 Good evening to you all. And if you're in California. Good morning. My name is party Murphy. I'm a senior fellow in the Institute of International and European Affairs. We have a very extraordinary interesting presentation this afternoon by Professor Francis Fukuyama. Before we get onto this, you will allow me perhaps to mention some housekeeping items. First of all, the presentation by Frank Fukuyama will be approximately 20 to 25 minutes after which there will be questions and he will answer them. The whole event is on the record. You are invited to pose your questions by means of the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen and to pose these questions at any time during the event. That's to say, even while that Professor Fukuyama speaking. If you wish to tweet on this, you can use the handle at IEA. And finally, the whole event is being live streamed on YouTube. So much for the housekeeping. I could say perhaps that Professor Fukuyama is the last man that needs introduction to anybody. He has for 33 years been elaborating and presenting the big ideas that subtend our political world. And his contributions have been extraordinarily fruitful and stimulating, I say not least to me personally. I love these big ideas that Professor Fukuyama brings into the discussion. The starting thesis of his presentation, liberalism for the 21st century, as given in his book, liberalism and its discontents, is that liberalism is under stress and under severe stress in the world today. This was said before the event of the 24th of February that we all have in mind. So one can imagine that it can be seen as even under most stress today. So Frank, you have the floor to make a presentation and welcome once again. Okay, thank you very much, Porto. I really appreciate the invitation by the IEA to have me speak. I'm sorry that I can't be with you in person in Dublin, maybe sometime in the future. So let me talk about one big idea which is the idea of liberalism. I need to begin by defining what I mean by liberalism. It has a left of center meaning in the United States. It has a slightly right of center meaning in much of continental Europe. I have a broad definition of liberalism. Liberalism is a doctrine that was developed in the middle of the 17th century at the end of Europe's wars of religion in which a number of early liberal thinkers basically said we need to lower the aspirations of politics not to seek after the good life as defined by a particular religious doctrine but simply to protect life itself by cultivating a virtue of tolerance whereby at that time Protestants and Catholics but today maybe Russians and Ukrainians could live together peacefully, allowing each to individually choose what to believe, what to speak, and the like. It believes that all human beings are endowed with a certain basic level of dignity that is equal among all those human beings and it is institutionalized through a rule of law by constitutional provisions that prevent the excessive power of the state to limit individual choice. It's not necessarily associated with a particular economic ideology except that it does protect private property rights and so you can have an expansive social democratic government like in Sweden or Denmark, or you can have a more limited one like in the United States and those are all I would say liberal societies because of that commitment to rule of law. However, liberalism has been very severely threatened in recent years. It's been threatened from a number of sources so internationally, you have two great powers Russia and China that are definitely not liberal polities that have expansive ambitions and as Vladimir Putin said back in an interview with the 2019 liberalism is an obsolete doctrine, but the threat I think also comes from other places as well you have a the rise of a populist nationalist right in many countries this is Victor Orban in the United States, this is Narendra Modi in India, Donald Trump in the United States, you know, Marine Le Pen in France, all of them criticizing liberalism, precisely for the tolerance that it permits and tries to deal with in increasingly ethnically and racially diverse countries. It's also been attacked from the left by people that, you know, I teach students at Stanford, and many of them think that liberalism is really the doctrine of their parents or their grandparents generation but it's really not relevant to Gen Z younger people who are impatient for social justice and social change that liberalism is not providing. All right, so that's, I think the crisis the number of liberal democracies measured by the organization Freedom House and its annual survey of freedom around the world has been in decline for 16 straight years, and the biggest declines recently have been in the two biggest liberal democracies India and the United States so there's, we've, we're dealing with a big global problem so let me start by just going back to basics and explaining why liberalism is a desirable form of government of ideas to live under and there's basically three reasons one is practical, one is moral and one is economic. The practical reason has to do with that original purpose of liberalism which was to lower the temperature of politics by taking final ends off the table and allowing societies to govern themselves when they face religious or national diversity. And that remains one of its biggest selling points in India. The Republic that was created by Gandhi and Nehru was a liberal Republic they did not define themselves in religious terms. They knew that they had to deal with the incredible diversity, not just religious but in terms of cast region language of many other dimensions. The Republic was really the only way of accommodating that diversity. What Prime Minister Modi is seeking to do right now is to shift that national identity to one based on Hindu nationalism, which then excludes the up to 200 million Muslims that live in contemporary India as well as, you know, Parsees, Christians, other people that are not Hindu. When he was the chief minister in Gujarat this led to communal riots and I'm afraid that India is moving towards that kind of communal violence. Once again, today. Alright, so that's the pragmatic reason. The second reason has to do with the moral basis, which is the protection of human autonomy. You know, if you ask, in what sense could a liberal believe that all people are equal when they differ by skin color by gender by intelligence by many other characteristics. The answer I think goes back to a fundamental insight that in a way is stated in the book of Genesis in the Bible, you know that Adam and Eve are told not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil by God and they disobey him. They eat of the fruit and then that original sin leads to their being cast out of the garden. But it gives human beings a moral status that other parts of created nature don't have they can make moral choices they can distinguish between right and wrong and it is that ability to choose morally that ultimately is what makes us all equal because we share that despite the more superficial differences between people and it's that right of autonomy. That is to say, you know the decisions on what to do in life were to live who to marry what beliefs to to engage in. These are all essential characteristics of every human being that everybody human being wants, and the liberal regime protects that autonomy. Then finally, there's a good economic reason for choosing a liberal society because among the rights that liberalism protects is the right to own private property to transact to engage in commerce and where it is the basis of a market economy liberal societies like England and the Netherlands in the 17th century where the leaders in terms of creating the modern economic world precisely because they respected property rights and trade. Even communist China, when it opened up in 1979, 78 did so by adopting certain liberal principles Deng Xiaoping allowed peasants to keep the fruits of their labor. In the result of those incentives quasi property rights, agricultural productivity, doubled in the space of four years and in general the most dynamic parts of this amazing Chinese growth story, come from the private sector where people are able to buy and sell and to own in effect to own property so even in a illiberal politically, a liberal society, economic liberalism has led to tremendous prosperity. Those are the those are the three reasons. Now, the argument that I make in my book is that part of the current disaffection with liberalism is not from any of its basic principles but really is the result of certain deformations of liberal principles that are very to extremes that led them to bad outcomes. And there is a move in this direction on the right and a move in this direction on the left. The one on the right concerned the shift from an older understanding of economic liberalism to what is now called neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is not in my view a synonym for capitalism, I don't see how you can have any kind of modern economy without a market based economy, neoliberalism took that basic insight and stretched it to an extreme, seeking to deregulate privatize and basically pulled back the role of the state which many neoliberals regarded as simply obstacles to individuals to entrepreneurship to economic growth. And as a result, markets did their usual work. They produced a great deal of inequality as, you know, global corporations searched for very small cost advantages by moving jobs to low cost areas, and they destabilized the global economy in certain important ways by deregulating the financial sector. As a result of the deregulation that occurred in the 1980s and 90s, we had an escalating series of financial crises in the Stirling crisis, the Asian financial crisis, Argentina, Russia and finally culminating in the big American crime crisis in 2008. The cumulative effects of this instability were political and they were very serious because many ordinary people were hurt by this instability, a lot of people lost their homes, lost their jobs, and the elites that ran these big banks and financial institutions suffered only a momentary disruption in their incomes and went on to continue to dominate their respective economies. And I think that this had a direct impact on the rise of populism in subsequent years, both on the right and on the left. On the left, you had a different aspect of individual autonomy that was pushed to an extreme, which really had to do with the autonomy that individuals have to create their own lifestyles. So as I said, you know the basic concept of liberal autonomy has to do with your ability to make moral choices. But as time went on, the emphasis came to be not on making the right moral choices within an existing moral framework that rather to be able to make up that framework on your own, that that was the ultimate expression of individual human freedom. And it has obvious problems for a society because all societies have to be based on shared norms that allow people to coordinate their actions to communicate and the like. And if you believe that the rules can be really set by anybody and the transgressing existing rules is automatically a good thing, you're not going to have much of a stable society. There was more over an attack on the individualistic premise that underlies liberalism through a new kind of identity politics. There's a liberal form of identity politics that says that liberalism does not live up to its promises of the equal treatment of individuals. So, you know, black people, other racial minorities, women, LGBTQ people have been marginalized and excluded from participation full participation in the promise of a liberal rule rule of law and identity politics was simply a means of mobilizing people and getting them to push for their inclusion so that's a liberal and I think perfectly acceptable in fact desirable understanding of identity, but there was another. Another view that's grown up very powerfully, especially in the Anglo Saxon world, you know places like the United States or Britain or Australia, where identity politics is seen as a an attack fundamentally on the individualistic premise of liberalism that is to say, individuals are not really free they're determined by the categories the racial gender and other categories into which they are born, and that the society needs to respect not what they do and decide as individuals but to look first to that category the racial ethnic gender category and use that as a means of determining you know the distribution of resources hiring promotion, the other goods that society offers and that I think is fundamentally a liberal it divides the society, which had previously either through a set of, you know common values shared by individuals into a society of groups and at the end of that process. You can ultimately end up with a place like Lebanon or Bosnia where identity politics really defines a whole of politics, and there is a kind of effort to move our modern liberal democratic politics in that kind of identity based direction, coming out of the contemporary left. Now, a further threat to liberalism has to do with the mode of cognition that we call modern natural science. The, the early liberals were very closely aligned with the founders of modern natural science people like bacon and Descartes Newton who believe that there was an objective world beyond our subjective consciousness is that we could perceive this world through the experimental method, and when we came to manipulate it. natural science gave us technology and it was that technology that made the world much more habitable by conquering the disease by inventing things that vastly increased human productivity. And it's, it's closely related to the wealth and the really the safety and comfort of a modern economically developed world. The attack on modern natural science has come from a number of sources. In recent years, in my view, it starts really on the left with a series of intellectual developments, you know, French structuralism then develops into post structuralism post and ultimately into different varieties of contemporary critical theory, the premise of which is that there's basically a subjectivity in the way that we perceive the world we don't so much perceive an objective reality as impose reality on the world through the words that we use. This really culminates, I think in the thought of Michelle Foucault, he was a very brilliant philosophical observer but he began to argue that actually modern science is not an objective cognitive technique, it is really something that elites use to manipulate so that in previous years they could simply order the death of one of their subjects but now they use science and the authority that science carries to convince people of certain things that are essentially a way of holding power over them and he really focuses to things like incarceration homosexuality, mental illness, and the like, but by the end of his career had really broaden the idea of bio power to really include much of what we understand to be modern natural science and so the skepticism of that really starts on the progressive left, it is now completely moved over to the nationalist populist right. So during the covert epidemic and I think up to the present moment. There are many people on the extreme right around the world that, you know, for example, argue just like Foucault that what the public health authorities are telling you about vaccines or about masking is really not based on objective science. It's based on their, the elite desire to manipulate you and it's really a game about power, rather than about the truth. You combine that with the internet and the new digital technologies that have wiped away all of the former gatekeepers like the traditional media, or, you know, other credible sources of scientific information that used to certify information. You combine that with a principled belief that there really is no such thing as objective truth and you get the situation we now face ourselves in, or we now face in which, at least in the United States you can't agree on whether vaccines are safe, whether, you know, who is the winner of the 2020 presidential election, and the like and obviously, you know, liberal society you're not going to agree on the deepest, you know, moral frameworks but you are going to agree on factual information and in fact if you can't agree on factual information, it's very hard to deliberate in common, you know, what needs to be done in the future. And that's the situation we now face. And I just say has to do with the question of the nation and the role of the nation in liberalism because there would seem to be a tension between liberalism's belief that all human beings enjoy, you know, the same basic set of human rights, and the fact that we are divided up into nation states in which the authority to enforce those rights is territorially limited. This contradiction can be bridged, because I do believe that there is a liberal form of national identity, which is not only possible but in fact necessary, if a liberal society is going to succeed. A right exists in theory, you know, human being all human beings have the same set of rights, but rights need to be enforced by a state. It needs to rely on the coercive power of a state that is to say its army its police force to actually make those rights, something real that citizens can enjoy. And the enforcement power is not universal. And in fact, we wouldn't want to live in a world in which every liberal state wanted to enforce liberal rights in every other state in the world. The other big issue is an emotional one. We tend to feel the greatest bonds of solidarity with people that are close to us. There are very few true citizens of the world, we're citizens of individual countries and we really feel the closest bonds to people that live within our nation. And therefore, you know, the nation becomes a kind of social glue. But if you're going to make national identity compatible with liberalism. It has to be the right kind of national identity. It has to be one that is open to all of the citizens that actually live in the territory of the nation it can't exclude certain groups by race by ethnicity by religious belief and the like. And therefore, it needs to be an open identity that is based on essentially liberal ideas. So this is something you know we see happening right now in the war in Ukraine. A lot of people raised the question why are Ukrainians resisting the Russian invasion as ferociously as they are and there's been a little bit of a debate over whether this is due to the fact that Ukraine is democratic a liberal democracy and Russia is not or whether it's simply a fight over sovereignty. And I think that that's a false dichotomy because you really don't fight for liberalism as an abstract principle you fight for it. And that is embedded in a specific nation that is say your nation. And, you know, from my rather frequent visits to Ukraine over the last few years. I believe that that's really what's going on that Ukrainians want their sovereignty but the reason they want it desperately is that they want to have a free Ukraine, and not Putin's Ukraine not a dictatorship a centralized dictatorship and that's why they're willing to fight so tenaciously. So just to conclude, you know, I think it's appropriate to conclude with the invasion because I think that it exhibits in stark terms the choice that is before us today, between maintaining a liberal government that respects the rights of individuals, or moving over to a form of centralized illiberal dictatorship, even if that dictate, well that illiberal government is somehow democratically legitimated I think that's the central issue in global politics today I think that's basically what the Ukraine war, the Ukraine invasion is about. And that's why I think that all liberal societies that care about those individual freedoms actually have a very powerful interest in the outcome of that war because Putin and Russia are the center of an international network of illiberal forces that are seeking to overturn liberal values in virtually every part of the world. And therefore, you know, that's all part of a larger global struggle over, you know, our fundamental liberal values. So with that I'll stop talking and I look forward to questions in a discussion. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Frank, for giving us everything that we expected from you, which is a very great lot. The summary of the situation we are in today, in regard to liberalism, the fact that over the past, let's say 20 years has been, if anything, a design and liberally oriented states in the sense in which you define liberalism, and that it has come under threat from both the right and the left, from the right in the form of neoliberalism which grossly exaggerates certain trends in liberal thought. And the left in the form of, first of all, a great emphasis, an excessive emphasis on identity, and also the questioning of the scientific method which you rightly say was co-evil with the rise of liberalism. And you also mentioned the events in the Ukraine, which I think throw a big stone in the pool that we all contemplated only six months ago with all the problems. None of us expected that in Europe, there would be a military invasion of one nation by another. So a lot of questions, maybe I can take some of them. One from Andy McGuire of the Technical University in Dublin, who asks, does Dr. Fukuyama believe in global terms, do societies need to move towards a post-abundance mindset? And if so, does he have thoughts on how liberalism best organized itself to most effectively fit this change? And this chimes with a locus in your book which struck me, and I wondered a bit about it. You said that growth remains a necessary precondition for most of the other good things that societies seek. I think in 2022, the concept of growth has become a bit questionable. You know, it really isn't conceivable that we can foresee an era of interminable growth. We are seeing limits to growth. Sure. So, I think that it's true that if growth occurs the way it has through the 19th and 20th centuries that, you know, as a result of carbon emissions and global warming, it's not going to be a sustainable system. But I think that the idea that countries are voluntarily going to give up the idea and the aspiration for abundance is politically extremely naive. It's simply not going to happen for quite a lot of reasons. I mean, for one thing, you know, growth is what allows existing societies to get along with each other because growth is never equally distributed. But, you know, what keeps people believing in the legitimacy of the system is that in good periods everybody has participated in it. So what needs to change? There are several things. First of all, the character of the output needs to change very much. You know, we're in the process of decarbonizing the economy by shifting to sources of energy that do not produce emissions. The economy as a whole is shifting to the production, not so much of material goods but of services, which, you know, do consume energy but, you know, not at the same rate as traditional growth. I imagine that there are, you know, many things that we need to do to adapt to climate change as well as to mitigate it that actually require a lot of resources. You know, the estimates for decarbonizing energy in the global economy today run into the trillions of dollars as we go to, you know, alternatives. Where's that money going to come from, you know, if we simply decide that we're not going to grow anymore. The other thing is a real equity issue, which has to do with the developing world. So the IMF estimates that by the middle of the 21st century, the developed world is only going to be contributing something under 20% of global carbon emissions. 40% of new emissions by that time are going to come from China and then another maybe 20% 15 to 20% from India and then the rest from other developing countries. So let's say post abundance, does that apply to these countries as well as well that constitute, you know, 80% of the emissions that are happening are we going to tell poor countries, you know, in Africa and Asia, Latin America. Well, sorry, you know, you're going to have to be happy with the abundance that you have now you're never going to be developed countries, even if that were morally possible to do politically, it's not going to happen. And so I think that we need to look to different ways of shifting growth, you know, onto a path that is more sustainable. And a lot of that will involve technology it'll involve building things to adapt and the like. And a couple of questions, which have to do with the possibility of coming. Let's say the, the classical liberal. It's coming to terms with those that don't meet these criteria. And I can, I can issue who is a member of the LDP of Japan asks, is it theoretically possible to establish a strategic relationship of indiscipline stability with non liberal stroke democratic entities. It's possible to prevent war, coercion or conflict. And Ken Fitzgerald, who is a foreign policy researcher at the Institute has a similar kind of question. Asking, is it possible to build a foundation on the basis of a universal understanding of human dignity. In other words, can these meet West. To begin with the second question. I don't think that that's possible because there really are very, you know, everybody around the world uses the word dignity but it's, it has different meanings and different societies and so when the Chinese talk about the preservation of dignity there almost always thinking about some form of collective dignity. It's not the dignity of individuals that liberal societies try to protect but, you know, national sovereignty or the, you know, the well being of the Chinese people and these really are very, very different concepts because in China. The value of an individual's dignity is much lower than it is in a Western liberal society they don't respect the rights of individuals and are frequently willing to sacrifice them to, you know, to some kind of collective interest and, you know, and of much worse countries than China in terms of disrespecting individual rights and therefore I don't think there's ever going to be a kind of universal consensus around, you know, a shared understanding of dignity what we can hope for is that, you know, the larger countries of the world will agree on a fundamentally liberal framework and that that will be enough to keep the peace and to, you know, build prosperity and the like it looked like we were on the way to doing that in the 1990s and the early 2000s but it's that process that's gone into reverse on the question of, you know, peace and what liberal societies need to do when dealing with illiberal ones, it really depends on the nature of that illiberal society, you know, there are many illiberal states that basically have no foreign ambitions, you know, they don't want to dominate the world or dominate the international system, but there are other illiberal states that whose national identity is basically inextricably bound up with the idea of domination and I'm afraid that that's what you're dealing with in the case of Russia right now. You know, Putin has made it really clear that although he's complained about NATO expansion and what he perceives as security threats to Russia. His real, his real source of unhappiness is what happened in 1991 the falling apart of the former Soviet Union and he would like to reassert control over as much of not just the former Soviet Union but of the former Warsaw Pact countries as possible. Given that you know he doesn't really face any constraints at home. I think, trying to coexist with him you know like there have been a lot of calls in recent in the last couple of weeks that Ukraine needs to give up territory in order to get peace with Russia. And I don't think that's going to solve the problem because the Russians will use that as a means of recuperating from their early losses, and they will then go be back at the business of threatening others. Including continuing to threaten Ukraine and so I don't think that you're actually going to get to peace by that route. Whereas with other states, you know, you can work with countries that differ very greatly that are not liberal. If they don't have that, you know, expansive sense of national identity so I think the, you know the decision on whether to negotiate really hinges on factors like that. This question from Bobby McDonough former Irish ambassador to the UK. How optimistic are you that liberalism can survive and thrive. Can the EU, the European Union play a significant part in that direction. The EU has already played a significant role in spreading liberal ideas. It's based on a real liberal notion of the internal market and the freedom of the internal market freedom of movement. Its membership criteria require respect for the rule of law, strong liberal institutions and so it's been the accession process has actually been one of the, you know, probably the most effective ways of projecting liberal values and institutions into other parts of the world. And, you know, they've been the new entrance that entered after 91 have been under the gun to reform their institutions in a liberal direction because of the attractiveness of joining the EU. The EU's problem is a little bit different. It's a great membership club, but it has no way of kicking members out or disciplining them when they get unruly and stop stop obeying the rules of the club. And that's the situation you really have right now with Hungary, which has thumbed its nose at a lot of the. The EU itself, but also at the principles of rule of law underlying the European Union and the EU because it depends on consensus decision making really hasn't been able to do much, you know, to stop it. There are some of the solidarity funds now that the US promised its members, you know, if they, if they have qualified majority voting in the distribution of those funds that it may actually be possible to withhold them from a country like that is being highly disruptive, you know, the consensus among the other EU members and, you know, indicate that there are some costs to not living up to European standards but up till now unfortunately that mechanism doesn't really exist. And you could say it's also a state which prides itself on being an illiberal democracy. But Victor Orban has said, you know, explicitly right. Two questions together if I may. First from Bill image, who is a former editor of the economist. He says given the US Republican Party's embrace of the idea that the election, the 2020 was stolen. It's acceptance of the January 6 assault as legitimate political discourse. Does this mean that one of the two dominant parties in the US has chosen to reject rule of law based liberal democracy. Where do you think this will lead in 2024 and beyond and the second question is on the same subject from William know economic counselor at the European Commission office in Ireland. In the current US, there does not seem to be any court left on court politics, only shades of extreme right and right. You still think that democracy in the US is salvageable. Oh, yeah, well I think certainly think it's salvageable but it's under severe threat. And I think it's correct as Bill Emmett suggested that the Republican Party has really gone off the rails and has become, you know, in many ways a quasi authoritarian party because many Republicans are not willing to accept the results of a you free and fair election. I think that we've learned a lot from the committee the House committee that studying the January 6 insurrection. And what that committee has revealed was that this wasn't just a demonstration that spontaneously got out of hand it was planned very deliberately by the White House as a way of pressuring the Vice President Pence to overturn the election and keep Donald Trump in office and right now a lot of state level Republican legislators are trying to modify their rules for counting votes in the next election so that they would be in a better position to do what they tried to do in 2020 but didn't get away with and so this is probably the most severe threat to American democracy that has come up really since the Civil War in the middle of the 19th century and I'm quite worried about that. You know with regard to the question of the survival of American democracy. I think that there is still a, you know, pretty overwhelming consensus in favor of existing democratic institutions in the United States, you know the right wing Republicans that support Donald Trump. There may be a majority within the Republican Party but overall they're not really more than about 30% of the whole electorate and you do still have quite a big group in the middle that are not our Trump supporters, you know they live in these swing states that are in the last election, but they also feel that the Democrats aren't giving them much of a, you know, much of an alternative because President Biden, you know, was initially elected as a kind of normal alternative to Trump and among the Democrats running was seen as the most centrist and moderate but ever since he got elected he's been governing, you know, from a much more progressive left wing position. And I think that as a result a lot of those centrist voters have been turned off and you know I know this from friends of mine that are conservative that, you know, they don't like Trump but they also don't like the Democrats just like the Democrats to the point where they're considered they'd consider voting for another Trump candidacy and that's very dangerous. I think that you know we need a good alternative to Trump is there is a majority in favor of that, but you know the other party is really not providing that alternative in a in a very clear way. Yeah, we have another question here which speaks to precisely what you've just said from Mark Coleman. Yes, does Professor football except that the dominance in the media of one side of the debate, largely liberalism in a partisan sense, the Democratic Party in the US is undermining the confidence of some voters in the fairness of the Democratic game, does this create resentment that forces more moderate conservative voters and to turn to the far right in desperation, rather than conviction, I think it speaks to what you just. Yeah, well look as an empirical matter that's certainly happening. But the mainstream media does have a liberal bias as does, you know, a lot of higher education academia, you know, and so forth. And a lot of people see that and they don't like it. You know the problem is that the solution that is being offered by the extreme right is, you know, is really a lot worse. Well, first of all, the critics of the mainstream media don't actually appreciate the fact that there is diversity in that, you know, and that there are actually journalistic standards that, you know, the New York Times and the Washington Post continue to adhere to all of which is being tossed out the window on the far right, you know, in in reaction to the perceived bias. The only thing is that there's a difference between bias and outright, you know, lying. So the bias really has to do with what kinds of stories are covered. You know the kinds of slant that's given to the reporting on different things that happen. But what's going on in large sections of the conservative media is just outright, you know, the truth, you know that that people will just make up facts and, you know, without sourcing them properly just present them to to viewers and that's another sense in which I think, you know, the solution is a lot worse than that, you know, the underlying the underlying disease. Yes, I do believe that that is what's driving a lot of people away from the mainstream media. But I think that what we need is a, you know, responsible right wing media that, you know, does adhere to certain basic journalistic standards and basically, you know, there's a tendency on the part of everybody to, you know, take particular anecdotes and instances of abuse and then generalize it to say that, you know, the entire media universe is corrupt because of, you know, one particular story without, you know, really appreciating the fact that, you know, that's not a universal problem. The social media come in on top of this. And you have, you know, channels like QAnon which which disseminate things that to any ordinary intelligence are simply unbelievable but astoundingly are believed in by even members of Congress. Yeah, that's right. And there seem to be no guardrails and that sort of thing so you have, you know, elected politicians that will repeat these, you know, including a woman that, you know, maybe the next house whip in the house of representatives who, basically charge the most Democrats with being pedophiles. I mean, it's, it's, it's a kind of ridiculous degradation of the kind of political rhetoric that our leaders are using. To come to the economic side of this a question from Daniel Bryan, who is chief economist in the Institute, who asks, is there a tendency to overstate economic factors in the rise of nativist populism in many European countries, the Nordics in particular, there have been few losses from globalization, and the state's welfare safety net remains very comprehensive. Yet, even here, populist parties have gained ground. So, yeah, I think that culture is a much better predictor of populist sentiment than economics, you know, the average Trump voter in 2016 had a higher per capita income than the average Hillary Clinton voter. And if you look at the people in the January 6th riot, you know, the vast majority of them were comfortable middle class people with good jobs and so forth. And so, I think that there is a core, you know, kind of white working class base to Trumpism, but, you know, a lot of the people that are aligned with that movement are there for cultural reasons, they really don't like the kind of identity politics that's being, you know, put forward by the progressive left. You know, a lot of Hispanic voters, for example, don't like socialism, and they don't like the fact that the Democrats are using the word socialism as if it's a, you know, perfectly normal set of economic choices. The interesting thing about the world today is that the fundamental division is really a kind of sociological one between people that have better educations that live in big urban agglomerations that then can benefit from, you know, a global economy, and those people that live in smaller cities and towns or in the countryside, you know, with more traditional values that division is exists almost universally in Turkey and Hungary in the United States and Britain. And, you know, it reflects, I think, it does reflect different economic opportunities, but more fundamentally, I think it reflects a certain way of life that, you know, in the in the urban case is fundamentally liberal and open. But in some cases, you know, people would say a little bit too open and too tolerant of, you know, people that want to break traditional norms that are still maintained by, you know, other parts of the population. So it's really that cultural fight, I think that's at the at the center of populism related to economic inequality but certainly not fundamentally driven by economic inequality. We can turn to Russia for a moment. We have a question from Claudius Kozhevsky of the Polish Embassy, who asks how do you see Russia now after 30 years after Glasnost and Perestroika. Is there still a prospect of movement towards liberalism and democracy, or have they reverted finally to the classical Russian pattern of the strong Tsar who dominates the system. It's a big question. I think, unfortunately, the latter is really where the Russians are heading. I mean, there was a liberal opposition in the 1990s that's gradually gotten squeezed out. I mean, they're literally now either in jail like Alexei Navalny or their they've been forced out of the country. And I think that the prospect of a liberal Russia returning right now is extremely low. If the Ukrainians really win this war and humiliate Putin. There may be some internal, you know, shuffling among existing Russian elites but if you look at, you know, poll data and, you know, what passes for public opinion in Russia, you know a lot of people have been supporting the war. And, you know, it's interesting, even Russians living outside of Russia in other parts of Europe that have access to good information about what Russia is doing to Ukraine, even a lot of those people support Putin. And so I'm afraid that, you know, this older form of slavophilism that was very powerful in the 19th century hasn't disappeared and, you know, it has certainly gotten reinforced under Putin in recent years that Russia can't be Russia unless it dominates, you know, the smaller countries around its periphery and I don't see that changing anytime, you know, in the near future. Well that's what you could say the same about China and when you speak of China you speak of one fifth of the population of the globe. There doesn't seem to be any great prospect for an expansion of the sphere of liberalism or liberalism in the sense that you and I would define it in the world today. But at the moment I do think that there are real problems with the China model. You know this one man decision making that they've now moved into who's downside you can really see in the zero covert policy that they've maintained, you know, in spite of the cost that that it's imposing on China's population. But I don't think that that's going to lead to instability or any changes in the regime. The one thing you'd have to say for China is that their leadership is more risk averse than is Putin, you know, Putin has been this huge risk taker in the course of his career and done all sorts of things that, for example, the Soviet leadership was never willing to do like send troops directly to the Middle East to intervene in a Middle Eastern conflict. China, I think is more cautious and in a way that makes them more dangerous because they're going to rush headlong into kind of harebrained, you know, schemes like like Putin has. They're going to buy their time and they, you know, they don't want to be overly disruptive but but they are going to definitely be a big challenge and I don't expect them to disappear anytime in the near future either. I have a question from Donald Obama who is a member of the Institute on the question of identity. He asks, what kinds of institutions can be conceived of that serve that basic human need. How can we enhance institutions so that identity is grounded in the practical moral and economic mode of liberalism. Well, look, I think that identity is something that is universally desired by people in a liberal society. We say that people can associate based on, you know, all sorts of identity affiliations, and that they're free to do so in a kind of voluntary civil society. I think the danger really resides when the state begins to endorse identity categories as sort of fixed categories and then to distribute resources or, you know, access to institutions on the basis of those fixed categories. And that's the point at which I think you risk really hardening these notions of identity into self regarding groups that are living next to each other. You know, well, okay, I'll give you a very specific example of this in the UK. The state supported religious schools, you know, for Jews for Muslims for, you know, people of other faiths, people should be free in a liberal society to set up private schools to, if they want to bring up people in a religious tradition, I don't see why the state ought to be supporting that because what you don't want to do is to have people, young people educated in closed communities where they have nothing to do with people from other communities. I mean, that's fundamentally illiberal and I think that's, you know, that's a mistaken policy that's actually going to harden those divisions rather than to encourage a more, you know, open and tolerant society. You will find the same feature in this country, Frank, a system that was established under British rule in the 19th century. Thank you very much for the spirit in which you approach this. I think we have been very enriched by your presentation, which is the culmination, as I said at the beginning of 33 years of engagement with these big questions, which are so important for us all. My apologies to the many questioners that I couldn't reach within the time scale, but I think you covered quite a lot also in the answers to the questions that we thank you for being with us. We look forward to having you again. And we would like to hope that we will be able to meet you in due course in Dublin. Okay, thank you very, very much for having me.