The Drivers of Illiberalism

Welcome to Shield of the Republic, a podcast sponsored by the Bulwark and the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia and dedicated to the proposition articulated by Walter Littman during World War two. That a strong and balanced foreign policy is the necessary shield of our Democratic Republic. I’m Eric Edelman, counselor at the center for strategic and budgetary assessments. A Bulwark contributor and a nonresident fellow at the Miller Center. And I’m joined by my co conspirator in this enterprise, Elliot Cohen.

The Robert Ozgood professor of Strategy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington DC and the Arleigh Burke Chair in Strategy at the center for strategic and international studies. Cop summary. Oh,

well, thank you. I we had a joyous passover, Mike. Digestive system hasn’t quite recovered, but it was great being with the swarming children and grandchildren. And of course, wishing all our listeners who celebrate Easter that they had a wonderful holiday as well. It’s a real pleasure to introduce our guest this week, somebody that I’ve known for a very, very long time.

And This is Francis Fukia, Emma, who is the Olivier Navalini’s senior fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spoli Institute for International Studies. He also has a number of other titles, including professor, but I I’ll I’ll refrain from mentioning them all. Professor Fukuyama, as I said, is a longstanding friend of both of us. His written widely. He’s, of course, very very well known for his nineteen ninety two book, the end of history and the last man.

His most recent book, liberalism in its discontent, which was published in May twenty twenty two. He received a BA from Cornell, a PhD, from political science. I think the two of you cross paths at Yale, And I’m glad to say that he and I were colleagues for a decade at size. So I I wanna begin by welcoming you, Frank.

Thanks very much, Elliot. It’s a great pleasure to be with some old friends.

Well, at and it’s a great opportunity for us on shield to the Republic too. We occasionally delve down into the details because the details are important, including things like transition memorandum between one administration another. But here we we are dealing with one of the foremost public intellectuals of our time and it’s a great opportunity, I think, to talk about some of the larger issues at stake, which you’ve really written very eloquently about. Let me open up with a bit of a softball, Frank. I think in a number of articles, including one in the financial times, which I personally found quite compelling, you really make the case that the Ukraine war is about much more than even the critically important question of European security.

It’s part of a much larger contest that we’re involved in a much larger set of phenomena around liberalism. So I guess, I would ask you perhaps first for the benefit of our listeners define what you mean by liberalism or the liberal order, and then talk about the significance of Ukraine in that context.

Sure. So, liberalism means different things in different parts of the world. In the United States, it means you’re left of center in continental Europe. It means that you’re kind of center right. You’re interested in free markets.

You want to minimize state regulation. And I think that my definition of liberalism is broader and encompasses both of those

I

it mine doesn’t center around, you know, the size of the state. It’s really about the belief that all human beings have a certain base level of dignity that needs to be respected and recognized, and it’s recognized by governments that grant citizens rights. Rights to speak, the right to associate, the right to believe. And ultimately, you know, it comes to include the right to participate, have a sharing participation in self government. And it means that the power of the state needs to be limited.

Typically, the institutions that limit that power are things like constitutions, checks and balances against executive interference and the private lives of of citizens. And so a free society is one that preserves that sphere of autonomy based on a belief. It’s a moral belief that, you know, what makes us equal human beings is that power of choice that power to choose between, you know, right and wrong, good and evil. And that and that’s what a liberal society does. As opposed to, let’s say, one that is based on a particular religion or a particular ethnicity or race where one group of people is held to be of higher status than another.

And I think that’s really the kind of conflicts that we’re seeing right now where you have these assertions of for example, religious identity, like in India right now, under Prime Minister Modi, who’s taken a liberal Indian Republic established by Gandhi and Neru that is incredibly diverse, and he wants to now shift its self understanding to one that’s based on Hindu nationalism, which means that the two hundred million Muslims in the country really aren’t part of the the community. They’re excluded from that. Or you can have something like Putin’s under earning of Russian national identity, which is like a lot of national identities in the nineteenth century that you know, you can’t really be a Russian unless you’re dominating at least the weaker countries around your periphery. You can’t feel pride in yourself unless you’re recognized as a, you know, as a dominant great power. And both of those, I think, are incompatible with the part of liberalism that we see.

Now, there’s a difference between liberalism and democracy, and we typically speak of our regime and those in Western Europe, Japan, Korea as liberal democracies. The liberal part refers to that constraint on government power, on state power. The Democratic part refers to institutions like elections and accountability that make sure that the that what the government does reflects the Will Saletan many of the people that are citizens of the country as possible. I think that, you know, there are some countries like Russia and China that are neither democratic nor liberal. But they tend to attack the liberal part first.

They don’t like the constraints on power. And, you know, I think the most disturbing phenomenon of the last few years is the rise of illiberal populism, particularly in the United States. And so what populous tend to do is they say, well, I was elected in a free and fair election. And here are these judges, you know, media, legislators, you know, different obstacles to mine carrying out the will of the people. And so the first thing that they attack is the liberal part of liberal democracy using their legitimacy that comes from a democratic election to erode the constraints on power.

And that is what you’ve seen, you know, in Hungary and Turkey, in the United States, unfortunately, where, you know, Donald Trump, right, from the beginning, wanted to use the Justice Department as a way of getting at his enemies regardless of the fact that we we rely on an independent, you know, judiciary to make those sorts of decisions, and it really culminated with the attack on January sixth, you know, on the on the capital where he didn’t want to accept peaceful turnover of power. And so I think that, you know, shows the way that the attack from at least the populist side tends to focus on the liberal institutions in the first instance. But then once those are weakened, goes after the addic ones as well.

Frank, I wanna pull on that thread if I could for a bit about ill liberalism in in the United States. When you and I first met at Yale fifty years ago, I was studying part of the time with C. Van Woodward, the great historian of the American South, and You know, typically, people argued that in the United States, the conservative tradition to the degree that it existed really was nineteenth century liberalism, that because the United States had no aristocracy, we didn’t have the kind of conservatism that one saw in Europe that was wrapped up with Mona Charen aristocracy, landed, gentry, etcetera. But of course, there was this episode in the United States where some people argued that in fact, the founding was wrong, that Jefferson was wrong when he wrote all men or created equal, and that slavery was a positive good, which is why the confederacy went to war with with the North after Lincoln’s election. And I guess what bothers me is the rise of sort of this sort of neo confederate discussion that we have.

And the cult of confederate statues and base names and things like that. Am I wrong to be worried about that? Or is that a kind of sign of the illiberalism that’s arisen that you’ve been talking about? Well,

it is a it is a manifestation of that illiberalism. I think it’s always existed in the United States, but what has happened since two thousand sixteen is that it’s set out loud, much more explicitly and you saw that in the carrying of Confederate flags, you know, in in the capital on January sixth. So that’s one version of it. There’s a kind of eyebrow defense of illiberalism coming from like Patrick Denim, who aren’t so much interested in the racial, confederate, you know, angle, which is very very much American. I mean, it really comes out of America’s specific historical experience.

But, you know, somebody like DeNeen actually wants to roll things back prior to the enlightenment you know, he says we need

a

teleological understanding of our community that is essentially based in a single religious understanding of you know, the country. And in his case, it has to do with some version of conservative Catholicism. And so that’s a separate source of illiberalism on the right. But I think politically you know, they all merge. And and, you know, the big change that I would never in a million years have anticipated is this shift on the question of state power.

Because if you look back at twentieth century and even before that, you know, conservatism in the United States, it was essentially libertarian. It was all about wanting to prevent the federal government from interfering in the lives of its citizens. That’s what Reaganism was all about, you know, deregulation, privatization, and so forth. And in the last few years, that’s positions flipped completely so someone like Rhonda Santos actually wants to use state power to enforce, you know, his version of social conservatism. You know, Denim is perfectly happy in going after corporations because thinks that, you know, they’re too woke and and so forth.

And so the nature of American conservatism has actually it’s now, you know, we used to say that there’s a fundamental difference between European and American conservatism because European conservatism was status. It was this marriage of throne and altar, and we didn’t have that in the United States. But now we’re getting a version of it. You

know, although I, you know, I have to say, listen to the two of you, at least the two strands that you mentioned, they really don’t have any future. I mean, the the confederate statues are going down, not up. Nobody’s gonna rename army forts after Confederate generals. And, you know, the Catholic church isn’t where — Yeah. — where some of these very ultra conservative Catholics are.

I suppose my question though is a little bit different. And again, I want to internationalize it a little bit. This is happening in the United States. You you mentioned Modi in India, which is quite troubling, particularly for a country, which has as a history of sectarian violence. You have Victor Orban, you know, you have movements like this in France.

And other places. We see them as opposed to some extent in Israel. My question is, first, do you think all these are linked by something? Why now? Why now?

What explains this? And then the other topic I’ll eventually like us to get to is So, I mean, obviously, you should be worried because liberal democracy is always fragile at some level. But how worried should we be? I mean, can you make the case that actually the liberal democracies are showing quite remarkable resilience in a way Ukraine is a test of that. So that’s That’s a lot.

Let me take

take however much of that you want. I would throw my my friend, Tayyip Erdogan, into that group as well. Right.

Right. So, you know, there’s been a big debate over why this kind of populist nationalism has arisen at the present moment. And they’re basically two different strands of argument. So one is economic, you know, that this has to do with the kind of inequalities and society that emerged as a result of the kind of hyper globalization that we saw in the nineteen nineties and early two thousands. And, you know, a lot of people reserve the fact that they were left out of, you know, general press sparity that there’s a lot of oligarchs in every, you know, society that are walking off with the majority of the of the riches in those societies.

And then the cultural argument really has to do with, you know, this fundamental value and divides where there’s the view that liberalism or progressive thought has become increasingly hostile to a lot of traditional forms of society religious, you know, with lack of respect for people to follow religious traditions, but also national that they’re globalist, that they don’t believe in, you know, the national community and they aren’t loyal to it. Now I actually think that the cultural stuff is really what’s driving people to a much greater extent than the economic stuff. I mean, you just listen to the rhetoric of people on the right you know, if they really thought that the economic inequality was the issue, they should all be supporting Bernie Sanders or they should be porting, you know, traditional person on the left who wants more redistribution, bigger welfare state, more social protection But instead, it takes this right wing form of, you know, hostility to immigrants, a kind of narrowing of national identity or reraising of race and ethnicity is qualifications and that sort of thing. I think that you can actually combine the two however to say that first of all, they’re correlated.

Right? So if you are a working class person living in a rural community without a lot of economic opportunities over the last couple of decades, you also tend to be looked down upon by people like us. Right? Went to fancy universities, that live in big cities, that have really good jobs, really connected with a lot of global opportunities. And, you know, they they really resent that not because they’re starving necessarily or you know, economically destitute, but they don’t have respect.

And I think it’s that equality, inequality of respect that actually bothers people more. So I guess what I would say is that, you know, a lot of the fundamental drivers are the cultural cleavages that have opened up between different parts of the global sociology. You know, people that live in dense urban environments with high levels of education and people that live in more rural areas, you know, that that that that don’t have it. But that the timing was probably driven by the economy. You know, the financial crisis, I think, for example, in two thousand eight, actually was much more consequential than we realized at the time because that convinced a whole lot of people that the whole economy has stacked against them.

And, you know, that it’s the elites that have been making off with all the, you know, the benefits and and and they have not.

But

what about – what explains the kind of the synchronization of this globally? The fact that Is it just a set of coincidences? Or I mean, two thousand eight was a global event. I understand, but that that’s one of the things I find so stark

I think technology actually does play an important role in all of this. Right? That it used to take a while for ideas to seep around different parts of the world at this at the speed of newspapers. But, you know, today, it’s instantaneous and it’s not just that information moves more quickly. You know, what the Internet did was to destroy all of the gatekeepers.

So, you know, elites had much more influence in shaping public discourse than I think we realize or give them credit for when we were younger. You know, there I don’t know how many decades that was, but

let’s

say thirty, forty years ago, you know, you had three television Bulwark. You had a handful of major newspapers. There’s much more trust in governments and and what they said. And so there was a lot of elite control over information, and the Internet completely destroyed that. So anybody can say anything they want and we used to think that was a great thing, but it turns out it’s got some real downsides because it can be weaponized, it can be used to, you know, send around a lot of misinformation or even if it’s not information, you know, people no longer trust a kind of handful of sources the way that they used to, and therefore, they don’t have a common basis.

You

know, I I would say that the biggest problem socially that every country faces is declining trusted institutions and that’s backed up by a ton of, you know, empirical data

on

you know, whether they people trust the government, corporations, labor unions, political parties, all of that stuff has declined in virtually every country. And I do think that, you

know,

it it is a lot of a lot of that is based on technological change. I think, for example, you take the Catholic church. Right? Have priests been abusing a young people in the Catholic church? Or is this a new phenomenon?

Course not. Right? They’re doing it for centuries. But right now, you’ve got a you’ve got a media universe in which You can’t keep this stuff hidden. And so a lot of it comes out and people see how the sausage is made and they say, the sausage factory is completely corrupt, but it’s not a new phenomenon.

It’s it’s something that actually, you know, had always existed, but we’re just more aware of it now.

So I I mean, are we doomed? Or will climate change get us first?

That’s my question. Well, you know, all technological disruptions have eventually, you know, there’s this arms race that goes on between the disruption and then the society’s effort to control and regulate it. And, you know, this was true. I mean, the printing press was hugely disruptive. Right?

You had all these European wars of religion after the protest and reformation that were the result of, you know, and that combined with the printing press was another early version of this kind of technological empowerment of alternative narratives. And so I do think that we will probably come up with ways of restoring, you know, the credibility of certain you know, institutions, you you kinda have to. Right? Because if anything goes in terms of information, then people are not gonna get vaccinated, and they’re gonna do really self destructive things. So there’s a certain self interest in that.

The trouble is that, you know, there’s a lot of other technological changes that are all queued up just waiting to hit us and the ability to adapt fast enough. You know, like the fakes right now. I’ve got a number of CS students that are involved in, you know, working on different aspects of AI. A lot of them are just scared of shitless because they can see what this stuff will do you know, you think that people don’t trust institutions now. In another five years, anybody is gonna be able to go on the Internet, use one of these tools to come up with a completely fake video of anyone saying anything, you know.

And so how do you restore trust in that kind of world? Well, I think it can ultimately be done. You know, there’s authentication technologies. But, again, it is an arms race and it just takes time for the the forces of order to, you know, catch up to the forces of disorder.

Frank, you you’ve written that the Russian attack on Ukraine, you know, sort of a premeditated war of aggression may actually lead to a kind of resurgence of lower case l liberalism around the world. Could you for our listeners, spell out why you think that is and and what evidence do you see that that’s actually happening? I mean, this is a way of getting, I guess, Elliot’s earlier question about the prospects for liberal democracy?

Well, so liberalism has certain disadvantages. You know, the the whole doctor in a rose because people realized that basing a society around a single strong set of ideas about what the good final human good is, was dangerous. That’s a kind of religious, religiously defined society. And so the early Liberals said, look, we’re gonna disagree about those final goods, but we’re gonna agree on a framework of tolerance so that we can believe what we want to but we’re not gonna impose our view of the good life

on

other people. And, you know, this is fantastically successful. Doctrine that, you know, has spread all over the world, but it has certain limitations because people really do want to live in you know, a strongly bonded community where everybody is pulling in the same direction and has basically the same culture and the same, you know, set of beliefs. And so I think that the real, you know, the the one of the most powerful arguments in favor of liberalism is alternatives. You know, if you if you live in a strongly bonded community, it’s intolerant.

You get violations of people’s rights domestically, and they also oftentimes tend to be very aggressive internationally. But the thing is that you oftentimes don’t appreciate the virtues of liberalism until you’ve experienced in liberal society. So, you know, we’ve gone through several phases of this. The first Liberals emerged after, you know, the peace of this failure after hundred fifty years of continuous European religious warfare. And, you know, religion was replaced by nationalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the major dividing forces,

and

you fight two big world wars, kill millions of people. And in nineteen forty five, everybody says, oh, well, maybe that wasn’t so great. Maybe we ought to try liberalism as an alternative and try to tune back some of these out of control Jonathan Last. And, you know, even in Eastern Europe, you know, you had an experience of living in under communism, in Poland, in Hungary, in, you know, many parts of the former Soviet Union, and people really didn’t like it. I’m not sure that liberal democracy is universal, but dislike of living under an authoritarian dictatorship, you know, there are very few people that really love that.

And so you had this phenomenon that after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the former Soviet Union, You had an early generation of people that experienced communism directly and they knew how bad it was. And they wanted to join the year American Union, you know, use liberal rule of law as a framework for their societies. But now time has gone on. A whole generation has passed. A lot of those people have gotten old.

In

Poland, you know, only a small fraction of the population has actually lived under communism. And so they attempted to kind of take the liberal presubpositions of European Union membership for granted, and you say, well, we want something more. You know, we think Brussels is the big tyrant. You know, it’s not the local communist party. It’s it’s these horrible bureaucrats in in Brussels.

And so, you know, it’s that generational turnover that I think makes people forget what it’s really like to live in illiberal society. And now we’ve had, you know, actually several generations of that in the United States and in Western Europe, in many countries. And so people can you know, fantasize about living under a more tightly bonded society in which, you know, like in Poland, the Catholicism is more, you know, prominent or or or you know, nationalism means more, and they forget, you know, what that was like. So that’s all a big wind up to saying, yes, I do think that when a clearly liberal society gets up and invades a liberal one and, you know, tens of thousands of people get killed and have their houses blown up and their children, you know, kidnapped and so forth. It is a reminder a kind of vicarious reminder of, you know, why liberalism might be a better alternative than a than a authoritarian society.

You

know, just a footnote on that. I think one of the things that is sometimes not stressed enough when we talk about Ukraine is it it’s quite remarkable the way at which It is a liberal democratic policy with with lots of problems to be sure. But, you know, take just the the minority that I suppose I probably care about more than more than others. You know, when I’ve heard arguments with Israeli friends about Russia, Ukraine, I say, k? Where’s the chief rabbi of Ukraine?

Answer you know, he’s having meetings with general solution a and, you know, giving him gifts for Passover and so on. And where’s the chief rabbi of Moscow? And the answer is he’s sitting in Tel Aviv because he he had to flee. I mean, it is, you know, with all of its undoubted faults, it is quite remarkable that it is a kind of liberal society. And I think one of the ways in and and certainly has a liberal conception of citizenship.

And I do think that’s one of the ways in which there’s something profoundly inspiring about the Ukrainian story, but there’s it’s also why if they win and that requires us putting a lot of muscle behind them, their win will really be quite significant and it’ll it’ll remind people of a lot of things.

You know, I spent a lot of time in Ukraine over the past eight years because beginning in two thousand fourteen, my center, the center on democracy development and the rule of

law,

began running a bunch of leadership programs targeted at at Ukrainians. And so we did six or seven courses where we went there. We invited a lot of them to stand for some of them for a whole academic year, some for a very intensive summer program. So we got, like, three hundred graduates of these different programs in Ukraine right now. And, you know, through that experience, I mean, that’s part of the reason I’ve been so confident in their ability to beat the Russians because you really do have a whole generation of younger Ukrainians that are very pro European I mean, they’re not just pro European.

They’re European. You know, they they have absorbed European values. They want to live in a liberal society. I’ll give you a couple of other examples apart from the chief rabbi. The person that led the maid on uprising is mustafa Nayim.

He’s an old friend of mine. He came through one of our Stanford programs, but he was a journalist that really told everybody to gather in in the maidan to oppose, you know, the the the previous government’s turn towards Russia. He’s in Afghan. He was born in Afghanistan. He came to Ukraine as an eight year old.

He speaks perfect Ukrainian. And he’s like one of their biggest civic leaders. Everybody in the country knows who he is. Or if you take the Crimean Tatars, you know, they are a very persecuted minority that Stalin deported to Siberia. They came back after Stalin left power.

But they’ve been under terrible pressure after the Russians took over Crimea in two thousand fourteen, and they love Ukraine. You know? And the Ukrainians, you know. So, I mean, I’ve been to a celebration of, you know, the Crimean Tata National Day in Kiev you know, that was attended by a lot of non Muslim, you know, Ukrainians. And so it’s a tolerant society.

I just remember walking around you know, in the maidan thinking to myself, this is a free society. Any Ukrainian can say anything they goddamn, please, critical of the government. You know, and there’s so many countries in the neighborhood where that’s just not possible.

You know, one of the ironies, I think, Frank, of this conflict is, of course, that the Russians constantly harp on, you know, Stephen Bond era and the supposed fascists and Nazis in Ukraine, when the sort of ideologues who Putin has relied on, contemporaries like Alexander Dougan or past ideologues like Ivan Illian, you know, are explicitly fascist. I mean, in in their writings. And somehow, this hasn’t really, I don’t think, percolated completely through to the public in either Europe or the United States that this is really what we’re what we’re seeing here. And, you know, we had a previous show in which we talked with our friend Constance of Stilson Mueller about the argument at Hitler, Ms. Leo Strauss.

You know, talked about it. But in this instance, you know, this is really pretty much an explicitly fascist regime, and I’d you know, I’m not using the word lightly. And the rhetoric you see on Russian state TV, for instance, is really genocidal and eliminationist. Is there a way do you think that we should, you know, be trying to get this, you know, perspective on this struggle kind of more public attention?

I I agree with you conceptually that Russia has become a fascist regime. The trouble is that the word fascist has just gotten to completely devalue over the years. I basically, anybody you really don’t like, you call them a fascist because that’s the only moniker that virtually everybody agrees is bad. Even calling somebody a communist, you know, there’s still people that like communism,

but you

know, hardly anybody likes fascism. So it’s just just become a term of abuse. And I just think that restoring it to its earlier, more specific meaning is kind of an uphill struggle. So, you know, you gotta come up with a new understanding about why Russia is as bad as it is because I don’t think it’s hard to do. They’re really bad.

But

can I ask a a different kind of question? So I just dug up one of my favorite quotes from George Orwell. And this is really to ask the question in the other way, which is what is it that Liberals, if you will, progressives if you prefer, don’t get about the authoritarians. And it’s something he wrote in April nineteen forty, where he says that nearly all western thoughts since the last war, certainly all progressive thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind, he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort safety short working borders hygiene birth control and in general common sense.

They also at least intermittently want struggle and self sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags, and loyalty parades. I’m almost done here. Where socialism and even capitalism in a more gretching way have said to people I offer you a good time. Hitler has said to them, I offer you struggle, danger, and death. And as a result result, a whole nation flings itself at his feet.

And, you know, I guess, the the the thought that occurs to me is, there is a problem on the kind of liberal or progressive side not understanding the force of some of the things that Putin appeals to, or Xi Jinping in a different way, or Tayyip Erdogan, or, you know, you name your favorite authoritarian. And, you know, the the question I think has to arise at our time does the liberal side have what it takes to successfully oppose these folks? And I’m just put a finer point on

it.

You

know, in Ukraine because they’ve been invaded and because of their history, loads of people willing to fight and risk their lives for the way of life they have.

You

know,

when you conduct similar polls in the United States, of course, the test hasn’t come. It’s not clear that people would be willing to make those kinds of sacrifices for the way of life that all of us would prefer. How do how do you think about that?

Well, I I wouldn’t be that pessimistic. So if I can toot my own horn in the last couple of chapters of the end of history and the last memory about exactly this issue. Right? What’s the last what’s Nietzsche’s last man? The last man is that person described by Orwell who’s just interested in comfort and security and has no higher aspirations.

And, you know, the argument was that if this is the product of a liberal capitalist society, then, you know, you’ve got a big problem. But there’s this thing called Thumos, this sense of pride and, you know, demand for dignity that is based on your ability to take risks, to struggle, to aim for something higher than your own, you know, comfort and security and that this is one of the downsides of liberalism itself that it didn’t give you these opportunities for that kind of struggle. So there’s several alternatives. One is that, you know, liberal society can find a small war every now and then and get the juices flowing as not a very safe alternative in the modern world, but I think that the thing that we don’t appreciate is

that

liberalism itself can become an aspiration when it’s taken away and that people can die for their freedom. I think that, you know, it’s complicated as both of you know well what motivates soldiers to fight, and it’s oftentimes not any high principle, but it’s just for their buddies. But it was the case that, you know, Americans regarded you know, World War two is what Bison Howard called a crusade in Europe. Right? It was a crusade for freedom.

Around the world. And I think that that can be very inspirational to a lot of people, particularly when their own freedom is, you know, is at risk.

So let me use that in a way to segue the one of the issues that both Eric and I want to ask you about, all true. But of course, that was also the time when the universities of this country in particular produced people who understood that. Whatever their political views were, it’s what was Yale’s unofficial motto in the nation’s service or something like that? You’re both different times products of Yale. And I wonder, you know, most of our leadership class comes from are elite universities.

I think that’s just a fact that may very well change. I would probably prefer it if it did. What are the universities producing by way of the kinds of people who who have to be in the forefront or should be in the forefront? Those kinds of things. I

have a very specific anecdote about that change. So when World War one broke out, Dean Atchison was an undergraduate at Yale. And if you read his autobiography, he says his entire class then quit school and they volunteered to go into the army. And I would guarantee that, you know, even after September eleventh or something, that’s sort of the whole class undergraduate class at Yale did not do that. Right?

So norms in that regard have changed. In a way, you know, it’s actually quite rational because I think that, you know, the result of the experience of the first world war you had an entire generation of British young people that were, you know, red cigarettes soon and, you know, I mean, just were very cynical, you know, claimed that they wouldn’t fight for king and country. But then, you know, less than generation later when they were called on to do that. They they they volunteered and they fought because,

you

know, the specific a call to arms was different, and the threat was certainly a very real one. So I think it’s a little bit hard to say. You know, I do regret a lot of the changes that have taken place in higher education. You know, Alan blew my mentor wrote about this in the closing of the American mind, but, you know, essentially, western civilization core courses shut down in the nineteen eighties. This certainly happened at Stanford when Jesse Jackson came to the school and led demonstration chanting, hey, hey, Ho Ho, Western culture is gonna go.

And so, you know, that kind of grounding and and, you know, just the the requirement that everybody learn as a matter of citizenship, how America and institutions Bulwark. That’s all disappeared. And that’s bad. I would like to see that, you know, return I don’t know that that automatically translates though into an unwillingness to actually, you know, meet the call under the right circumstances because I do think that people do have a certain sense of pride and they do wanna have things struggle over. And if you remember, just the number of American flags that were placed in vehicle back windows in New York City, after September eleventh.

You know, it was a very brief moment that that unfortunately got involved in other, I mean, issues. But, you know, that that I think that spark still is there, and I I wouldn’t say that because of the changes in our educational system, it’s gone forever.

You know, I I comment this maybe from a slightly different angle than Elliott does. I mean, I look at sort of the populist leaders who have emerged in the US, for instance.

And

you look like some let someone like Josh Holly. You know, educated at Stanford and Yale. Ted Cruz, Princeton Harvard, Ron DeSantis, you know, Yale Harvard. You know, it seems that the benefits of a liberal education have been put to the surface of ill liberalism somehow. And you know, I remember, you know, distinctly frank, you know, meeting you fifty years ago when along with the late Donald Kagan and Al Bernstein, we were busy trying to preserve the right of speakers with whom we may not have agreed, like William Shockley to speak and be heard at Yale that ultimately led to the Woodward report that, you know, was a, you know, hallmark of the university’s commitment to free speech and and open debate.

And yet today, I mean, you know that is, you know, honored more in the breach than than the observation at at Yale for instance. And you see on both right and left this desire to cancel or sensor speech with which, you know, you don’t agree. I mean, I know at Stanford, there recently was an incident at the law school. And then you look at, you know, Ron DeSantis and what he’s trying to do at new university in Florida. I mean, what do you make of all that?

So I think that this is something that kinda comes and goes and cycles. And so you had a lot of cancellation back in the nineteen eighties. That’s what prompted Blum to write the book he did. And then 90s were kind of quiescent, but it’s now come back in a in a big way. But I think that the current cycle can also be defeated.

You know, if you follow the so what happened at Stanford was obviously, just completely unacceptable shouting down this conservative federal judge that came to visit. But, you know, the the dean of the law school wrote a very good reply to her community saying that this was unacceptable behavior. They didn’t quite fire this DI associate team that supported the students. But she’s put on indefinite leave. I don’t think she’s gonna come back to the school anytime soon.

And

you

know, the school has now put its institutional weight behind more University of Chicago, like free speech And so I think that it’s important not to give up in these struggles. Right? It’s a kind of ongoing It’s an ongoing fight over, you know, social norms and what is acceptable. What scary is with the scientists, he’s actually trying to put the power of the state behind some of these illiberal rules. On the left, That’s it it’s tended to happen more, you know, in in in civil society rather

than

actually using state power. They’re both dangerous they’re both dangerous, but I think they can both be opposed.

Yeah. You know, I I mean, on this way, I suppose I’m a little bit more optimistic than I used to be if only because there have been more and more university presidents who’ve supported things like the Chicago rules. And Chicago is, I think, the clearest articulation of the standards of free speech that I think we would all agree with I have to say at my own university, John Hopkins, has a has one that’s pretty good. What I worry about is in a way less the formal structures of the university than the social pressure. So there was a very interesting op ed, I think, and then maybe in the New York Times by a a student at Stanford law school saying, you know, the the one thing you don’t wanna do in any of the kind of case discussions they have is take the side of the prosecutor.

Yeah. Because that means you’re a bad person. Or to take of something very different more on the left, this recent trend of bolderizing children’s classics. Because they have expressions that, you know, you don’t want the kids to see, whether it’s doctor Seuss or Royal Doll, who’s a pretty reprehensible guy I have to say. Or for that matter, Mark Twain.

And I you know, the problem is that technology makes it a lot easier to do that. Than once it was. And so it seems to me, this is a series of battles on a very broad front that people will be waiting for some time to come.

Yeah. Well, that’s true. I mean, but that same op ed that that law school student wrote Also argue that the actual number of left wing radicals is actually quite small. And that there is a kind of silent majority that is just intimidated, and they don’t want to speak up. And so I think that and that’s preeminently a situation where a little bit of leadership can actually shift the overall tone of the school It is disturbing, though, that so much of the pressure for cancellation and illiberalism is actually not coming from the faculty in the administrative.

It’s coming from the students themselves that We had a case of this Intelliorite Association that got written up in compact, you know, one of our summer programs was taken over by just one young woman that was really very radical in stuff, and everybody at that age is so impressionable that they’ll simply go along with whatever authority figure is there. But it also means that if authority figures start exercising a little bit of authority in the other direction, maybe, you know, that’s something that can be beaten back. Yeah.

For my own own experiences, Dean, I I tend to think that’s absolutely

right. Frank, let me well, we’re on the subject of the academy. Move beyond just the free speeches who’s more to the sort of state of kind of the human sciences, if if you will, I think once upon a time, you once wrote that academic political science had not really proven many non trivial propositions. What’s your sense of the state of sort of international relations, political science history as disciplines today. I mean, all of us, I think, grew up in those disciplines care deeply about them.

There’s certainly been no shortage of folks in in the international relations world making the argument for appeasement of Putin arguing that it no. It was the US that actually forced Putin to invade Ukraine, etcetera? I mean, what what should our listeners make of the state of the academy in these disciplines?

Well, I think you’ve got to distinguish. First of all, mainstream political science and IR are actually quite separate. You know, my problem with academic political science is methodological that it’s really become completely dominated by economists and economic methods. This is something I actually didn’t realize until I got to stand like everybody in the Stanford political science department right now is doing a thesis based on a randomized controlled experiment, which means that they can’t really address any kind of big, important, interesting questions. And they’re kind of made themselves irrelevant to, you know, to policy questions.

In IR, I’m not so sure that the that the discipline as a whole is pro proven or anything like I mean, you just got this one loud mouth, you know, our friend John Mirshimer that’s managed to parlay, you know, this, I think, ridiculous position into career, you know, speaking everywhere. But I actually wonder how many people in the field actually would agree with that as opposed to taking a, you know, more balanced and more early repugnant

position.

And IR doesn’t suffer from the same kind of

methodological

disease that I think a lot of other forms a political science do. History is You know, your field is is a big problem because it’s impossible to get a job, you know, as a professional historian. And I think that people simply do not learn enough history. I I see this among the under graduates I’ve taught who just don’t know basic stuff about twentieth century, twenty first century history, you know. They’re all born after September eleventh and, you know, I think, actually, a lot of them to the extent they actually do know anything above the world or the United States.

It’s from their high school AP history courses, but they have not been given that in most undergraduate universe. Now I do think there is a difference between elite universities and, you know, kind of middle tier like state, you know, I just did a lecture series out in Indiana, spent a week in Bloomington. And I think that, you know, there is different set of schools that haven’t quite fallen into the kind of elite school trap. Are not quite as politically correct and so forth. But I do think that overall, you know, it’s but the The ability of the discipline, academic discipline to actually contribute to solving real world political problems is a lot less than it was I THINK WHEN WE WERE IN THE SCHOOL?

WELL,

I JUST ON HISTORY, I REMEMBER A CONVERSATION WITH DAVID KENITY, ONE OF THE GREAT HISTORIANS AT STANFFORD. And he was promoting the fact that enrollments in the history department just collapsed. That at one point, it was — Mhmm. — I believe the largest concentration at Stanford. And now it’s one of the smaller ones that has partly to do with tech and

computer science and so forth. It is not just at Stanford earlier.

It’s not it’s it’s true at Hopkins. I mean, Hopkins, you know, in some ways founded through modern history in the United States, and it’s a tiny department in terms of concentrators. So I think there’s there’s kind of a deeper rot in some of these disciplines. Unfortunately, one of the things that’s I find very interesting. I’m associated with a couple of historical museums.

And in some ways, they try to pick up some of the slack to include increasingly offering courses and even degrees will be I mean, I suppose one of the reasons why, like you, Frank, I’m very cautiously optimistic is I I think, you know, for every action, there’s a comparable reaction. You know, if there’s suppression of free speech, then you get an organization like fire that the foundation for individual rights of expression, I guess, was just taken off as doing what the ACL used to do. And same thing with, you know, some of these historical museums and alternative institutions. So I I And I tend to assume that a lot of those responses, not all of them, but a lot of them will be healthy ones. Howard

Bauchner: Yeah, well, I think that it’s important not to give up prematurely, you know. People don’t fight back for principles like freedom of speech. We won’t have freedom of speech. Yeah.

Amen. We’re coming to the end of our time, but, Frank, I don’t wanna let you go without asking you to enlighten our listeners on something they probably haven’t thought about a lot, which is what’s going on in Georgia, and I don’t mean the state of Georgia in the United States. But

Yeah. That’s bad enough. But

But in the in the in the caucuses where you’ve just written for foreign affairs about the situation of the Georgian Dream Government, and the former president, Misha Sokashvili, who also was governor under president Piotr Poroshenko of Ukraine of ODESA, languishing now in a jail cell under this government. You argued that it’s time for the US to get tough on the Georgian government. Can you kind of lay out that?

Yeah. Oh, sure. So Georgia in the two thousands was one of the star transitioners because under Sokoshvili, the third president after independence, they cleaned up their police, they reduced levels of corruption and they improve government services. And so they’re one of the few really bright spots in terms of a transition out of communism. But they went too far and they got replaced by the Georgian Dream government, which wasn’t really a mass movement.

It was a creature of this one oligarch. So, you know, Ukraine has many oligarchs Georgia has one oligarch named Bucina Iwanyi, who was briefly prime minister, but then he realized that he didn’t like the publicity, and he could manipulate the government from the shadows. So he stepped down, he funds the Georgian Dream party they can’t do anything without his permission. And he is basically pro Moscow. He made all of his money in Moscow.

He continues to have, you know, strong ties with many people there. And as a result, Georgia, which has got a very anti Russian population. You know, in two thousand eight, they had a war with Russia, and the Russians ended up sitting on twenty percent of Georgia’s territory. It’s a small country to begin with. So that’s, you know, that’s really important to them.

And so there’s no popular sympathy for Russia in that country. And yet because of the Vonage Vili, you know, they have not joined the sanctions regime There’s a lot of sanctions busting that’s going on because they’re secretly helping the Russians to get access to you and other kinds of goods that are not supposed to be flowing into Russia. They’re hosting, you know, gigantic numbers of Russians who left Russia to escape being drafted, but that’s also screwing up the domestic politics of of the country and we just haven’t been paying attention. And so, you know, I think that they’ve been, for example, denying healthcare to Sockosh really, who went back to the country, he’s ailing and he may well die in prison. And I think the Georgian Dream government is perfectly happy with that because What’s gonna happen is the EU is gonna say this is an abuse of human rights and you’ve applied to get into the EU and forget about it.

It’s not gonna happen. But that’s exactly what Yvonne Schvi wants. He doesn’t want alignment with the EU. And so he’s actually deliberately staging these human rights violations to prevent that from happening. And so, you know, what I argued along with my collaborator, Nino, Evgenitsa and Tbilisi, you know, what we’ve argued for is that we shouldn’t punish the whole country by blocking their EU accession.

We should continue to push for it. What we should do is sanction yvonne is reeling. He is worse than many of the Russian oligarchs that are

currently

on the sanctions list. And it wouldn’t be that hard to add him because he’s got a lot of assets that are actually in Europe, maybe even in the United States that, you know, would really hurt him. And why we haven’t done this yet? I I really don’t understand,

but

it’s something that I think we, you know, we need to get busy on.

I wonder sometimes if we tassetly

are

inclined to accept the Russians’ assessment of their neighbors. And I mean, I think that was a large part of the problem with Ukraine that we know at some level kind of bought off and the idea that yeah, they’re just a different flavor of Russian when they were anything but

Yeah. I don’t know. Anybody that spent any time in Georgia. And again, this is another country that I’ve been to a lot in the last few years would know that they, you know, it’s hard to find another more anti Russian country

— I’m sure.

— given, you know, their their history if anyone in in the administration thinks that they’re really being very foolish,

Frank, we could go on, I think, for hours. You’ve been very generous with your time, but we’re gonna have to bring this episode of shield of the public to a close. But thank you so much for for joining us. It’s been great to see you even if it’s only in two dimensions.

Yep. Oh, good. I

think you’re gonna be in Washington soon, so I hope maybe get a glimpse of you in person. But thanks so much. Thank you, Frank. Yeah.

Thanks very much for having

me.