations. but others of them i think are much more voluntary and that in liberal societies we can

discuss. i would like to defend why liberal societies into the kind of freedom and dignity is the most powerful argument but there's also a very powerful argument that has to do with the alternative and i think that part of the reason we are seeing the rise of these popular nationalist movements all over the world is liberalism has been so successful with exceptions that produce 70 years of peace and prosperity in north america, europe, northeast asia, societies that have adopted this kind of liberal democracy, and i just think that it's a human characteristic you begin taking these types of times for granted. i had a lien where i said if you can't struggle against injustice then you're going to struggle

against justice because what people want to do is struggle and have some higher horizon to struggle against and i think it's become too easy for young people to forget that they are living in one of the most prosperous societies with a greatest degree of opportunity. so what else is new. i want something more and that i think is one of the sources taking for granted these benefits of liberalism that i just outlined. it's taking them for granted that has led a lot of people especially young people on the left and the right that it's not enough i want more, i want social justice or community, a stronger sense of bonds with fellow citizens and realistically if you look at the societies based on the stronger

principles, it doesn't end well. one of the premier societies after its independence in the 1940s right now the nationalist party for one that is based on hindu religious ideology but there's 400 million muslims and christians and a lot of people that are not hindus, so they are basically left out of the natural identity and that is deeply problematic in a society that has that kind of a history. i don't see how you can run a country like india except on liberal principles. let me see if you have any

comments or questions. [applause] for the loss of trust so i would like to know do you look at the measurement -- and it's taken a precipitous decline so that is one measurement. if you look at the struggles we are having with recruiting that is another indicator that this is no longer an institution people are anxious to join.

what are your thoughts on that? >> there are several. across the board with domestic institutions but it's also true of a lot of countries outside of the u.s. where you've seen a similar loss in trust and i think it is due to several factors. the most important, and i think is technology and the fact so much of our lives have moved online over the past or at least since about 2010, 2011. i think that permits people to live in what one of my colleagues labeled the spoke realities where you can believe things and believe they are empirically supported that are completely false but you are

living in a universe where there are thousands, millions of people that kind of agree on the false premise. so have the republican party believes were more than half believes the 2020 election was stolen with a similar percentage they believe that vaccines were more harmful than helpful and i don't think this could have existed in a pre- internet world in which certain elite institutions had credibility to filter that kind of information. of those of us that have been looking at this phenomenon since 2016 have always said social media, the internet is one of the sources of this and i always thought that it was one of like six different things, economic inequality, cultural conflicts, politicians and so forth.

i now think that this is actually of those explanations probably the dominant one that in my mind is causing this lack of trust. when the internet was privatized everybody including myself said great this is going to democratize information and anyone can have access to any information they want. this is going to be profoundly good for democratic societies and it turned out that part of that was right it did democratize information but good information there's the whole hierarchy of institutions that if wehad to add credibility to empirical factual information and those have been undermined by the ability of anyone to say anything they want on the internet, so that's one issue

and the causality is very hard to distribute because there are lots of causes, economic inequality has led to this and managed to seal themselves off and a lot of the world around them that they helped create that causes resentment. i would say that it's the technology factor that in my mind is central in existing institutions. >> i had a question in regards to that how can we absolve the modern democracies as well as

trying to mitigate on the spreading of false information? right now you've got two choices in front of you either you can have the bigger internet platforms, so by the way at stanford we've been looking at this a long time we had the cyberpolicy center that was created and that has looked at this content moderation. first of all you have to moderate content. there is so much garbage on the internet that if the platforms didn't do basic filtering we would have beheadings, violence, stuff nobody would want to see so there would be a basic function of acting as filters but the big problem comes in

political speech because there's a big legitimacy problem with a for-profit company making big basic decisions and i don't think they got the right to do that. on the other hand you don't want the government to do that either. you don't want the government to set up a bureau that says this is factually true and this sort of thing. we came up with a solution i chaired a group on platform scale three years ago where we came up with a concept that i increasingly think is the only solution to this problem where basically what's the problem with these platforms like facebook, twitter, whatever it's called now, google, the problem is their ability to reach these

enormous audiences and silence certain places it's a powerful political tool so you don't want the government making those decisions or these big private companies to do that. our view is the only way you can solve it as my competition that you basically want to create a layer of outsourced content moderation companies where you could specify what kind of content you wanted to hear or see so if you're doing an amazon search you can say i only want to buy american or you're looking for political news, i want to hear about environment or the southern border. and you would get a dial on your feed where you can address that

for more or less. but the important virtue of this is that it would put the user in control of content moderation so the user could him or herself make basic decisions about what came across through facebook or x or whatever. now we may be moving in the direction of something like that because there's now been this proliferation of platforms. all i think is that it's necessary to have competition in the space so you are not relying on three gigantic platforms for your news and so now you've got blue sky, mastodon, and there's a protocol if you post something it also shows up on mastodon and if they joined the same consortium all these platforms can reach a broad audiences but

you would be in control of what you saw and it's critical to reduce the scale and increase its diversity and hand back control to individual users. we got stuck because we didn't see an economic model to make this viable but maybe it is just clearing, maybe the market is just providing it itself. >> something struck me you said at one point if something doesn't make sense it's not going to continue. >> deeply unnatural it's probably not going to continue. >> and i think in an obscure essay to you which you already referred to and you wrote long ago i think you made the claim and suggested if something makes sense it isn't going to end that

is liberalism and it seems your belief is that liberalism makes sense. could you make the case to play devils advocate for your self and to do so may be in light of the case you made against liberalism long ago that i think consistent in some part at least in the essay in the suggestion that liberalism ends in boredom and it might set history going again. is that still your view from which liberalism doesn't make sense and it reduces us to a state of boredom or would you update that in light of subsequent events? >> i do think liberalism makes sense it's just it doesn't make sense to a lot of people at any

moment. >> what is their considered argument? >> as i said, there's an adjustment mechanism that has to happen where you try different versions of liberalism so that is the experiment that we have been going through in terms of neoliberalism and woke liberalism and so forth and there is a way of adjusting if these things don't seem to be making sense or making people happier then you're going to try something else and i think that is one of the virtues of liberalism. i do think that the board at the end of history is driving a lot of people towards this kind of right-wing populism and a sort of that combined with the fact you can live in this online fantasy world you completely disconnected with the reality of and like i said if you can't

struggle against real injustice you struggle against injustice and a lot of people are falling for that. you have all these right-wing's that to say we living under the brussels tierney of the horrible european union. european union is a bunch of democrats that make up these annoying rules, but you're still living in an incredibly free society but you want to have an enemy as something to struggle against so you turn this into the monster that you're dealing with. >> based on what you just said it's not to simply boredom that's the problem, but the lack of seriousness self-respect given that you've got no overarching moral purpose.

this desire for recognition is important. they are intentioned because by recognizing the superior and the trick is to put it into safe channels. that turned out not to be the case, but i think that there is this side of human nature that demands recognition in a peaceful, prosperous or liberal society you don't necessarily get it and maybe just being a ceo for climbing ten the

himalayan peaks maybe that's not enough for some people. [applause] thank you very much for sharing your thoughts on liberalism on the 2024 mccain conference entitled liberal democracy challenges and critics. the last panel of the day will take place in ten minutes. we ask you to get up, stretch your legs and come back and we conclude with a look of liberalism and its application to military context. [inaudible conversations]

so we're going to in here new orleans, 1895. she's beautiful in shape up here on the screen. bustling city. it's a city on the make. nearly two decades since thend of reconstruction, a decade after the world's fair ce to town, which was a