 I'm here to introduce Francis Fukuyama back to Carnegie. As I'm sure all of you know, Professor Fukuyama is at Stanford University, where he's the Olivier Nomolini senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute. And he's also the Mossbacker director at the Center for Democracy Development and the Rule of Law. But I think all of you know Frank is a major American thinker about society and about politics, whose intellectual journey over the last 30 years has been a path across, I've counted at least 10 books, Frank, maybe I missed one or two, 10 books in many, many articles and much participation in public intellectual life, as well as in policy life through association with a number of different institutions. And to my view, at least, it's a journey marked by several signal characteristics, intellectual boldness, resolute independence in his point of view, deep erudition, but he wears it lightly and doesn't hit you over the head with it, but his work is reflected by his base in a deep erudition. And a searching quality, it's an intellectual journey that if you try to trace the specific path, you'd have a hard time each point on the journey knowing what the next step is, because Frank always defines the next step for himself. But then you begin to see the pattern over the years of the central concerns of his intellectual life over governance, over politics, in a sense over societal cohesion, historical direction, and both the relationship of the United States to the world and many other topics. And above all, from my point of view, it's a journey marked by a deep integrity, integrity and a set of values that inform his work and I think inform his life, that make it a special pleasure to follow, given the difficulty of maintaining integrity and modern American public life, I would say, and something that he has done unbroken in an unbroken fashion over the years. So that's a tribute to everything you've done, Frank. So it's a pleasure to have you here. He's gonna come up to the podium and present his new book, Identity, The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, which is just out. He's gonna describe major ideas in it, then he and I are gonna sit and have a conversation about it for a little while, then we'll bring you into the conversation and have questions and discussion with the audience. So without further ado, Frank. So that was an excessively generous introduction, Tom, and it's really great to be back here at Carnegie. I was the next door neighbor in all the years that I was at SICE and have spent many, many an afternoon in this very room having very serious discussions about democracy, global democracy and other topics close to our hearts. So thanks very much for having me. So let me just say a little bit about the origins of this current book on identity. It would not have been written if Donald Trump had not gotten elected president in 2016. I, like Tom, am concerned about global democracy, about democracy in countries outside the United States. We went through a really good period, the third wave from the early 70s and that wave kind of peaked in about the mid 2000s, but as my colleague Larry Diamond has been pointing out, we are in a democratic recession and have been really for the past 10 years. Part of it is fairly familiar. So you have China and Russia, authoritarian countries that are increasingly aggressive, self-confident, they've got resources and so they're pushing back against the democratic world. But the more troubling phenomenon has been the rise of a certain kind of populist nationalism within well-established democracies. And so that includes some countries in the European Union, Hungary and Poland have elected this kind of regime. Turkey has gone even further down that road and then you have a major anti-immigrant, anti-EU right-wing parties in virtually every country within the European Union, the latest being the Sweden Democrats that managed to get about 17% of the votes, so they're now the third largest party in the Swedish parliament. And this is very troubling for a number of reasons. So let me just give you a brief definition of populism or my definition, political scientists really don't have a consensus on this, but I think that there are at least three characteristics that are important. One, the first one has to do with unsustainable economic policies that are popular in the short run, but not sustainable in the long run. So fuel subsidies in Venezuela or things that have benefited people but are really not affordable, that's one. The second is a matter of political style. So populists tend to assert that they've got this organic connection with the people that they are representing and the people are somehow merged and this has a very important political consequence because it means that they are intrinsically anti-institutional, a modern liberal democracy is not simply about popular choice, it's also about a series of institutions that constrain executive power. So these are courts, this is the media, this is an independent or this is a impartial bureaucracy. All of these things are there to limit power in a certain sense and because of this charismatic style many populist politicians become intrinsically anti-institutional. They say these courts are making decisions that are getting in the way of what the people want. They identify their own persons with the people. I mean, this happened actually last week with Hungary where fortunately for the first time somebody in the European Parliament got up and criticized Hungary for moving down this very illiberal path and Viktor Orban, the prime minister's response to that was you're attacking the Hungarian people. The people are insulted by this attack whereas it's actually just an attack on him and his party and his party's policy but that charismatic style tries to merge the two and it is something that is very characteristic, I would say, of our current president. So the first real warning sign for me of this being the case was during his Donald Trump's acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in the summer of 2016 where he said, I alone understand your problems and I alone can fix them. This kind of rhetoric, you have to go back to Juan Perón or Mussolini or one of these earlier 20th century figures to hear that kind of talk. Of course, in retrospect, it's pretty implausible that he actually knows how to fix anything but that's the style and that was his claim to legitimacy. The third characteristic has to do with the fact that the people that many of the populists are referring to are not the whole people in the society, there are certain subset of them usually defined by ethnicity or possibly in some cases by religion. So again, to pick on a worthy subject, Victor Orban, he said explicitly Hungarian national identity is based on Hungarian ethnicity, which is fine if you're a Hungarian but there are a lot of people that are not ethnic Hungarians that live in Hungary and furthermore there's a lot of ethnic Hungarians that live outside of Hungary in many of the neighboring countries in Eastern Central Europe. And that's obviously problematic both from the standpoint of the protection of minority rights within Hungary but also in terms of foreign policy because what's the status of these Hungarians that are not within the territory of Hungary? So those are the three characteristics. I think that the different forms of populism are different combinations. So Hugo Chavez in Venezuela had number one and number two. He was an economic populist whose policies had been ruinous in Venezuela. Once oil prices collapsed and he was also very charismatic he was not particularly an ethno-nationalist. So that charge I don't think you can label him with fairly. There's a big divide between Northern and Southern Europe and so in Southern Europe, Syriza and Podemos in Greece and Spain tend to be more classic left-wing populist parties. They're not ethnically exclusive whereas in Northern Europe you've seen the rise of a kind of ethno-nationalist movement like Marine Le Pen's National Front, the Danish People's Party, the Sweden Democrats, the True Fin Party. I mean there's quite a number of versions of that in which there is a more traditional and oftentimes ethnically based sense of national identity. So that's the problem and I think it's a problem for people that believe in democracy because democracy does depend on institutions and every single one of these populist movements has threatened or actually undermined institutions and so Hungary has basically neutered any kind of independent media. The court system has really fallen under its control the same thing, it's true of the Law and Justice Party in Poland, there's no level playing field in terms of future political competition so on and so forth and our president I think is a perfect anti-institutionalist. So he came into office in January of 2017 attacking the entire intelligence community. He's gone on to denounce the mainstream media as enemies of the American people. He's attacked his own FBI, his own Justice Department so basically all of the institutional constraints on the presidency have been targets of his again under the grounds that he was legitimately elected and he's carrying out the people's will and so this is really I think the challenge that lies ahead of us. Now the other, so the question then which we at Stanford have been looking at in a number of ways is why is this stuff happening and here I think there's been this fundamental divide between people that think it's fundamentally driven by economics and people like me that think that the, I agree that that's important but I think that there is a identity cultural aspect to this that tends to get a little bit overlooked. So the economic part of it is very straightforward. It's received a lot of discussion in the past couple of years. Globalization is good for all of the countries that participated in the aggregate. This is something that we used to pound into the heads of our students at SICE you know in their international trade theory courses but if they were good students and listened very carefully that same trade theory would have told you that it's not good for every individual in every country and in particular lower skilled people in rich countries would tend to lose out to similarly skilled people in poor countries and so that's in fact what's happened. You basically had a stagnation in the real incomes of the American working class. The bottom half of the income distribution has seen essentially no income growth over the past couple of decades and a lot of those people have actually lost ground in terms of employment especially older white men and that obviously has big social consequences in terms of their sense of security and the like. So there's no question that that's at the core of it. However, I do not think that that is a full explanation of what is happening and it's partly the result of the fact that these economic factors are very much interconnected with cultural and identity factors that have to do with the loss of status and so let me just give you a few more definitions of what I mean by the term identity. Identity by the way that word was not commonly used until Eric Erickson the psychologist in the 1950s and identity politics is really not something that we started talking about until the 60s, 70s, 80s but the ideas actually have a much deeper and longer standing provenance. All right, so identity is built on something that Plato called fumos which is translated, it's a Greek word that is usually translated as spiritedness. What it means is that we have this sense of dignity or this demand for respect from other people and we get very angry if that external respect is not at the level that we think we deserve and so it's very closely tied into these political emotions of anger, pride and shame and this is something universal. I mean all people have a version of it. Some people simply want equal respect if other people are treated with greater respect than they are or if they're treated as invisible or worthless they feel very badly about this. Other people actually want to be respected more than other people and so there are different manifestations of this. So that's a kind of universal thing in all societies. What is particularly modern I think is this distinction between an authentic inner self and a false outer society which has a lot of roots in Western thought. I mean can come out of Martin Luther or a secular version of it really in Jean-Jacques Rousseau but it's the idea that deeply hidden inside me is this true authentic being whose worth is really not being adequately recognized by the outside world. Now there are misfits in every society that didn't get along and didn't obey the rules and so forth but what's particularly modern is the idea that the valuation that I give to myself, that inner authentic self is higher than the valuation of the surrounding society and that inner self is right and the outer society is wrong and unjust and it is the society that has to change itself and not me and so many of the big social movements that we've seen emerging over the last couple of hundred years have been based on this demand for political recognition of a different kind of self. I'll give you a few illustrations of this. I think that actually modern democracy starts with this kind of a demand for basic respect of human dignity. Muhammad Bouazizi was the vegetable seller in Tunisia whose vegetable cart was confiscated by a policewoman. He was slapped and spat at. He went to the government's office and said where's my vegetable cart? They would not see him or give him an answer. So he went and doused himself with gasoline and died in an act of self-immolation. This was a spark for the 2011 Arab Spring and the reason that it was a spark was that many people living in authoritarian countries throughout that region saw something in Muhammad Bouazizi that reflected their own situation, that they were living under authoritarian governments that did not respect their basic humanity to the point of even being willing to give them an answer to that question, where's my vegetable cart? Can I have it back? And I think that that's really the condition of people in authoritarian countries. At best, if you're like a Singapore, you're treated as a child that has to have guidance by a wise parent. But at worst, if you're North Korea or a brutal dictatorship, you're treated as cannon fodder, less than human. You can be eliminated, jailed, mistreated, or whatnot. And I think every democratic revolution is basically a revolution over dignity. In 2013-14, the Euromaidan Revolution occurred in Ukraine. Spent a lot of time these recent years going back and forth to Ukraine. And I think the basic demand again was that Viktor Yanukovych threatened to take that country back into this morass of corruption and kleptocracy represented by Russia. They wanted something different. They wanted to live in a modern European country where you didn't need all these personal connections in order to get ahead, but they wanted to have a more impersonal form of government. And that's why they labeled what they did the revolution of dignity. So an interesting choice of words that dignity didn't mean equality necessarily, but what it meant was that citizens would be treated as citizens and not on the basis of any kind of personal favoritism. And so basically, I think at core, a liberal democracy is based on recognition. This is what the philosopher Hegel said. It's a system of universal recognition where every citizen is recognized as a free and equal human being equal and free or equal in their freedom. That is to say, the basis of dignity is our ability to make choices, to make moral choices. And in particular, to make political choices about how we are to be governed. And the political system gives us this dignity by granting us rights or guaranteeing our rights. We have a right to speech. We have a right to association. We have a right to religious belief. And most importantly, we have a right to vote, which means we have a share of political power, which means that we are the adults ultimately that control the system and whose agency collectively leads to a system of self-government. And that's the sense in which a democracy does protect our individual dignity. All right, so dignity is important is driving the color revolutions, the pushback against authoritarian government around the world. The problem, I think, is that if you live in a authoritarian country, you are painfully aware of your lack of agency, your lack of respect that the government has for you. And so you want to live in a democratic society, but once you make that transition, in a sense, you take it for granted. And you kind of expect that, yeah, the government's going to behave that way. And then you start to think about other forms of recognition, other ways in which you are bound to people in different, much more particularistic communities. And so the one that really emerged in Europe first was nationalism, right? Where in 19th century Europe, you had many linguistic, cultural groups that did not correspond to political units. And the demand of the nationalist was that the political borders needed to be changed so that they would be represented by their own political institutions, their own state, and so forth. The French Revolution really had two faces. So one was the liberal individualist form of recognition, the rights of man being spread through the Côte-Napoleon and constitutional government. That was one form of dignity politics. But the other form was nationalism. So right from the beginning, French Revolution was also a revolution to defend France from foreign intervention and to protect French national identity. And in many ways, the second half of the 19th century was a fight between these two understandings of dignity in which the nationalists ultimately dominated, beat out the liberal interpretation of dignity. Ultimately, it leads to two horrendous world wars because of out of control nationalism and in a way discredits itself. But that was a form of dignity politics as well. I actually happen to think that a lot of Islamism can also be understood as a form of identity politics as opposed to a form of genuine religious piety. This is particularly true, I think, for a lot of the young European Muslims that have gone to fight in Syria on behalf of the Islamic State or in an earlier age for al-Qaeda. Those people in particular have a special identity problem because they come from families from Pakistan or Morocco or Jordan. They settle in Europe. They reject the kind of religiosity and culture of their parents. It's too old fashioned. They're not really accepted by the host countries in Europe and so they don't feel part of that society either. And I think it's kind of understandable that someone like Osama bin Laden comes and says to them, you're part of a great umma that stretches all the way around the world. Your brothers and sisters are being mistreated and disrespected around the world. And what you need to do is fight back. There was a story actually when he was a teenager. He came into his parents' room in Saudi Arabia with tears in his eyes because he had been watching a TV show about mistreatment of Palestinians in the conflict with Israel, saying our fellow Muslims are being disrespected and mistreated around the world. And so this becomes the basis for his movement for the Islamic State and so forth. And so I mean, there is genuine religious ideology at play here, but I think psychologically a lot of this actually does take the form of this search for a clear identity that then puts you in community with other people that are like yourself. And needless to say, I was just in Iraq a couple of weeks ago teaching a course. And if you want to look at what's the problem in the Middle East right now, it's out of control identity politics. I mean, that's the problem in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia. There are countries that do have stronger identities, but those countries in particular that have fallen apart, many of which have fallen apart as states, Libya, is in that group as well, have no larger overarching sense of identity, but rather just this conflict of partial identity groups based on sect, ethnicity, region, tribe, family, and the like. So those are actually, I think, all manifestations of identity politics. So that then brings me to what is going on in the United States, in Western Europe, in other rich democracies where you see a version of identity politics that is actually in certain ways converging with this older form. So in my view, identity politics really had its birth in the big social movements that began in the 1960s, beginning with the civil rights movement for African-Americans, continuing through the feminist movement, the LGBT demands for equal treatment, the disabled, Native Americans, immigrants, Hispanics, and so forth. Every single one of these groups had been disregarded and treated unjustly by mainstream American society. At best, they were invisible to mainstream Americans. At worst, they were actively discriminated against. And so there is a important and perfectly legitimate social justice component that lay at the basis of every one of those. What I think the rise of these movements did is to shift the nature of the agenda of the Democratic Party, the major left-wing party. Left-wing parties in the developed world in the 20th century had focused on the working class, the broad working class. In Europe, a lot of those parties were overtly communist or Marxist. And so they worried about the proletariat and proletarian revolution. In the United States, they were never that radical, but they still focused on workers broadly speaking and their labor unions and so forth. And in the course of the 70s, 80s, 90s, that agenda began to shift increasingly to the specific grievances of specific identity groups. And the left increasingly became a coalition of these groups. Now, I want to make something really clear. There is nothing wrong with that whole evolution. It was driven by real injustice. And if you have a Black Lives Matter movement or you have a Me Too movement that is insisting on the specific experiences of injustice of particular groups, that's important because, in fact, people are marginalized in different ways. And there are specific policy and social solutions to those injustices that are specific and unique to those groups. So there's no fundamental complaint. I think what happens, though, in the evolution of some of the thinking around identity is that it begins to veer off in a way that gets in the way of underlying liberal principles. And by liberal, I don't mean liberal in the conservative liberal US sense. I mean classic liberalism that prizes individual autonomy. And that can happen in several ways. I mean, one is in which you begin to emphasize the difference of the group as being more important than what that group holds in common with other citizens. Just as an example, the civil rights movement of Martin Luther King basically said, Black people are mistreated. They're discriminated against. All they're asking for is to be treated the way other Americans are treated with the same rights and the same access to opportunities and so forth. But over time, you had a Black Power movement or other parts of the civil rights movement that began to say, well, no, actually, Black people don't want to be just like white people because they're not. Their experiences are very different. They constitute, in a way, a separate set of cultural expectations and behaviors. And we don't want to be homogenized into the broader society. And every one of these groups made this kind of claim for dignity, not on the basis of them as individuals in a democratic, liberal democratic society, but for their dignity as members of a particular. I'll give you one example that was cited to me actually when I was in Iraq by a colleague of mine. His daughter was born deaf. And when she was a teenager, she had a cochlear implant. And all of a sudden, she could start hearing again as a result of this operation. And he said that he was astonished by the fact that in the deaf community, there was a huge amount of hostility at him and his family for having given her this transplant because it implied that somehow being born deaf without the ability to hear was a disability. But that had a dignity dimension. And they did not want to accept the fact that it was a disability. And they really opposed the idea of allowing his daughter to hear. I mean, she's now a successful lawyer and so forth. But it's a kind of example of the strange way in which this demand for equal dignity leads to conclusions or leads to results that seem to contradict actually the underlying interests of the groups involved. That's one problem. The other problem, I would say, is sort of the Middle Eastern problem with identity politics, which is that under certain interpretations of it, the way that you are born, your lived experience as a member of a particular group should be determinative of really your entire outlook on life, your politics, your attitude towards culture, a lot of ways that you interact with the rest of society. And this is what I would call the re-biologization of life because in a liberal society, presumably, you're getting beyond these biological characteristics. And you're saying we are all equally human agents living together in a democratic society. But increasingly, you begin to understand yourself as no actually being members of particular groups that have sort of fixed identities. And this is what I would say is kind of the Middle Eastern dimension to this. I mean, that's what the Middle East is like. And that's really the source of a lot of its contemporary problems. And I think that's also an issue. I think the final, well, there's a number of other problems, free speech. That one, I'm not really sure how big a problem that is in universities. I know that a lot of conservatives have made a career of trying to provoke students universities into shutting down talks and so forth. Whether that is a general characteristic of academia these days, I think that's still an open question. But I guess the final issue is that I think that the focus by the contemporary left on, no, I'm sorry, two more issues. So one is it's kind of a distraction from serious thinking about real social policy that would actually make the situation of marginalized people better. As far as I'm concerned, Americans have been brain dead about social policy for the last 30 years or so. Apart from the Affordable Care Act, there really has not been any major initiative to provide social assistance to people to actually try to overcome this widening gap between rich and poor in the United States. And that, in part, I think is due to the fact that if you're, it's a lot easier to actually just start an ethnic studies program at a university than it is to figure out how do we actually raise the incomes and job opportunities and access to health care of the particular ethnic group involved and how do we pay for it and how do we persuade our fellow Americans to cough up the resources, so on and so forth. Final issue has to do with the fact that I think that the rise of identity on the left has triggered a similar identity politics on the right. And that's what Donald Trump is about. He's basically the first racist president that I've dealt with as an adult or ever, where he has sanctioned a talk about race and revived a sense of American national identity that is based on race or ethnicity in a way that I think we had long since gotten past. I thought it was an achievement that we'd managed to work our way towards a civic sense of what it meant to be an American in the post-Civil Rights period. And now it's the right that is picking up the framing and a lot of the rhetoric from the left. I'll just give you an example. 50 years ago, a white person in the United States, the first thing they wouldn't have said is the first way of identifying themselves. I'm a white person. They would have just said, I'm an American. I'm kind of a median American. But increasingly among the alt-right white nationalists and so forth, they frame it in terms of identity, that I am a victimized minority. There's a very nice metaphor given by Arlie Hochschild in her book on, you know, she's a sociologist at Berkeley that interviewed a lot of Tea Party voters in rural Louisiana. And she's got this central metaphor in her book that they all imagine themselves standing on a long line in front of a door for a house that's labeled the American Dream. They're raising families, working hard, doing the things you're supposed to do to get to the American Dream. And then they see all these people cutting in front of them. So they may be African-Americans, women, Syrian refugees, immigrants, and the like. And they feel a great sense of grievance that they're not playing by the rules. Now, neither she nor I would vouch for the accuracy of that perception. But I think that that is part of what is driving a sense of victimization. And actually, I would go further than that. I do think that a lot of people that do not live in highly cosmopolitan, well-educated big cities in the United States actually have suffered from a high degree of invisibility by the elites. I mean, we're now understanding the real consequences of deindustrialization. There was an opioid crisis that until 2016, I think a lot of more elite Americans were completely oblivious to that last year it's estimated killed 72,000 Americans, more than all the highway deaths in the country. And that segment of, so these are people that are more traditional. Oftentimes, Christian, they live in smaller, more rural areas, different levels of education, different attitudes towards a lot of more traditional cultural values. That group was looked down upon or ignored, I think, by a lot of the mainstream elites in the United States. And given that a lot of them are actually facing a genuine social crisis, it does seem that if you're going to do something about inequality, you've also got to consider this group as well. Final big issue driving this is immigration. Maybe we can save this for the discussion, because I think that actually that's both in Europe and the United States. That is one of the biggest drivers that's causing people to vote for these new conservative parties. There's been a huge amount of cultural change. The United States now is where it was in the 1920s. About 15% of the population were born outside of the United States. A lot of Western Europe is getting up to those numbers. Canada and Australia are actually higher than that. And so there is a lot of very rapid social change. And I think that the combination of the downward mobility of former middle classes in developed countries combined with this sense of loss of social status leads to their blaming immigrants and globalization and elites in general for what has happened to them. In terms of what we do about this, I have a number of policy suggestions. I think the main one that applies both in fact, it applies even more strongly to Europe than it does to the United States, is that you need to start thinking not just about these specific narrow identities, but you need to start thinking about national identity. Because a democracy is not going to work if people do not have a common set of shared values and belief in institutions. This is sometimes called a creedal identity. Nationalism has had a bad name, understandably, in the 20th century because it's associated with out of control aggressive nationalism. But nationalism can also be civic. And by civic in this country, what I think that means is saying, well, what it means to be an American is not that you're born into a certain race, ethnicity, religion. What it means is you believe in the Constitution. You believe in the rule of law. You believe in the principle of equality that is embedded in the Declaration of Independence. And an American is somebody that believes in those as foundational principles. You can be un-American in a way that you can't be un-Japanese or un-German. Because in those two countries, national identity, those particular adjectives are actually associated with specific ethnic groups. But in the United States, I think by the post-civil rights era, we had arrived at this kind of open, liberal, civic form of identity. And that is what I think we need to get back to. With regard to immigration, that means that we need to think really about assimilation. This is a word that is not used much these days in our immigration debate. But I think that a lot of the discomfort with immigration, both here and in Europe, is not, I mean, some of it is driven by just plain racism and xenophobia. A lot of it, though, is actually driven by what I regard as a much more legitimate concern about whether immigrants can successfully be assimilated into the dominant national identity of the country in question. And that's a reasonable concern. I think also concern about the loss of control over the process is another worry that people have that is not simply racist or xenophobic. So those are a couple of things. You need the right national identity. You need to think about how you integrate people to that national identity. I think that something like national service, this idea that you actually owe your country something beyond just paying taxes and obeying the laws, is an important idea in building a sense of citizenship. It would be great. The only big institution we've got that really forces Americans to work together across class and regional and racial lines is the military. And if we had a civilian version of that, I think that would be very healthy for us because we have sorted ourselves into these little groups where we only deal with people that come from our social class with very similar educational backgrounds to ourselves. And I think that's been contributing to the polarization of the country. So there are other things we can talk about about how you build a sense of civic identity. But I think that's really the way that you walk back out of the current situation, which is bad for democracy, if people believe that their primary loyalties are to their narrow identity groups, rather than to a larger community that would constitute the basis of a democracy that can deliberate, cooperate, and ultimately live together in a peaceful fashion. So thank you very much. Frank, thank you very much. It's a real tour de force, which reflects the nature of your book. I'd like to take a little bit of time. I'm gonna engage in a bit of discussion with Frank before we turn it open to all of you. I'm sure you've stirred people up, so I don't wanna keep them away from you for too long, but I have a few questions I wanted to ask to try to draw out your ideas a little further on some points. I wanna focus first a bit on what you've said about, in a sense, the current state of US politics. You have a central argument that you start off with, and it's whenever I go to an event with one of my books in the person, I've got a lot of bookmarks in the book, I know they're kind of some kind of nut who's been reading a book too much, and so I've got bookmarks here and I'm gonna ask you tough questions based on them. You say 20th century politics have been organized around along a left-right spectrum defined by economic issues. In the second decade of the 21st century, the spectrum appears to be giving way in many regions to one defined by identity, so that's really a core argument of your book from ideology to identity. Now, I must admit I paused and puzzled over this, I wanna push you a little bit on this. If I look at what this administration over the last almost two years has done, there's been a lot of talk and a lot of noise about identity, but when I look at what are the tangible actions that our country's gonna be living with for some time, I look at a historic tax reform that involved a major shift of resources in one direction. I look at bank deregulation that helps a certain economic sector. I look at other forms of economic deregulation, particularly related to environmental actions that freeze up business to do things. I look at continued efforts to take apart the Affordable Care Act and so forth. It seems to be all about ideology to me. While people are busy arguing identity, that is a nice cover and people are be varying away, carrying out a very resolute ideological and economic agenda. So is the age of ideology really up? No, it's not dead. People that voted for Trump are a coalition, so you got the Paul Ryan types that love the tax cut. And that's why he has been soft peddling criticisms of Trump up until the moment he leaves Congress, because that's what he gets out of the deal. All these big lobbies, the banking industry wanted the bank deregulation, winding back Dog Frank and so forth. So yeah, there are a lot of other issues as well, but I think that what Trump is really gonna be remembered for is what he's done in the cultural realm, just watching one of his rallies, and just the fervid support that he gets from a lot of his core supporters. He gets the big applause lines, not over tax cuts. A lot of them are waking up to the fact that Obamacare is actually pretty good for them. He's not gonna get applause lines for that as well. The Republicans are actually playing that down. What he gets applause for is his attack on immigrants, on they're stealing our country from us, all of this anti-elitist argument, even though he's actually, as you suggest, acting on behalf of the elites. So yeah, it's not a ideology is by far not dead, but you didn't have this discussion. You didn't even have this discussion about this kind of toxic discussion of race that we've been having in the last couple of years. That simply was off the agenda because no American president thought it was appropriate to touch on that, criticizing black athletes and celebrities, all of this stuff. Okay. Next question is, you touched on it here or actually went into it at some length which was useful and it's touchy territory and I'm sure some other people in the room abuse. I think you're part of the book in a sense. I felt you're trying to chart a very subtle line in between what you see, which is a very polarized society and you're trying to give some advice to get us away from that. More of your advice falls towards the left and I wanted to pick up on two pieces of that and just sort of try to draw you out a little bit more. One of them is you talk about identity politics and you use the term the splitting of the society into smaller and smaller groups as a negative thing. But I still stumble a little bit and I'd like you to say it again in a sense that you said before, say I'm an African American and I'm very concerned about my perception is that when policemen look at me, they see an identity and they treat me badly. I would like them not to see my identity. I would like them to treat me like other people or if I'm a gay person and I would like to have rights to my spouse's pension, I'd like to be treated like everyone else. I'd like to de-escalate identity. I'm trying to unify society and get us beyond our divisions. But then I hear people saying, oh, don't play identity politics. And I'm a little confused. I say, well, I'm not playing identity politics. I'm trying to get people to stop treating me on the basis of my identity and start treating me on the basis of my rights. No, that's right. I think that that's a completely appropriate response to injustice. People are mistreated on the basis of their identities. The identities really exist out there in the society. They're not someone's invention and so it is important to do that. I just think that you also, in addition to these specific injustices, need to have an agenda that is more integrative. That needs to be balanced by a sense. And you can see this in Black Lives Matter because the way that has evolved certain people in that movement want to blame white policemen. And it turns out that that's actually a very complicated matter because that's not a single uniform group. And so then it spawns white lives matter or blue lives matter and this sort of thing. But you're right, that the objective ought to be to remedy that specific identity-based injustice and it ought to be done under a heading of basically liberal equality. Yeah, it's that line between pursuing liberal equality but then taking some steps or actions or approaches that you feel are splitting. That's a very hard line to define each of these groups. And so I feel that's where some people might get stuck and say, I think you say that the Democratic Party has come to make the mistake of trying to stand for diversity. Whereas I think some of the groups I feel that are represented, they say we're trying to stand for unity in respect for diversity but not diversity as an end in itself. No, I get this exactly right. What I said is we cannot base a national identity on diversity. That's like saying we have no national identity. You can embrace diversity and it's very healthy and it's important in many ways. Overall immigration has been a very good thing. Now my own family, we're all immigrants and so there's no question that that form of diversity is good and important. What I'm saying is that given the fact that we are de facto that diverse, you've also gotta spend a little bit of time thinking about what we have in common, right? And what is it that we wanna share and what we wanna emphasize in the way we teach our children about our own society. And if it's only an emphasis on the things that make us different, you're not gonna get that fundamental glue that holds a democracy together, Ken. And another part of piece of advice which you're kind of broadly giving to the left is with respect as you say, reading here you say, particularly in the United States, much of the left stopped thinking several decades ago about ambitious social policies that might help remedy the underlying conditions of the poor. It was easier to talk about respect and dignity than to come up with potentially costly plans that would concretely reduce inequality. Well, I must admit, Frank, I kind of stumbled over that because I seem to remember the 1980s, the 1990s, it wasn't that the left stopped being interested in promoting social programs for the poor. Another political party held power and made clear that it was gonna prevent any effort to do that. And so, except for the first two years of the Bill Clinton administration, when there was some window of opportunity due to the way Congress was aligned at the time, otherwise, in those 20 years, there was almost no political possibility of advancing social programs for the poor. And so the idea that it was, if only the left had just focused on it more, one political party in this country is adamant about not wanting such programs and doing everything it can to disassemble them. And so I feel a little bit like, and then you say, identity politics has made the crafting of such ambitious policies more difficult. Maybe that's 5% of the problem, but to me, 95% of the problem is one political party has a different philosophy about the society and about whether there should be governmental programs to help the poor and to determine to stop them. Isn't that a bigger issue than identity politics? Well, it's certainly a big issue. I just think that in terms of, so obviously the left has been playing defense on this against the right that has wanted to cut into the social safety net. But I just look around the world, I mean, this is, I guess, where I think that we're brain dead. I spent a lot of time in Latin America where traditional cash transfers have been implemented in many Latin American countries. Mexico and Brazil in particular, it's had a measurable impact on economic, socioeconomic inequality in both of those countries. And I don't see anything innovative in what we've come up with. Like I said in the book, I think Obamacare was actually given the constraints of our political system, the single most ambitious thing that happened. I think that that was a great policy. It's a kind of, for me, a touchstone of what we ought to have been doing and focusing on at a much earlier stage. So it reminds me, I had some colleagues here a couple of years ago who came to me in like the fastest research direction and said, well, I'm gonna do some work on carbon tax. There really needs to be a lot of careful, nuanced, sophisticated thinking about designing the carbon tax because it really is an interesting in other countries of China, et cetera. And I said, you're welcome to do that. Describe to me the political conditions that would exist that would make that possible. And, you know, they're pretty hard to see these days. And so I sort of feel the same with social policies for the poor is I don't think there's any shortage of ideas probably the Brookings Institution and many other fine institutions around town and elsewhere for conditional cash transfers. Other things, the possibilities of passing any of those measures in the current political climate, not because of identity politics are about zero, no? I don't think that's true. I think that there's still a lot of room for kind of political entrepreneurship. I mean, these things have to be framed in the right way. But the very fact that you actually could get the Affordable Care Act through indicates that they're... During that window, the Democrats controlled, yeah. But, you know, I think a lot of the problem was also that the Democrats actually accepted some of the pessimistic conclusions of the right-wing critique of social policy, that social policies always produce unanticipated consequences. They produce moral hazard. They produce dependence and so forth. And so there was kind of a reluctance to actually look with a fresh eye to see whether those actually were true and whether there were different ways of proceeding with different policies that could be framed in a different way that would have concretely done something about it. And given this widening inequality that we face, that's pretty urgent. Just a couple more questions, Frank. Stepping back, as I was reading the book, the book really goes deep into both Western political philosophy and also political history, sociopolitical history about the rise of both nationalism you talked about and also individual quest for dignity. I was torn between, I was a little bit confused. Politics changed in the middle 2000s. There's a sense of current drama, but then there's a sense of timeless forces. Nationalism has been around, you mentioned the French Revolution, goodness, the American Revolution was a dignity revolution if there ever was one, I guess. So these forces have been with us for hundreds of years. Is this book saying they've been with us all this time but now they're taking an ugly form because of certain things or is it warning us that we haven't been aware of these forces? I was a little confused over what's new and what's timeless. Well, part of it is completely timeless in so far as it's rooted in thumos and this human psychology that has existed as long as there have been human beings. The modern version of identity, I would say, dates back a couple hundred years. I mean, this idea that we prize authenticity above the existing society's social norms. That was a really new idea and in many parts of the world that was never accepted, but it's now become a dominant mode of discourse for a lot of people. So that is of more recent provenance. I do think actually that a combination of rapid economic and social change oftentimes in a negative direction that has been caused by globalization is the actual trigger for why this is occurring right now. But the framing, this identity frame was there to be picked up by somebody. And you get these particular entrepreneurial politicians that put these things together. They take the real concrete grievances against elites and they take the identity frame that's been lying around for some time and they put them together. And what do you get? You get an Orban or a Trump or Brexit people and so forth. Two last questions. Your previous work, before you wrote this book, I almost have the sense of you were headed on a path intellectually that got interrupted by the 2016 election. I do remember we had lunch in September 2016 from Dupont Circle and you're never a man of quick and flashy smiles, but you were in a pretty subdued mood and I said, what do you think about the election coming in this country? And you just sort of said in that voice that I'm just very worried that this could go in a direction we buried down for our country. You were seeing this, but at the time you were engaged in an intellectual pursuit of governance and the fundamentality of governance as the, in a sense what the state needs to provide in a sense to make an effective state. And at the same time that this has been going on in the last few years, that story, you've been busy doing this, that story is continuing. And I see it in the push around in the last couple of years, the continued push by citizens in so many countries against corruption. We see the scandals in Brazil, we see in South Africa, we see continued protests in Romania, continued fights in Guatemala over this. I don't think of the governance quest as exactly the same as the identity quest. Those are people who are saying, no, I want a government that actually does what it's supposed to do. And this isn't particularly about me, it's about what the government's supposed to do. Is that a different thing that's going on in the world at the same time as this? It is different, but they are related to each other because I think that the United States was actually committed to promoting good governance, you know, all of the anti-corruption, good governance, democracy, promotion activities that you've been writing about. And now the United States has checked out of that effort. I think that that's a really bad thing for global governance because people really look up to the United States. And so as you were saying to our students, before this session started, the United States is actively behaving in a corrupt fashion, defending authoritarian leaders that want to muzzle their free press, engaging in lucrative business deals with their own personal interest as they are occupying public office. It makes it really hard to promote good governance in other countries because people just throw it back in our faces and they say, what about Washington? So this is why I actually interrupted this story because it seemed to me that if you had to say, well, what's the best thing you can do to promote good governance around the world right now? Of course, yeah, so I go to Ukraine a lot and I try to help those people, but I would say actually the more urgent thing is to get this idiot out of the White House and get back to a United States that actually supports these kinds of principles of democracy, of rule of law and so forth because we for better or worse are really still big powerful country. People ought to be looking up to us. We ought to be supporting these efforts around the world and right now politically, well, I mean, it's funny because actually there is a deep state that continues to do this stuff, which is good, but it's one that is really not getting a support. The other thing that I find very upsetting is that, so I like bureaucracies. I actually think that having a competent, highly effective, professional, impersonal bureaucracy is really the core of good governance and you got an administration that's devoted to dismantling what or politicizing all of the parts of the bureaucracy that are actually still functioning, yeah. So just wait till they get to the CDC and NASA and a lot of these other agencies. And again, that's a very bad precedent. I mean, it's bad for our country, but it's also very bad precedent for the rest of the world. Final question, and it's more a kind of overdrinks type question, but we have water here. How worried are you? Hold on, and I mean, the Trump presidency will end at some point, the country will move on to another president and he or she will be unlikely to have all of the characteristics of the current one. But this book is a sober book, because it's a book that's more than just about the Trump presidency, much more. I mean, it's more about how societies are cohering in an age of modernization. As you say, these are deeper trends about how they're responding to globalization and this and other kinds of pressures. There's an element in this of how are we gonna put this all back together? And he said, could we go back to that time in the 1960s when we were still more clearly a creedle society and stuff, but how worried are you? It's limited not to the whole world, the United States, about whether we can get on a better path towards something that would be less divisive and less norm breaking than what we're in. Well, I have no doubt that with the proper leadership you could get back on that path. And there's a kind of short term and a long term issue. So I believe that in a democracy, the most important check that you have on political power is actually an electoral check. And therefore, I actually think that the election that we're gonna have in November is like one of the most important elections that we've had in US history, because if the Republican, and I say this not in a partisan way. I mean, I was a Republican up until I moved to California. It doesn't have a lot of people, Frank, it's okay. Not just you. But I just think that if the Republicans managed to hold on to both houses of Congress, that that's gonna legitimate all this bad stuff that's been happening over the past couple of years. And it's gonna be very bad, whereas if they really take a shellacking to use Obama's phrase, they will begin to say, well, maybe the president is actually a liability and you need to rethink the strategy. And it could be the beginning of sort of healing at least within that party. Now, the thing that that doesn't address is the larger issue of polarization where the country has divided itself. This is something that pre-existed Trump. I think he's accelerated that process, but it was really bad prior to his coming and it's gonna survive. And if Hillary Clinton had won the election, she would have a horrible time trying to govern under those conditions. But again, I think that this is something that the right leadership can be overcome. It really depends on the leader setting forth an agenda, this integrative agenda that tries to actually heal some of those wounds and part of it. So this book in terms of who I'm speaking to, a lot of it is obviously critical of this populist nationalism. I don't expect them to read the book. And even if they do, I don't think they're gonna be persuaded by any of it. I do think that the left both in Europe and in this country has an important choice to make. And I would put it in the following sense that the Democratic Party can follow one of two strategies so it can double down on the existing identity groups that constitute it and use that to win the next and subsequent elections. Or it can try to win back part of that white electorate that actually swung the last election in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, that used to be an integral part of the New Deal coalition, the Great Society coalition, but have been defecting to the Republican Party over the past few years as a result of this, focus on identity sorts of issues. And I just think it's bad for the country if the Republican Party continues down this path of becoming the white people's party and the Democratic Party continues to become the party of minorities plus a few white, well-educated white professionals. I think that both parties need to refocus on the old ideological issues that characterized politics in the 20th century and get away from this identity sorting that's been going on. And so even if it's easier to win an election, doubling down on identity, I don't think it's gonna be very easy for anyone to govern under those circumstances. You need a broader coalition. And so that's the choice that I would really like to see the Democratic Party make. Okay, let's turn it to the audience. I'll do my best. I have the feeling we won't get to everyone. I'll do my best and please keep your comments or questions short and just say your name and there's a microphone you need to speak into because we're filming. I'll start here and I'll get to a couple. Let's take these two gentlemen right here and I'll work back and I'll get back to you here. Yeah, right here, Captain. Please keep your questions or comments fairly brief. Okay, Victor from Global Peace Foundation. I have a question regarding U.S.-China relations. The relations is under big change, right? And in the early time of President Xi, he was more emphasized on rejuvenation of Chinese civilization and now seems moving for more kind of ideological, more emphasis on communism. So how does identity or ideology kind of things play in this U.S.-China relations? Where are they going? And then from your view, what could be a solution for have this good, relatively stable, good relationship between these two countries? Frank's book is broad, but it's not that broad. So I'm not sure. Let me get a few more questions and he'll pick and choose what you'd like to respond to right here. Okay, thank you. Jim Michael, I remember when you wrote a book called Trust. And it seems to me that we're living in a time of distrust. When I look at your recommendations about national identity based on shared civic values and beliefs, it sounds very much like what the World Bank said in its World Development Report was the essence of how you get governance and reform. And it seems to me for that, you need leadership. And I wonder if you could say something about trust because without the leadership, how do we build that trust in this polarized and divided and fragmented society? It's scary. Yeah. So leadership is really important in this. I think that society, if all you had is grassroots mobilization, that oftentimes just accelerates the fragmentation within the society and doesn't create overall trust. And so you need larger institutions to deal with this. The example that I give in the book of I think visionary leadership is the one that was portrayed in the movie Invictus and with Matt Damon about post-apartheid South Africa where one of the divisions in that country under apartheid is that the whites played rugby and the blacks played soccer. And what Nelson Mandela tried to do is to, at the time of the 1996 Rugby World Cup is trying to get blacks to root for the spring box, the national rugby team that was largely white. And he did this against huge opposition within the African National Congress, but I think he realized that in terms of national identity, sports is really important. And you had a society that was divided racially divided in terms of the kinds of sports that they cheered for. And that one of the ways of overcoming that division would be what he tried to do. And then it helped that the spring box actually won the title that year. By the way, if you watch that movie, there's another beautiful example of multicultural nation building. So they played the championship against the all blacks, the New Zealand national team. So if you've ever watched the all blacks, they start every rugby game with a hawk out, which is this Maori war dance in which they all, they stick out their tongues and they, but it's a kind of beautiful illustration in a multicultural society, how you actually can develop sort of overriding symbols of national identity that are specific to your society and take account of the actual diversity. So those are kind of examples. I think, I mean, that Mandela example is I think an example of how leadership could actually function to improve things. Frank has a good governance guide to the movies, movies sea lights, body, good governance tips and tools. So yeah, I want to come to the back this woman then back to you. Yeah, with their sasuke. Yeah, we'll take her and then this gentleman. Yeah, go ahead. I mean, what is the case, how do you think they come? So in terms of my characterization of 20th century politics, you know, in Europe in that period, there were communists, socialists and fascist parties, as well as some liberal ones. And they were all distinct positions, but the left was Marxists who were built around the working class. It was the nationalists that had this identitarian understanding of their goals and the way that they understood what their political agenda was. And those were separate parties. So I think it's perfectly defensible to say in that period, the left did stand for a kind of universalism based on the working class. I mean, it comes straight out of Karl Marx in a certain sense. In the United States, that's correct that the New Deal coalition contained a lot of white working class people, including like 80% of voters, white voters in the rural South voted Democratic at that point. And you're right that at that point in our history, it was based on exclusion. Part of the problem was that you didn't have black civil rights at that point. And the moment that blacks started voting after the civil rights movement and moving into the Democratic Party, a lot of the whites began to move out. And I think, yeah, of course, there's a power dimension to this, that this was a reaction against those kinds of changes that were necessary and important. Again, a lot of it is this kind of more complex issue about the specific way that identity is framed because a lot of it is necessary and just, but some versions of it, I think are, they tend to erode the universalism on which I think a real modern liberal democracy needs to operate. And so it really depends on the specific spokesman and the specific message and agenda. In other words, in the identitarian world, lived experience is a very common trope that the identity groups have their own lived experiences that make it difficult for people that have not had that experience to really sympathize or understand the situation of those groups. But trouble is that if you can't actually move from lived experience to experience, which means the possibility of shared experience and empathy and so forth, you're not gonna have anything like communal memory or communal institutions that are based on things that are held in common. So that's the tension I think that I'm trying to point to, but you're right, the power is important and a lot of it is just a reaction against people gaining power that didn't have it before. Short change, one of your students over here because I've been neglecting this side of the room. So hopefully, over here would like to come in. I see somebody right there in the back, yeah, please go ahead. I'm not sure that microphone's working, so yeah. Thanks. I was wondering if you could elaborate on- You can introduce yourself. Oh, my name's Paul Lee from the Carnegie Endowment. I was wondering if you could elaborate on assimilation which you propose as one of the solutions for identity politics. So in social psychology, there's the intergroup contact hypothesis which suggests that if people from different backgrounds just have more meaningful interactions and cooperate together, then there'll be less discrimination. Is that a way you think the US should start in assimilating its immigrants and people from different backgrounds? I think that there's a couple of different elements to this and the first is just this basic one what is it that we want to do with new Americans? And I think that even the very term assimilation has really fallen out of favor over the past generation as an objective of social policy in favor of view that actually we want people to keep their cultures and we want equal respect for these different cultures and we don't really expect them to ever converge particularly. So part of it is just realizing that actually you do need a certain set of shared values that can be cultivated liberally. My agenda would be some combination of civic education, national service, combined with the right kind of immigration policy that would basically commit people to this shared set of values. Europe frankly has a much more serious problem than we do because in Europe, many European democracies do not have a civic sense of national identity. In citizenship laws, there's a difference between youth sanguinus and youth solace. In a youth sanguinus country, the only way you can get citizenship is if your mother is a citizen which really restricts citizenship to people of the dominant ethnic group in that country as opposed to the kind of birth citizenship that has always been the case in the United States and was reinforced by the 14th Amendment and so forth and so for them, they've got this dual problem that they've got to open up their understanding of what it means to be German or Dutch or Danish. In fact, in a country like Denmark, problems even more severe as a result of their pillarization, this policy they developed in the course of the 19th, 20th centuries where the Protestants, the Catholics and the secular community all had their separate newspapers, political parties and schools and then when Muslims began arriving in the Netherlands in large numbers since everybody else had their own school system, they said, well, why don't we have our own school system? And so, you set up a separate Muslim pillar and it means that in a sense, the whole institutional setup is almost designed to prevent people in these different religious communities from having common experiences and so all of these sorts of things, I think you'd need to somehow deal with in Britain and a number of other European countries, you end up with something similar to pillarization where because you don't have a common school system they've allowed different religious communities to set up their own schools with state support, religious schools. So this happened first with Catholics and with Jews and then increasingly with British Muslims and again, this is a kind of policy that actually deliberately prevents assimilation and so one thing you can start with is trying to rethink, I mean, I'm not under any illusions that the Netherlands is gonna give up pillarization or that Britain is gonna go to a French-style common school system, but those are the sorts of issues that you'd have to grapple with because it really is the educational system that is the basis of assimilation. Frank, time has run out. I wanna say that as always with your work, you're making us think harder, better, bigger and your book is really challenging us to think through these problems in new ways. I think you're gonna be available downstairs. We're selling copies of the book at a cheaper than usual price to sign a few books down the stairs out there. So take advantage if you've already brought a book, I'm sure he's willing to sign it or you can buy another one, but it's good to have you back at Carnegie and congratulations on another fine work. Thanks very much. Thank you. Thank you. I should probably get down there. Just go down the hallway there. Yeah, we've got a table set up. I'll come down and sit. Thanks.