December 10, 2024
By Fred Bauer
On the morning of October 28, 2024, a prankster announced the death of the distinguished political scientist Francis Fukuyama—only for Fukuyama himself to explain to the world that he was still quite alive.
In a recent Financial Times column reflecting on Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election, Fukuyama himself proclaims an ideological death. Trump’s win, he writes, is “a decisive rejection by American voters of liberalism and the particular way that the understanding of a ‘free society’ has evolved since the 1980s.” Yet this death, too, might be greatly exaggerated, at least in a sense. While the global rise of populism might have shattered an increasingly brittle ideological variant of “liberalism,” it has also revealed how constricted that ideology was. A broader—and maybe even weirder—horizon of freedom waits.
Since 2016, a purported crisis of liberalism has become a cottage industry for intellectuals and academics. Fukuyama’s 1992 blockbuster The End of History and the Last Man established him as one of the most-cited analysts of big-picture trends in modern politics, so his discussion in this new column is worth considering as representative of these bigger debates. Here is his definition of “classical liberalism”: “Classical liberalism is a doctrine built around respect for the equal dignity of individuals through a rule of law that protects their rights, and through constitutional checks on the state’s ability to interfere with those rights.” For the moment, let’s leave aside whether this framework of the rule of law and checks on central authority can be solely identified with classical liberalism.
Fukuyama rightly discusses the way that technological change, neoliberal economics, and what many later observers would call “woke” identity politics have become engines of political disruption. Fukuyama calls these “distortions” of liberalism. However, it’s not clear that many of the populist actions that Fukuyama warns against actually aim at classical liberalism as he defines it. (Some would deviate from a version of classical liberalism that recommends a laissez-faire approach to economics, but that is not Fukuyama’s sense here.)
Take the three areas of trade, deportations, and international relations. Whatever their prudential merits, many policies proposed by American populists are distinct from theoretical challenges to the rule of law or checks and balances. Fukuyama warns against tariffs, and certain tariffs may indeed be poorly thought out. But a tariff agenda is entirely compatible with “liberal” constitutional democracy. The central gambit of the Union during the Civil War was to take vigorous action to affirm the “equal dignity of individuals,” but the same men who financed the Union Army also levied high tariffs.
Similar points apply to immigration and international relations. Enforcing immigration law—including by conducting deportations—is in no way at odds with living in a constitutional republic with robust civil liberties. Dwight Eisenhower did not signal an absolute break with liberalism when he conducted mass deportations in the 1950s. Whatever the benefits of the current international security order, prudential claims on behalf of those benefits should be distinguished from assertions that liberalism requires support for various specific international institutions. Setting policy merits aside, it’s possible to believe in constitutional self-governance while also opposing more aid for Ukraine.
More to the point, the international security order was already undermining itself prior to Trump. It was not Donald Trump but Bill Clinton and George W. Bush who championed the complete integration of the People’s Republic of China into the international trading order, which has given the Chinese Communist Party incredible leverage over American as well as global supply chains. From the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan to the Israel-Hamas war, the Biden administration has presided over growing international instability. American support for Ukraine has put a spotlight on how withered the national defense-industrial base is. The United States now risks shortages and limited supplies in key munitions and defense technologies. Almost three years into the Ukraine war, U.S. policymakers have yet to remedy the situation. Despite the growing challenges to American security interests, the Biden White House projected that the United States would spend less as a percentage of its economy on defense over the next decade.
After the succession of strategic debacles under Trump’s 21st-century peers in the presidency, there’s a potent argument to be made that a Jacksonian rebalancing could actually help put American foreign-policy commitments on firmer ground. A United States that regains credibility in projecting power abroad while also recognizing the limits of that power-projection in the 2020s could strengthen—not vitiate—international alliances. In current circumstances, pushing for NATO partners to invest more in their militaries is not isolationism but prudent internationalism.
While I think that the policy areas that Fukuyama highlights are distinct from ideological disputes about liberalism as such, this foreign-policy dynamic does reveal something relevant to both broader policy and theoretical questions. Just as a Jacksonian pivot could help preserve elements of the international architecture, populist turns on various issues might help address the destabilization introduced by populism’s opponents. As Trump’s own political career shows, public anxiety about immigration is rocket-fuel for outsider politicians. Populist upheavals in the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and elsewhere are closely tied to immigration issues. Efforts to regain control of the border—instead of detonating those controls, as Biden did—are an essential part of addressing that public anxiety. Few things have been as destabilizing in many Western nations as the adoption of a radical form of identity politics by progressive elites. The recent impromptu pogrom on the streets of Amsterdam and the antisemitic demonstrations that have sprung up in the United States demonstrate how a politics of identity-based grievance can corrode the pluralism and respect for minorities that liberalism supposedly ensures.
One might add that it was Kamala Harris—not Donald Trump—who ran on a platform of nuking the legislative filibuster in the United States Senate and packing the nation’s courts on a party-line basis. In its war against populism, the American establishment increasingly adopted a state-of-exception politics: sowing doubt about the integrity of American elections, mobilizing the federal bureaucracy against the elected government, unveiling novel theories of legal prosecution for Trump and his allies, and embracing a cultural “reckoning” that dissolved pluralism in the acid of vitriolic self-righteousness.
It is thus a mistake to confuse the American establishment displaced by Trump with liberalism itself, and the inherited constitutional liberties of the American republic also resist being reduced to some thin ideology of liberalism per se. Traditions regarding the rule of law, the testimony of the individual conscience, freedom of speech, and checks on centralized power long predate John Locke and John Stuart Mill. The lineage of those freedoms in American life is much broader—including traditions of civic solidarity, habits of religious worship, the frontier aversion to control, and revolutionary hopes for public reason.
After the Second World War, a certain ideological form of liberalism attempted to extirpate many of these cultural sources from American life—to purge religion from the public sphere, to “unshackle” the individual from the bonds of family and duty, and so forth. Beyond proving too thin, this secular doctrine of liberalism has shown itself to be vulnerable to the managerial will to power. The fact that many American elites put “religious freedom” or “free speech” in sneer quotes is testament to the way that a compulsive secularism can make war on political pluralism. Relying on an alliance between bureaucrats and the commanding heights of the digital economy, the technocratic quest to combat purported “misinformation” during the past decade itself has posed a grave danger to freedom of expression and intellectual integrity in public debates.
A technocratic version of the end of history, in which political questions would increasingly be routed through the citadels of international “expertise,” was digging its own grave long before Donald Trump seized the national stage. Trump’s rise was the whirlwind—not the cause of its decline. Moreover, this model of politics was increasingly growing estranged from conventional liberties. In the United Kingdom, for instance, local councils have begun arresting and fining people for silently praying outside abortion clinics. Canada’s assisted-suicide regime has promoted the liquidation of the poor and the disabled. Populism is far from the worst foe of fundamental human liberties and dignity.
And it might not even be a foe at all. A pivot toward place and nation could actually be a way to reinforce some of the structural elements of a more robust political liberty. Reasserting control of the border, promoting the institution of the family, and checking a rapacious ideology of identity would actually help restore some of the underlying conditions of a healthy and free society. Renewing the American defense-industrial base increasingly seems like a national-security necessity.
Whether American policymakers will be able to rise to this challenge remains, of course, an open question. The fierce negative polarization of the American political class as well as its incentives for performative outrageousness cut against it. Still, the decisive victory of Trump and his endurance as a political figure signal the need for new thinking about politics on the smaller and grander scales. Responding to that challenge would not be the death of liberties but a revitalization of the American Republic and a renewal of the promise of freedom.
Fred Bauer is a writer in New England.