 My name is Michael Lynde on behalf of New America. I'd like to welcome you to this very special occasion in many ways Francis Fukuyama the author of political order and political decay from the Industrial Revolution to the globalization of democracy is One of those rare figures who needs no introduction. He's probably The most famous if not one of the most famous public intellectuals of his generation In the United States and in the world. He introduced the phrase the end of history in a famous 1989 national interest Quarterly a magazine later expanded into a book the end of history and the last man Which occasioned a global controversy since then he's a written a series of very well received and equally controversial books Including trust the social virtues and the creation of prosperity the great disruption human nature in the reconstitution of social order our post human future State building America the crossroads democracy power and the neo-conservative legacy And the first volume of a two-volume series of which the the present book political order and political decay Is the culmination of the earlier book is the origins of political order from pre-human times to the French Revolution? And professor Fukuyama teaches now at Stanford having taught at Johns Hopkins and at a George Mason University So it's a great honor being able to host him today for this very important work And it's a personal pleasure as well. I've known Frank I think for a court of a century now and he was a founding board member of the new America Foundation so that What is good into America can you know be attributed partly to Frank's influence and we'll take credit for for the rest So please join me in welcoming Frank Fukuyama Thanks Michael well, let's begin Frank by My asking you about the arc of the two book series. So the first book Really literally starts in the Pleistocene era in the ice age and then brings actually before that It starts with monkeys Okay, the pre-human era It brings us up through agrarian Civilizations and then this book shows what happens to political systems in different regions of the world as a result of industrialization in the incorporation of middle classes well The larger structure of the book is to talk about the evolution of politics There is a tendency on the part of a lot of people to not believe in progress or modernization And you know one of the purposes I think of the two volumes is to describe what that means For politics and so it turns out that despite the cultural diversity that exists and has existed Throughout human history. There's also what the anthropologists would call a process of general evolution in which Disparate societies come up with similar kinds of solutions to solve problems of social order So 40,000 years ago everybody is running around on the savannah in Africa in a band-level Society of 40 50 people all genetic relatives of one another the first major Transition that happens is the discovery of tribalism which begins about 10,000 years ago in which you have a belief in The power of dead ancestors and unborn descendants to affect life in this world and all of a sudden patrilineal Few matrilineal societies appear in India China Among the Germanic barbarians that were the predecessors of Europeans You know all over the world Succeeded by state-level societies maybe seven eight thousand years ago and Then the other institutions that we come to understand you know like rule of law and like democracy Gradually get at it. So I think there's actually a coherent evolutionary story to be told about about global politics the thing that I in the title of this book the the political decay part is something that I did not write about in In previous books, but I think it's also a permanent feature of human societies that any Political order that seeks to be modern meaning impersonal based on a concept of broad public interest is subject to political decay For a couple of reasons and one has to do with intellectual rigidity that you create an institution to meet a certain set of Conditions it solves a problem of human cooperation under certain conditions But then human beings like to worship their institutions whether it's the Japanese emperor the British monarchy or the US Constitution and then when those are not Appropriate they they fail to adjust And the other has to do with the capture of institutions by by insiders and this in volume one I traced you know in ancient China in the The case of the Ottomans where they had devised this incredibly Unusual system for getting beyond tribalism The they basically would capture White European children in the Balkans and bring them back to Istanbul and then train them to be Administrators generals viziers and so forth Because that was the only way that you could break the tribalism in in you know the Middle East And that system began to break down when the Janissaries and and the other these other slave soldiers began to have children And started to you know, I want to give their children benefits You know from their political position and so forth the French Empire or the French monarchy did the same thing prior to the revolution in terms of selling Officers offices public offices to what we're called venal office holders And so there's also I think a permanent tendency towards political decay Which then leads to the need for renovation of political systems Well, you talk about modernity in terms of impartiality or the personality And two of the terms that are very important in your book are clientillism and Patrimonialism which represent sort of the other extreme could you expand on those terms? Well, maybe it would help to back up a little bit So in my framework that I laid out in the first volume. I think that there are three Important sets of institutions that constitute a political order today So one has to do with the state and the state is all about power It's the ability to concentrate power use it to enforce laws to deliver services to protect the population And then there are two institutions that constrain power First of those is the rule of law which is a set of rules that if it's to be truly the rule of law have to apply to the most powerful People in the in the polity the king or the president or the prime minister And the second is the institutions of democracy that are meant to Force the government to respond to the wishes of the whole population rather than simply to their own self-interest In my view the hardest transition to make Well the easiest one actually is democracy Because today we actually can set up elections and and select Leaders by popular vote relatively easily and that's happened in many many countries There's about a hundred ten to a hundred fifteen electoral democracies now in the world The much much much harder transition is to get from what max Weber called the Patrimonial state to a modern state so a patrimonial state is a state where the elite running the country Think of the state as basically their piggy bank. It's their patrimony And the reason they're in politics is to get personal benefits out of their political position In the days when there actually were monarchs, you know, that was legal because You know the king actually literally owned the the lands and could give it to his children and so forth Today we all pretend to be running modern impersonal states But in fact the reality in many countries is that the people running the government Want to use the government as a means of getting rich or see it as part of their patrimony And the big struggle I think is to get to a modern state Which is an impersonal one where your relationship to the government does not depend on your personal Connection to the ruler or the ruling elite it simply depends on your status as citizen and a modern state is also one where there's a very clear dividing line between public interest and personal interest and You know in a in a patrimonial state There's no such thing as corruption because the king owns everything but in a modern state there's supposed to be this division and this I would say is really the Central struggle in our politics that in a way is more important than the struggle between Democracy and authoritarian government. So you think about what's going on in Ukraine right now The struggle actually isn't over democracy per se Victor Yanukovych the president that was forced out earlier this year Was democratically elected and everybody would would admit that the problem was that he was the leader of a kleptocratic insider group that was basically stripping Ukraine of all of its assets and allowing him to build this palatial palace You know outside of Kiev and and slipping money outside of the country and so forth And what I think the Euro Maidan Protesters wanted was they didn't want to live in such a country They wanted to live in a modern country where the government actually pretended or at least not just pretended but actually Did serve a broader public interest and I think that's really what's at stake in the in the struggle I think with Vladimir Putin right now Well, so the three elements of modernity in your view are the impersonal state impartial rule of law and Accountability in the form of democracy or something like that now the sequence has varied Well, some countries only have one Some have three but they acquired the three in a different order. So just just to make it a bit more concrete For example, you're writing the book that Germany in France Had law first then the state then democracy The u.s. And I think you say the UK as well Well, at least the u.s. Had democracy first and the state came later. That's right. So the The sequence by which you adopt these different sets of institutions is actually very important for the successful functioning of them As a person that believes normatively very strongly in the value of democracy The conclusion that I come to in the first part of the book is actually very discouraging because it says that Democracy very often actually injures the quality of the state and state administration And I think the clearest example of this is actually the United States where The u.s. Was actually one of the first countries to democratize in the 1820s Most states began to eliminate the property requirements for the franchise and introduced universal white male voting and in response to the need to get masses of voters to the polls After the 1828 election that brought Andrew Jackson to power the first populist president in the United States You know we created this thing called the spoil system or the patronage system Andrew Jackson won the election against John Quincy Adams. He said Two things first I won the election so I should get to decide who runs the u.s. Government and second basically any fool can be a government official because it doesn't take that much talent to you know To be a government official and this is the start of a period of about a hundred years in American history We're virtually every office from the federal government all the way down to municipal government was Was what a political scientist would today call? Clientalistic it was based on trading political support for a job in the post office or in the police department or something of that sort and Because the democracy happened before the consolidation of a modern impersonal state The United States failed to develop this kind of government until very very late Something similar happened in Greece actually one of the reasons that the Greeks got into such trouble during the euro crisis was that They had a very weak state. It was very legitimate because they were an Ottoman province and until Independence in the 1820s. They were manipulated by foreigners The failure to pay taxes tax avoidance is a tradition in Greece that runs all the way back to Ottoman time So it's it's very deeply embedded and they actually open the franchise They were one of the first European countries to open the franchise and when people started voting in Greece in the 1860s They went through the same logic where to get people to vote You'd give out jobs in the public sector and this continued after the kernels and the period of dictatorship in 1974 when Greece returned to democracy We on the outside all celebrated the fact that that the kernels had been replaced by Competitive party government, but these two parties spent all of their time stuffing the public sector with their own political supporters With the result that Greece by the 2000s had several times the per capita number of civil servants that Britain or Germany did and that was you know One of the causes of their inability to control their deficits that then directly contributed to the euro crisis Well, I was pleased to see in the book that you allude to a Vilfredo Pareto in Gaitana, Moscow and other these were the so-called elitist school Which was particularly influenced by the post 1870 history of unified Italy, which seems to have been really one of the most corrupt countries at least One of the most corrupt countries that had brilliant intellectuals analyzed So some of these economists of geliti in Italy in the late 18th early late 19th early 20th century Came up with a theory of fiscal illusion Dozens of ways by which politicians can trick people into thinking they're not actually being taxed Or they're receiving benefits when they're actually not receiving benefits and and the conservative scholar James Buchanan revived this in the 1960s so so there's actually Political decay tends not to get as much attention among political scientists. No, that's right as a political order and the and the Italians that you know the Christian Democrats after 1946 basically created this unbelievable Clantelistic system in the south of Italy because again, they faced the same problem How do you get relatively poor and uneducated voters to the polls? And this is what started the whole post-war Italian system of patronage and corruption That you know, unfortunately persists to the present moment Well, tell us a little bit about how in us and maybe the UK to there was a pushback against this Well, that's actually the story that I think is most relevant for countries like India or Brazil or Mexico. So The the American story is important for these developing countries because I think it shows that This kind of patronage and corruption in the political system is not it's not an aberrant behavior that somehow Characterizes these benighted developing countries that just don't understand what clean government is I think it's actually a feature of early democracy and I think the history of the United States Indicates that that's that's the case But it also suggests a way out because what happened in the United States and in Britain in the 19th century Is that with economic development? You had a rising middle class and a lot of the middle class did not have an interest in this highly corrupt patronage system and there was grassroots mobilization so in Late 19th century in the United States all these grandmothers we get really really upset that their fourth class local postmaster was a Patronage appointee some incompetent political hack that had been put there by a machine politician And they began to mobilize and petition and write letters to the editor and then you had some great leadership people like Gifford Pinshow the founder of the US Forest Service or Theodore Roosevelt who was actually one of the early first leaders of the Civil Service Commission, and then you also had accident play an important role You wouldn't have gotten civil service reform in the United States, but for the assassination of James a Garfield Garfield was elected in 1882 he was shot by a fellow named Charles Gito who thought he should have been the US Consul to France and was really disappointed that Garfield hadn't appointed him. So he assassinates the president Garfield takes about six weeks to die very painfully They think actually his doctors made him worse rather than better at the time and at this point Congress which benefited from the patronage system and all the members of Congress got their offices because of their ability to Dispense Patronage so they had no interest in reforming the system They were Because of this external shock embarrassed enough that they passed something called the Pendleton Act which in 1883 established the first Civil Service Commission and then the principle that people ought to be hired on the basis of merit and qualifications Rather than on the basis of their political connections and this I think is the route out for a country like Brazil You know you you see these the uprising in Brazil last year. They're led by better educated middle-class young people by and large who are just sick and tired of the pervasive corruption and poor quality of services in You know in San Paulo and Rio and other cities And if Brazil is ever gonna fix this problem It's got to be by that same route that the United States took it It's a political problem at base and it can only be solved through politics And you know the United States indicates that the democracy is actually capable of correcting some of its own mistakes Well, as you're writing the book the US solves that civil service patronage problem to a degree But it continues to have a very bizarre state structure Which is what what Steven Scarona calls a state of courts and parties or the legislature and of courts and lawyers Rather than administrators. That's right. So You know Americans are used to thinking of their system as the exemplar of a modern democracy, but it's actually a strange system in certain respects the founding fathers Were deeply imbued with with the need to Constrain government the American Republic was born in a revolution against the British monarchy And the you know the main Theme I think in American political culture ever since then has been deep deep distrust of centralized government power and then an institutional Setup that limited government power. So the Constitution has many many checks and balances Many more than in most European or Japanese or parliamentary systems Meaning that power is divided and separated in a whole bunch of ways So you have a very powerful upper house of the legislature. You have a separately elected President you have a court a Supreme Court that can invalidate legislation you have Delegation of duties and responsibilities to state and local government every single one of these Acts as a potential veto point against concerted action by by the government and then as as Michael was suggesting We have never because we distrust executive power We've always tended to do things through courts and legislatures where a parliamentary democracy would would do things through us through a An executive administrative agency so for example enforcement of the laws in a European Democracy this is done by the Justice Ministry or the Interior Ministry controlling a national police force in the United States we actually Delegate this to private citizens. So in the 1970s when there's a big burst of Social legislation in environment occupational safety and health equal opportunity employment opportunity and so forth Congress saw fit to expand the standing meaning the right to sue the government to include, you know People who in many cases actually weren't even being affected by the particular law in in In in question with the result that and in fact in California, we even have a stronger version of there's a there's a Private enforcement act that that allows citizens to sue the government very easily and this is you know Government by courts. I mean a European would think that this is very bizarre because it's up to the government to enforce its own Rules but here we have a private attorney general, you know, basically private attorney generals And so I think it leads to very high transaction costs. You cannot put in a big infrastructure project In the United States without going through the courts for a couple of decades. There's a case in Oakland Near where I live these days where they wanted to deepen Oakland Harbor because they had a new generation of container ships coming in This was in the mid 1970s. And so the core of and Army Corps of Engineers did a plan Immediately it was challenged in the courts by all of these private attorney generals Including, you know a group of fishermen that had a fishery like 200 miles down the coast that they thought would somehow be affected by by this dredging plan and the result was that The harbor doesn't get dredged and expanded until sometime in the early 1990s the port of Rotterdam by contrast Had the same problem in the late 1970s and they did it within a like a five-year period because they've just got a more efficient You know type of government. Yeah, I think this is a point worth explaining on briefly because I think both Progressives and conservatives get the history wrong when they say that business Rebelled against the New Deal and the progressive era regulations And and then that explains a lot of late 20th century history. In fact, big business Was pretty much reconciled to the regulatory utility framework that developed in the progressive era and the New Deal because you had Industry by industry regulation, right the railroads and trucking and public and electrical utilities and The regulators wanted the industries to be healthy, you know, they didn't want them to gouge, you know use monopoly Predatory monopolies and gouge consumers What happened inspired by Ralph Nader and a lot of the public interest movement it as you've said in the 60s and 70s You got what was called the new regulation Where it was these broad? Economy-wide things right environmentalism consumerism Handicapped access which is fine. I mean, you know, this Represented the next step in the quality of life, but because of these private attorney general statutes of which are really bizarre What it means is that the they You have to have standing in order to sue in court, right? Traditionally unless you were personally affected you did not have standing Under these private attorney general statutes. I could have no interest whatsoever in whether this thing No, I'm registered or not, but nevertheless, I could sue right in court and and Arguably this created a lot of the hostility of the business community To regulation which simply did not exist in the Eisenhower era or even the Roosevelt era. Yeah, I think that's right That's right. Then the other side of the courts and parties government is the parties And I think there you see basically a return of a certain kind of patrimonialism So the progressive era got rid of the kind of overt bribery And gift, you know exchange that existed in the 19th century But we define, you know bribery extremely narrowly It has to be a quid pro quo that you know where there's a clear connection that the prosecutors can prove What we have seen, you know appear is not that kind of bribery There's not that much overt bribery of congressmen of the 19th century sort What you see is basically ritualized gift-giving or reciprocal gift exchange where a lobbyist makes a donation Doesn't expect anything immediately in return and then it just so happens six months later The you know the the member of Congress votes in a way that the lobbyist, you know makes the lobbyist very happy And there's no quid pro quo. The system is perfectly Is perfectly Legal Now of course a democracy is supposed to have interest groups I mean no one would argue that you shouldn't have interest groups, but I think that we've gotten to a point where There is a real problem in representation because Well organized, well resourced interest groups Using this check and balance system can protect their interests in a way that does not represent the interest of You know the public as a whole. I think the best example of this is just the tax code The US tax code, you know everybody looking at this thinks it's a total disgrace. It's way way too long and detailed Everybody knows that the corporate marginal tax rate is high It's one of the highest in the developed world is like 35% But very few corporations actually pay this because they've all negotiated special Exemptions for themselves. There's a story a couple of years ago that GGE managed to pay no corporate taxes whatsoever and All the tax experts say well look you ought to lower the marginal tax rate and then just get rid of these special Exemptions and subsidies and privileges But you can't do it even though everybody intellectually says yes This would be a much more rational system and you can't do it because of the nature of what I call our vetocracy Meaning rule by veto that the system privileges well organized minorities in a way that a parliamentary system would not That then makes it impossible to reform Reform our tax system So now we know who rules America the veto Well that that's very provocative. Why don't we get some questions now and have a conversation? Okay. Yes right here Do we have the microphones? Microphones coming. Hi Miriam Hassan I Find your argument very interesting There's always been this issue of the twice fails the chicken and or the egg if it is democracy or the state or the rule of law and I've never you know understood which one is really really goes first because you could argue that the US had first democracy Then a stronger state and then came the rule of law or I mean what is the order? I come from Mexico there was for a while the argument that it was first having you know the state then you know the rule of law in theory and then Democracy and now we have democracy will have the rule of law and we don't know what kind of state You have bureaucratic authoritarian systems in South America where they try to build you know stronger state You seem to argue that bureaucrat having meritocracy meritocratic systems is one of the main variables what would be the driving variables or the Independent variables in defining what goes first and what would be the right components And what would be the elements that would bring these stable systems that would bring you know stable countries Like advanced democracies. Yeah, so there's a couple of definitional points that are really important So when I use I sometimes use the the the term strong state a little bit carelessly By that I do not mean a repressive state that's able to jail journalists and you know get rid of opposition politicians what I mean is a state that has the capacity to actually deliver basic public goods education health and to do it in a in an impersonal way and That's the part that Mexico has had a real problem with I mean it does not have an impersonal state Clientalism in Mexico is still pervasive and so You know the two parties or the three parties compete with each other when they get into power in a city or a state You know they deliver social services to their clients and and you know not in a impersonal sense and It's that struggle so the democracy part in Mexico. I think is pretty well-established Now that you've had this alternation of parties and you know pretty open media and so forth Now the real struggle is actually to build not just a state that's repressive But a state that is actually modern and and and impersonal and that I think is what requires this general Mobilization because you can only you know succeed in doing this the question of sequencing and what should come first You know that's been an academic debate my Mentor Samuel Huntington Invented this idea of the authoritarian transition He said you know you you have to have state power first and you have to have basic order And then you can think about democracy as you get richer and so forth. I actually don't agree with that I think that there are countries where that happened like South Korea or Taiwan and If if that was a sequence that unfolded and It worked that's fine, but most countries don't have that option You know most countries actually face tremendous pressure from their own populations to democratize and so there's no Olympian point From which somebody much less than outsider can say oh no no you should wait for democracy another 20-30 years until you're ready for it and only then can you have political participation That that's just not the way the world works. And so I think for better or worse. We are forced in many countries To build all of these institutions simultaneously my only point is that I think that Well, okay, this is a generalization I could make for for Latin America that You know we've put a lot of effort into the Democratic the building the Democratic institutions over the past a couple of generations And I think in most countries that's been a gain that we've made and now the agenda is shifted It's really towards getting this modern state that that should really take priority Yes, hi professor Hypothetically you leave this place and President Obama calls your cell and he said you have a big book there I don't have time to read it all but I'm really impressed with your ideas Could you give me two or three really good ideas would help America that you found as you were writing researching etc? Well See that's a hard question to answer I didn't write this as a policy book even though I you know, I've been in public policy institutions my whole career I really read and wrote it more as an analytical thing as I argue in the chapters on the United States. I think that many of our problems are so deeply embedded in our Constitutional order that there's actually not that much you can do about them. So I've now really concluded that Parliamentary systems just tend to work better than presidential ones The presidential ones either end up deadlocked like we are right now Where they end up like a lot of ones in Latin America where because of the deadlock you then Delegate huge powers to the president and that's not a good solution either I think that institutionally There are a number of modest things that you could do that would make things better and basically most of them have to Do with inserting more hierarchy And reducing the number of veto points in the in the American system. So for example Senatorial holds are just absurd, you know There's like 60 ambassador appointments that are now held up in the Senate because every Individual senator can put an anonymous hold on any given appointment Imagine if you tried to run Google where every member of the board could actually stop a mid-level Employment decision on the part of the the management. It's crazy. You can't run an organization like the filibuster is another one That's not in the Constitution. It's just a it's just a Senate rule and I think in dealing with the budget ultimate, you know, so the the vetocracy part is going to be a real Obstacle to entitlement reform so Conservatives tend to like a lot of checks and balances because they say well, that's what's protected us from strong and overweening Government, but the problem is now you've got a very large government and if you want to reform it You actually have to have a strong government I mean you have to have a government that can actually decide that we're going to raise taxes control spending It's going to hurt the interest of a lot of very powerful Interest groups and so it's got to be it's got to be fairly decisive And so I think ultimately that you could try to embed a more parliamentary type procedure in our existing system that's kind of You know, we had versions of this like with the base closing commission a few years ago where no congressman wants a Base closed in their district so they turn this over to an impartial non-partisan committee that simply Decided on which basis to close and then put the whole thing up to Congress in a single Up or down yes or no vote they do this with trade promotion authority and other things as well Where if you just let the individual interests well organized interests decide you'll never get get anywhere And you know, you may end up doing something have to do something like this ultimately with with entitlement reform because Currently under our institutional rules. I just don't see how you're gonna get there Yes right here. I am Ari Ratner. I'm a fellow at New America and I'm writing a book on bureaucracy or bureaucratic reform It's interesting what you just said because obviously in Congress the problem is to some degree lack of hierarchy You know, you end up with you describe as a vatocracy in the executive branch You know real problems lack of discretion obviously to the individual agencies, but also, you know at the level of employees You know the exception of you know teachers in the classroom soldiers in the field, you know Everyone else has no discretion which you end up with no accountability and no managerial discretion either You know, I'm just stating me but I'm curious to hear your action What how states other than us have thought through that problem. Yes reforming that problem well So you're a great customer for my book Actually the whole question of bureaucratic autonomy. I think is Central to effective government. So there's no question that a bureaucracy has to be under the control of the Democratic Principles they're just agents that have to be controlled by the Democratic principle. So there's no question that that Who's the boss in that system? But given that there has to be a delegation of sufficient authority so that You know, the agents can actually make appropriate decisions and use judgment and incorporate local knowledge and so forth and here I think our general distrust of government has Become a self-fulfilling prophecy, you know, we don't trust the government to make decisions Appropriately and therefore you encumber them with all sorts of detailed rules. So Why does the Air Force buy six hundred dollar toilet seats? It's because you've got this thing called the federal acquisitions regulation that runs the several thousand pages Detailing all of the rules by which it is necessary for a federal agency to procure, you know, something employment You know, I mean, there's there's many domains in which is this is the case and I Think it's a general characterization that that there's not nearly enough discretion, but this is where the presidential system Really gets in the way. So in a parliamentary system, you could say, okay, there's not enough discretion We're gonna adjust the boundary of administrative discretion by giving them more powers and because the same party controls the legislature And controls the executive. That's not problematic But can you imagine if you went to John Boehner today and said well our proposal is to give more discretion to The executive agency is controlled by President Obama. What's he gonna say, you know, great, you know That's just what we want and that's where I think presidentialism really is, you know, is a is a problem I guess one further thing I would add is that it's not a it's not a uniformly bleak picture because in fact Congress sees fit to delegate substantial autonomy to certain selected agencies So the Federal Reserve is, you know, an incredible case of that But also the military not in procurement and routine operations, but in actual military operations They're given a lot of authority to do what they want You know the Centers for Disease Control or NASA, you know, these agencies are given, you know, fair amount of latitude And it's interesting. I think it's very revealing about how Americans think about their government if you look at different polls of trust in government The agencies that tend to be the most trusted by Americans tend to be the most expert ones that are the least subject to this kind of detailed Democratic oversight So the courts and the army and you know, NASA and so forth. What is the least trusted? Part of the American government. It is the one that is the most subject to immediate democratic control Which is basically the House of Representatives And so it's as if Americans kind of recognize that they can't trust themselves, you know that that the things that are subject to the most populist Direct control are actually the least effective parts of the government But no one's actually, you know, so try getting up, you know in an election campaign and saying well I actually think that I as your elected representative should have less authority and we should give more authority to bureaucrats I mean who's going to get elected on that kind of a platform Yes, front row Thank you, and thank you for a very informative talk I'm Alan Sessoms from the American Association of State Colleges and Universities and I spent time in the State Department I was wondering what your view of the implementation of foreign policy is under in a presidential system or in a parliamentary system Because from what I can see and from the experience I had neither of them work particularly well. Yeah Well, that's a complicated question I think that Anybody that has had any experience in American foreign policy knows that you know like 99% of your time is is consumed in interagency battles and The other 1% has been actually thinking about the outside world and how to deal with foreign countries and and this sort of thing and you know, there have been many attempts to Solve this question the creation of the National Security Council and the whole you know White House structure in the 1948 the big reorganization that also created the Defense Department and so forth That was an attempt to solve it But there is kind of a natural law of bureaucracy that you know the these agencies sort of multiply and then they kind of Replicate each other. So, you know, it's been interesting to watch the growth of the NSC over the last 40 years because it used to be a very small body that was only responsible for interagency Coordination and now basically it's its own State Department, you know They replicate all the offices in the State Department Meanwhile, the State Department in order to keep up and started to replicate its offices and and so forth and so You know, if you don't have a highly Engaged President that is able to delegate Appropriately, but also keeps an eye on all of this stuff Then this interagency process just leads to you know to garbage. I mean as an output in a parliamentary system You know, it's it's it kind of depends on on you know, exactly how they're set up I'm kind of impressed with smaller countries like Australia and Canada that have actually set up Pretty effective whole of government, you know efforts to try to coordinate this stuff a little bit better But I suspect that that probably has to do with their size and if you tried to do something like that in Washington, it just wouldn't work because of you know, the big and trenched interests that exist already Well, there's some political science literature that shows that the fragmentation of our system between the executive and a bicameral legislature in the courts Leads to multiple interest groups That's so for example in your your traditional parliamentary democracy. There will be one employers association You know one industrial union in the United States. There are two teachers unions Right, that's right. There are multiple trade associations and it means that if you win With the White House but lose in the Congress then a rival organization can then focus on Congress. Yeah, that's right Yeah, I mean in a in a in Germany or Britain in their parliamentary systems It actually makes no sense for a lobbyist to go lobby an individual member of Parliament because they have no they don't make the budget You know, they have no impact on You know on on spending you have to go to the top of the party organization Whereas in our country you've got multiple entry points And so, you know, they're all the different committees and individual members of Congress and so forth That's that's absolutely Correct. The only thing I would say is that the EU is becoming more the EU as a whole is becoming a lot more like the United States In ways that are not good So now if you can't get your way at a member state level you can go to Brussels and you know try to lobby There and so you're they're developing a federal system like ours that is Equally, you know open to access by by you know by different groups They want to be the United States if you're up in the worst way. Yes Towards the back I'm a fellow here so I Sort of wondering whether I mean you talked about some of these these problems being sort of endemic into Has endemic to the US system in the way we we separate power and then just you know all the veto points, but Part of me thinks that actually there was a period of time when actually we we we did a lot of things in the 60s In the 70s and we passed a lot of laws and we actually solved a bunch of problems and then something happens Yes And so is it a bunch of things that were we're set in motion by the passage of all those laws by all that activity And and if so is I mean you you leave us with a very pessimistic view of what we might do other than scrap the entire system or maybe have a global war or something But I mean it is if so I mean did did we hit this critical moment when everything kind of got messed up? And now we're are we kind of in the gray goo? That's a very good question. I should have addressed that point earlier. So it is true that the system has been evolving so that Veto points have been multiplying like the use of the filibuster just you know We use it much much more than we did 50 years ago But that's not this that's not what's causing the current problem that the current problem has to do with polarization Or it's when polarization meets this veto cratic system So for most of the 20th century the two parties had very very substantial overlap and all of the big legislative You know achievements of you know FDR and Reagan and so forth were the result of you know The president being able to get substantial support from the other party, but since the 19 late 1980s You know the two parties have pulled apart completely This is something you know guy like Evan pool political scientists at Georgia I mean he has this DW nominate you know metric that is actually very good at showing this and and the you know The parties have pulled apart so the most liberal Republican is now a lot more conservative than the most conservative Democrat in a parliamentary system this wouldn't be a big issue and in fact parliamentary parties are usually pretty ideological and you know opposed like this, but in our system It's a disaster because it means that now the two parties in their ideological competition will use every lever that our System gives them and our system gives them lots of levers You know so a lot of these ambassadorial appointments Or executive branch appointments are not being held up because they've got a real worry about the competence of the you know The appointee it's just part of the partisan You know part of the partisan struggle So I think it's it's it's the institutional rules meeting up with the current degree of polarization in the system That's really causing the problem. Well, I'm not sure this this was a case of accident or murder in the sense that you could argue that the American people are not divided into these two parties and most List brokers and the political Advertisers and pollsters they come up with different categories of three different groups or eight groups or something and we essentially had a multi-party system Because of our electoral rules you end up with two omnibus parties But under that you had the southern Democrats who were to the right of the northern Republicans and so on It is actually Newt Gingrich a lot of people give him credit or blame in the 1990s for trying to impose this kind of Westminster British type parliamentary centralization Tom DeLay told an acquaintance of mine who was a liberal Republican not to run From upstate New York because it would blur the message right which it which is a sort of a modern idea Right that you would rather be pure than then be this kind of omnibus coalition. Well, yeah So it's it's so there are social trends, but there's also this was a deliberate strategic Decision by some elites Tell us a whole right system So there's there's a controversy among the social scientists as to what the degree of polarization in the society itself I have a colleague at Stanford Morris Fiorina that's written several books saying that actually American society isn't all that polarized And the polarization is really just within the political class and then other people just you know They think that that's not true that for example in resident You know that Americans are segregating themselves Residentially by you know where they choose to live and so there is some some societal polarization a lot of it So it's complicated though because it's there's more ideological Purity being asked of the two parties, but actually the degree to which the party leadership can affect Their parties is has weakened substantially and especially with the latest couple of Supreme Court decisions What's driving the Republican Party to the right is not the central? Party leadership. It's these outside You know forces all the Sheldon Sheldon Adelson's and Cotches and so forth that have so much money or so much more money than the party itself does and I think actually if you returned control of Finance to the the party apparatus itself. You'd actually get much more, you know moderate candidates Well, that's one of this the counterintuitive counterproductive reforms arguably yeah has been all the forms have tried to weaken in And demonize the party control of money So the party can't raise enormous amount of money and then target a few swing races Yeah, so instead you're trying to make each candidate self-funded. That's right and candidates just have less bargaining Leverage with special interest than a a single party could say okay, you know We're not gonna do what you want right. We don't need to need your money, right? Yes, right here Your book doesn't really spend much time on the courts. I mean you mentioned private Attorney-General's you and your book talks about the Supreme Court's role in fighting regulation It seems to me though that the courts are actually quite the definitive Decision-maker as yesterday and not accepting the marriage equality or in campaign finance in allowing all types of Contributions and so I was wondering really as to what you see in a role of recording in a system like ours and the second the second Sort of comment is and I'd like to hear your response that ours when we have a Today's washing post Philip bumps the fix about having that a Republican Senate that is a Congress controlled by the by the other party will actually lead to some progress and less polarization in the country well, I Think in general, you know the rule of law is something that's very basic to the United States and one of its great Virtues, but I think in many cases we just have too much law and you know, so the case I gave you is of Substituting You know private lawsuits for administrative enforcement is is a kind of classic Case of this that we would you know things would be done much much more efficiently if if we proceeded in the you know, very different in a very different manner And I think unfortunately It would be nice if you could have these definitive decisions By the courts on certain key issues and in fact a lot of times Congress does this They don't actually want to decide on on abortion or you know other naughty issues So they kind of throw it into the lap of the courts and hope that they'll bear the brunt of whatever decision comes out But the trouble is that then that leads to the politicization of the courts itself and that's something that's very You know unfortunate. So even if you look at that recent, you know yesterday's whenever it was the abortion decision, you know Justices No, I'm sorry, it wasn't that it was a it was a decision about I'm sorry the marriage equality decision court's decision not to accept the appellate court cases because they all Yeah, no, I'm sorry, but it wasn't that one But an increasing number of cases are actually being decided, you know on partisan lines by you know, the part of you know the party appointed Justices and so, you know, there's been this creeping politicization of the courts You know is also not so the courts just become another Avenue for political contest well, you know law professors. I've been told will publish law review articles aimed a single member of the court right Sort of targeting that individual right More questions right here and then we'll wrap up Thank you very much While it may seem that there's a lot of gridlock a lot of stuff is actually happening I'm talking about the transition and attitudes Leading to change in law and gay rights and so on I'm talking about a Fundamental reform of the health care system and so on and while things may not be happening at the federal level There's a lot of experimentation in the 50 states and territories which eventually leads to Changes so in a sense it is a fulfillment of Churchill's quip about America always doing the right thing after its tried everything else If you move somewhat slowly and with some amount of creative disorder Maybe you have a better chance of getting it right ultimately No, there's there's something to be said for that if you have a very decisive parliamentary system You know you can do all these big flip-flops and policy where one government comes in and they change everything And then the next government undoes it you know the next time and the American system was designed to you know Slow all of that down and you're right that a lot of the most creative government is actually an effective government is actually Happening at a state and municipal level I just think that there are a certain category of decisions that You know just given globalization and the nature of the modern economy have to be made You know nationally and health care is one of them You know the health care system, you know if you want Mobility within you know labor mobility within the country if every state's got incredibly different laws for the portability of health insurance Or it's all linked to employers. It's going to decrease, you know labor mobility And so this is something that most European countries Japan Australia. I mean everybody figured this out, you know 70 80 years ago and the United States is just getting to this right now and Yes, we are gonna I think you know, I think that the Affordable Care Act is not going to be repealed Ultimately it's going to be reformed, but the process is so slow and it is so inefficient You know what ought to have happened is they passed the ACA they realize immediately that there's a lot of things wrong with it They didn't get the incentive systems, right? So they go back and they fix it But instead we've been caught up for the last, you know two three years on a debate about whether we should just Repeal the whole thing, you know from the get-go and so so yes, maybe we'll get to the right point Eventually, but you know, it's it we could just do a lot better than we're doing Last question Hi, it's very interesting. I'm a Norwegian journalist and I just want to follow up on one of the first questions here about Democracy and state the English scholar Paul Collier. He says that democracy has been prematurely introduced into countries like Afghanistan and Iraq and rather encouraging a split along tribal and clan lines instead of Making it possible to create a strong nation or a state. What is your opinion on that? Well, I just think that those arguments for sequencing don't take account of political realities So let's take the case of Iraq where a number of people not just Paul Collier have Suggested that we had elections too early after the occupation But the problem was that at the moment of the occupation after you got rid of Saddam Hussein There are no legitimate political actors whatsoever And without legitimate political actors, you know, you couldn't even start to rebuild the society And that's why Ayatollah Sistani Who I think is actually one of the wisest, you know political figures in Iraq Was pushing for early elections because he said look you have to have some basis of legitimacy And this is the only way you're going to get to it So there is no standpoint from which the United States could have said Oh, we'll just run Iraq out of our embassy in Baghdad for the next ten years Until you Iraqis are mature enough to Elect a government that it just was politically a non-starter. So yeah theoretically maybe there would have been some virtue to that I mean in some cases like Bosnia you probably could have Delayed the elections, you know by a year or two, but in the end I think that's not a realistic choice for most most countries The book is political order and political decay. The author is Francis Fukuyama. Please join me in thanking him